In my last post I talked about why a business plan is an important step in any entrepreneurial venture. Today I wanted to talk about the importance of revisiting your plan and not just letting it sit around gathering dust.
The catalyst for the revisiting of our plan was the hiring of two new interns. I wanted to provide them with a document they could read and hold onto. It would serve as a template of where our company came from, what we are about, and where they are going to help us get. The best document I could think of was my business plan.
I hadn’t looked at the plan for 8 months and it was amazing how many things had changed. Aside from the market analysis and the fact that we are selling scrubs to nurses and other medical professionals via an internet portal, everything was pretty much different. It was good to go back and look at where we had come from and gave me the chance to reflect on how much we had already accomplished.
Revisiting the plan also provided me a check to see how we are doing compared to where we thought we would be. Oddly enough back in February 09′ we did a pretty good job of projecting what our time-line would look like. Without realizing it we have been right on track! We expected our first internet sales of scrubs to medical professionals to happen in August/Spetember and guess what? They did.
My recent revision of the plan also provided an outlet to get my future plans down on paper. For the last six months our forward looking business model and marketing plan has been in my head. I still have those steps and ideas up there, but now I also have them on paper. In six months I will be able to come back to my plan and revisit our goals, successes and lack thereof once again.
While revising the plan was a lot of non-revenue generating work I think it was worth it. A side benefit is the ability to search out and enter business plan competitions more aggressively and with more confidence. If any of you have a young business I would suggest that you take a look back at the original plan you had laid out and see what you can learn from it. And guess what, in six months I will be able to come back to scrubadoo.com‘s plan; revisit our goals, successes and lack thereof once again.
