When is a plan not a plan?

How you approach planning dictates how capable you and your team are at achieving sustained growth. Not what the plan looks like but whether it’s something you lean on every day or you’ve detailed what’s going on once and never looked at it again.

In the early years of a small business, you can get swept away by the excitement of doing and growing but there comes a point when that cannot continue the way it started. When your team is growing, it’s easy to keep ploughing away whilst you wait for everyone to catch up but this creates a very real risk of burnout for you and your team.

Somewhere in that scramble, purpose risks getting lost too. You leave no room left to think about why you're doing any of this when you're just trying to keep up. Purpose and planning aren't separate things in an ethical or responsible business. Your operational plan should centre your purpose in your day to day delivery - We get it, ‘review and pay invoices’ doesn’t really feel purposeful but when you commit to fair payment terms for your suppliers, the plan ensures that gets delivered, on time, every time.

Commitments are easy… Delivery is where things get hard and a good centralised plan takes on some of the cognitive load.

We were working with a client recently who was exhausted by being the default ‘go to’ for updates, they’d be fielding phone calls, whatsapps and emails from the team, suppliers and clients, often it resulted in them having to spend time going back through old emails and messages to figure out where that particular piece of work was up to. They also found lots of follow ups were being missed.

The client thought this was a case of their team not taking any ownership and wanted to empower them to tackle queries but the reality is that it was a lack of available information. They had a spreadsheet, it was big, difficult to navigate and it didn’t do anything to aid collaboration or progression of their workload. This is a more common situation than people think and it can work but it needs a concerted effort and someone assigned to keeping it updated.

As capacity was tight (not uncommon in small businesses) we moved everything, from client workplans to renewal dates for insurances, into ClickUp (other software is available!). Every part of their business now existed in a single space, every member of staff had access to it and we set up a training space so they could get used to using it. Everyone installed the app on their phone and now, they can update as they go, receive reminders for work and even connect it to Claude AI so some updates can be automated.

The client was worried it would generate more work, however, the calls, emails and whatsapps significantly reduced, they utilised Clickup to tag each other to request updates so they could then schedule the time to look through queries and update the plan, over a matter of weeks the number of tags chasing updates reduced because people were just entering the updates as part of their normal day to day. It became the core method of communication and allowed the business owner and then employees to properly switch off outside of work.

It’s never going to be totally perfect but if you want to deliver a good service, consistently, and not lose your purpose in the process then everyone needs to be in the loop and this is a fantastic example of how to achieve that.

So back to the beginning… When is a plan not a plan?

• When it lives in your head instead of somewhere everyone can see.

• When it's written once and never touched again.

• When updating it is one more thing on your list instead of just part of the work.

That's not a plan. That's a memory, and memories fade, get missed, get argued over.

A real plan is boring. It's visible, it's current, and everyone who needs it can find it without asking you first. That's it.