During a recession, rigid long-term plans fail because markets shift too fast. Instead, keep a clear vision of where you want your business to go, then plan in 90-day cycles called tacking: assess your situation, set goals, review results, and adjust before the next quarter starts.
In a recession where there's a lot of moving parts, particularly what we're experiencing right now, we need to match short-term planning with long-term visioning. The mistake is long-term planning. You see, when we set a steadfast long-term plan— this is what we're gonna achieve in this next year or the next 5 years— it doesn't account for all the dynamics that are moving on. So instead, have a long-term vision. What's the outcome you want for your business? Not the plan to get there, but what's the outcome you want for yourself and your business? The short-term planning is in 90-day increments. I call it tacking. I actually wrote about it in Toilet Paper Entrepreneur. The idea is, based upon the current environment, what can we do in the next 90 days to move toward that vision? Then after 90 days, fully reassess your business and say, what do we need to change? What do we need to do differently? What do we need to jettison? What do we need to amplify? There's a great book out there by Nassim Taleb, I think his last name is. Called Antifragile. He has a section dedicated to this concept of setting short-term plans and that long-term plans can hurt us. And he has some documentation around large companies that have failed because of long-term planning. They got entrenched in something that was not serving them. So work on the short-term with a plan, work on the long-term with a vision. For more tips like this, go to mikemotorbike.com and definitely check out the recession response page that I set up for you. You can also go to recessionresponse.com for more tips like this. Wishing you both health and wealth.
