For Great Ventures™: Master Planning for Ultimate Success

“I learned to embrace risk, as long as it was well thought out and, in a worst-case scenario, I’d still land on my feet.”
– Eli Broad

Great ventures not only have basic plans to start them on a great course for their journey but they also develop master plans for ultimate success early on in their journey.  These master plans are developed after the journey has started but NOT before action is taken.  Much of the input for master planning comes from the information gathered from and interaction with the marketplace.

The business vision, values, and purpose as well as the original business plan and financial plan provide the jumping off point for action.  They provide enough education and guidance to allow you to make early intelligent decisions about how to begin to mold your great venture.  These plans will have to be adjusted and modified on your journey but these basic plans are not enough to provide a strong sustainable competitive position to excel in growing a great venture.

“Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.”
– Winston Churchill

A great ventures financial model must be part of your master plans for a great venture.  This great ventures financial model includes:

• A Best of Breed Analysis – performing a market analysis of the best performing companies in the same or similar industries to determine a reasonable financial model.  With this reasonable financial model in hand, you can look for ways to be more efficient, effective, and innovative in capturing market share.
• Stress Testing Scalability Modeling – This is the process of determining how well the organization’s processes and structures will work when the output of the organization significantly increases in a short 12 to 18-month accelerated growth period.  You need to test assumptions in business development, production, coordination, and communications to scale appropriately.
• Minimum Efficient Scale Model – a friend of mine has grown dozens of businesses with what he calls his “Chunks and Buckets Planning Model.”  These models help you determine the minimum revenue necessary to build the infrastructure necessary to develop a competitive market position and appropriate return on investment.
• Business Development Model – this is the cost and process to obtain a customer based on experience and best of breed analysis.  Can it be improved?
• Dashboards – the set of metrics that are critical for the success and progress of your business at any given stage.  You must create attention, line-of-sight, focus, and energy around these key metrics.

These five components are the keys to master planning a great venture.  With them in place, the chaotic journey of creating a great venture will be more steady and clear.  You will be armed with the right information to adapt and adjust to the challenges of the journey and create your ultimate success!

“Strategic planning is worthless – unless there is first a strategic vision.”
– John Naisbitt

© Copyright 2010 Jon L. Iveson, Ph.D.