There are plans and there are plans. [1] There are great plans, which took months to develop and now sit on a shelf gathering dust. And there are once great plans now rendered irrelevant by changing circumstances. Ineffective plans come in all flavors, shapes, and sizes; the common denominator is that they will not help you reach your goals.

Effective plans should be:

• Targeted – directed toward accomplishing specific objectives
• Practical – the required actions can be accomplished with available resources
• Flexible – easily modified when circumstances change
• Short – capture only the essential actions, participants, resources and time frames

Rather than craft a rigid operating plan, develop a plan template, which can be continuously updated and modified on a periodic basis.

• An entrepreneur, launching a new service business, sketched out his business development plan in a notebook including 1) target customers and lead sources, 2) proposed services, methods and pricing, and 3) marketing messages, activities, and required materials. Each week, the entrepreneur logged his activities, tallied leads and results, and modified the plan as necessary.

• A telemarketing company facing rapidly expanding market demand for its products scrambled to expand its sales force. To capture the sales opportunity, the management team quickly 1) ramped up sales recruiting activities, 2) streamlined the basic sales training program, and 3) rented cheap additional call center space. Plans were reviewed and adjusted weekly as the market evolved.

A plan is only as good as the results it produces.