Successful Blog

Are You Building a Birthday Cake or a Business?

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The Difference Between a Plan and a Strategy

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Do you know the difference between a plan and a strategy? Every strategy is a plan of sorts, but few plans are strategies. Thinking strategically takes a broader view and considers more variables than the planning that most of us do. Some ventures and adventures require a plan. Others require strategy.

Knowing which is which can mean the difference between watching the game and owning the team.

Are You Building a Birthday Cake or a Business?


BigStock: Birthday Cake

When we build a birthday cake, the plan — a recipe — takes place in a closed system. The birthday cake builder controls all of the key circumstances that will affect successful achievement of the goal.
And so the result is predictable.
We start building a birthday cake and we end with the birthday cake we set out to build. Rarely does an economic downturn affect it. It’s unlikely that another human unexpectedly tosses in a cupful of ketchup. A failure is a problem with execution or a flaw in the plan.

A plan is set of action steps to achieve a stated goal. Plans usually assume a closed system.

Birthday cakes can be build in a closed system.
A business can’t.

Building a business takes place in an open system. The business builder has inputs from outside the system and far less control. A business grows in an open system of change. It takes more than a plan to take advantage of the opportunity to grow that every change represents. That’s what makes a strategy the better road to growth.

Strategy is a realistic plan to advance over time by leveraging opportunities uniquely available to you.

  • Have a Mission — set an ultimate philosophical, economical, and / or political purpose
  • Assess and Reasses Your Position Every time You Gain Ground — Look, listen, measure, test your current situation, climate, resources, opportunities
  • Use Changing Climate, Conditions, and Trends — Find the advantage in interruption and unexpected — use change as a ally to grow.
  • Move Forward Tactically in Increments — Size, choose, and commit to campaigns that reflect obstacles, goals, and prizes

Don’t just plan to grow. Leverage the opportunity that shows up everywhere you are.

Do you use and leverage only resources you can control?
Could be you’re building a birthday cake not a business.

Be irresistible.

Be irresistble.
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Why It Takes a Personal Plan to Be Outstandingly Successful

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Plan Your Work, Work Your Plan

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The road to success — We’ve all heard of that one. Do the things everyone does and you’ll probably get to something that’s . . . well, . . . not broken. But if you want to be successful and outstanding. Doing what everyone does won’t get you there . . . because to be outstanding, by necessity, you have to be individual.

To do stand and shine as uniquely valuable, a business or an individual needs a road that leads in a singular direction.

Note that I used the word leads.

A Plan to Be Irresistibly, Outstandingly Successful

Any effective, efficient project, business, or life has structure and direction. It starts with a destination — literal or figurative — and then a route to get there. Without a plan, we leave ourselves open to winds that push us toward distractions or detours. A plan, well thought and well provided for is the only way to get where we want to that shining end point.

Have a plan and work the plan is sage advice.

Why It Takes a Personal Plan to Be Outstandingly Successful

Last week we talked about making decisions. Here are the reasons that outstanding success demands a plan.

  1. If we don’t have a plan, we’re just wishing.
  2. If we don’t have a plan, we’re always here and success is always out there.
  3. Without a plan, we have no direction. Any road will take us anywhere, but we won’t end up there.
  4. Without a plan, every decision is likely to have as much power as a whim.
  5. A plan is the only way to benchmark our progress and to build on what we’ve accomplished.
  6. A plan is keeps us focused when other ideas tempt us away from our dreams.

Decide. Plan. Get determined. The plan makes a dream into an outstandingly success. It’s the plan — the decisions and determination — that fuels the reality. Distractions are easier to disregard when we can hold them up to a plan we know we can achieve.

Without a plan, we’re always getting ready to succeed. Christine Kane says it eloquently.

“How will you go the long, long journey,
if you’re always about to begin?” — Christine Kane, Falling in Love with the Wind

If you want to be outstandingly successful, plan for it. Outstanding is a stake in the ground that we keep our eyes on. It’s a path that we plot for the life that we want. It’s as easy as a decision.

Have you planned outstanding success into your life?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Need help deciding? Work with Liz!!
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How to Know If You've Lost Track of Your Vision

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Where Do You Want to Be?

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It’s well-thought business wisdom that we need vision for a business or a career. Knowing where we’re going makes our daily decisions easier, quicker, and more lasting, because we’re building a road to a specific destination. Having a vision for our work is the same as having goal we’re saving our money to enjoy — a vacation or a great retirement.

I’ve not met anyone who disagrees with the wisdom of doing that. Yet, when I ask folks about their vision, most people have to stop, find some long ago thought, and dust it off. Holding that vision in the sunlight, they see how long it’s been set aside. Real-time issues and day-to-day decisions have taken all of their attention.

Many folks have lost track of their vision and don’t realize.

How to Know If You’ve Lost Track of Your Vision

If we don’t keep our business vision in our sights, we lose direction. A business vision is the energy that fuels our decisions, especially when situations get trying, and we’re learning new things under new conditions. With no clear focus to guide us, we start to compromise. Here’s how to know if you’ve lost track of your vision.

  • If you wake up in the morning thinking the day is going to be boring, you’ve probably lost track of where you’re going.
  • If you look at your life in the future and what you see is more of what’s right here, you’re not heading anywhere certain.
  • If you’re watching other folks get places and your response is that could have been mine, you’ve set your dream aside.
  • If you think that having a vision for your business is too [put your word here] for a serious person like you, you’ve given up trying.
  • If you cite the roadblocks and barriers to making your vision a reality and consistently stop there, your vision is just a story.

The road to making a most amazing vision happen is paved with our thoughts, our passion, and our decisions. No outside barrier can stop a person who’s willing to stay fully invested in getting where they want to go. Winners keep their vision in front of them, adjusting and tweaking it to fit reality and their changing skill set. They do the work and stay the course, holding onto the future they see, even when other choices come along.

That’s the purpose of having a vision — to guide us to where we want to go.

Is time to take out your vision and dust it off again or are you on the road to making it happen? Do you know where you’re going?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
If you need to refocus where you’re going, let’s talk.