Plan to make more money a year from now

When you are not policing the steady traffic through your office, psychologically counseling employees and customers, correcting billing errors from your suppliers, wading through hours worth of senseless email and voicemail, and updating your to-do list for the twenty-sixth time, is planning your company's strategic direction upper most in your mind?

Me neither. But it should be. Even though every day is crazily filled with hundreds of unfinished items screaming to be checked off our to-do list, the truth is that most of them don’t add to our bottom line. Scheduling time for real planning does.

We must schedule time for thinking and planning because business is constantly changing and if we don’t plan for those changes, we look up one day and find that our buggy whips no longer sell.

Think about how AT&T lost its commanding presence as the world's biggest communications company by not planning for market changes brought by wireless and VoIP. Think of how General Motors lost its leadership as the world's biggest car maker by not dumping all those Buicks that don't sell and not addressing the 2.5 retirees for every GM worker.

Change is constant, whether from currency valuations overseas, buying habits of customers, competition, or new competing technology. Most of the time business change is as out of our direct control as a 16 year old with a new driving license. But if we plan ahead, we mitigate damages and sometimes even thrive through reinvention.

So, ask yourself:

1. Has new technology, or outsourcing, lowered the barrier to entry in your field, leading to an influx of many inexperienced newcomers, chasing too few customers?
2. Are these inexperienced carpet baggers causing price erosion, which limits profitability and growth for traditionalists like you who want to invest and grow?
3. Can you quickly and profitably change your methods to thwart the new threat, or is it just throwing good money after bad? In other words, when is it time to pack it in and try something else?
4. If change is possible, can you shift from a commodity model to a value-add model, replacing price selling with full service performance properties? How?

Former Intel CEO Andy Grove wrote "Only the paranoid survive." How right he was. If you want to survive and prosper like Andy, never stop looking over your shoulder, redefining both the competition and the customer as you find ways to stay ahead. And about that 16 year old… hide the car keys.