A Business Plan on a Beer Coaster

Barry Mirakian is a business consultant with over 30 years of executive leadership experience. His new book, GROWTH on the FLY hits shelves fall 2016. Click here for last week’s post about Barry.

I hope your favorite bar puts a coaster down before they serve you that well deserved beer. And I hope that coaster is blank on the back. If it isn’t, it’s time to find a new bar.

Remember the Verb vs the Noun? The key to success is the planning, not the plan. The plan is a piece of paper ­after years of work the document might be an inch thick. You only use a very small portion of this plan you’ve developed. I always like to take that small portion, the most significant parts, and put them on the back of a beer coaster.

The beer coaster is almost like a talisman ­ it’s something you have in your hand that has the most basic summary of the strategy, the vision, and is the result of all the work you’ve put in developing your plan.

By now you know what you’re supposed to do, and the beer coaster is there to center you on the tasks you need to accomplish to succeed. One client I worked with came up with a simple two page business plan, and whenever things overwhelmed him he would close the door to his office, put his feet up on his desk, and read the plan. It would remind him what steps he needed to take to accomplish the goals he set out to achieve.

I had a plan for one of my businesses on a 3x5 card, and one day my dog ate half of it. I walked around with that card, I just kept it in my wallet for a while- it’s all I needed, because I knew what was on there, through all my planning I knew what I needed to do to accomplish my goals.

What you will find, absolutely, is that if you do the planning, if you set your goals, you will see consistency and you will get results.