Investors often take a haphazard approach to their investing businesses rather than approaching the business with a strategy.  Imagine, for example, building your dream home and how you would approach it.  What things do you consider when you think about your dream home?   The size of your family or the family that you eventually plan to have?  The activities that you enjoy and need your home to accommodate?  The surroundings?  The neighborhood?  The location?  The schools?  The type of construction you like best?  The look and feel of the home?  You would create a clear vision of your dream home and then create a strategy and specific plan to create that home.  Certainly you would not go out on a piece of land, anywhere and just begin to pour out some concrete, throw up a few studs here and there, plant a couple of bushes, then do some plumbing and so on.  Taking this approach would probably not yield the home you have in mind, whereas, a strategic approach would.  The same holds true for business – operating chaotically without a strategic plan will not yield success but will leave you with far less than you initially envisioned or set out to obtain. 

Most investors decide to invest, take some classes, begin looking for property and jump into the tactical side of business, often without ever having a true strategy.  They bump along from deal to deal, opportunity to opportunity trying to decide if each one is right or wrong for them.  Decisions are made day-to-day, deal-to-deal, often with confusion and much debate rather than with a clear strategy and approach to doing business. Busily working “in” the business from a tactical standpoint, investors forge forward leaving no time to work “on” the business from a strategic standpoint.

Creating a strategic plan will make a huge difference in your business results and accomplishments.  According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, over 50% of small businesses fail in the first year and 95% fail within the first five years.  You’ve heard, “fail to plan, plan to fail.”  In creating a strategic plan, one of the objectives is to look at strengths and weaknesses, threats and opportunities and appropriately address these with strategies and objectives to ensure your business success.  In fact, it has been proven that planning pays high dividends, as much as ten to one.  For every hour you put into planning, you will see dramatically higher returns on your business.

How much more effective would your business be if you had a strategic plan giving you direction and decision making capability in everything you do in this business?    With a strategy, you first create a clear vision of where you want to end up and work backward from that place. This plan is not a plan or strategy that belongs to or worked for someone else.  This plan is the place where you put all the pieces together and create a strategy to obtain the results that you desire.   Working “on” the business from the strategic standpoint is about strategizing, defining your vision and mission and defining the entire big picture approach to creating success in your business.