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Long Term planning, the key to stability and growth

In today's fast paced business environment most companies tend to focus on short term goals. Often basic business needs drive this strategy. The long-term planning is put on the back burner, and in small business often neglected entirely.

Long term planning is essential for several reasons.
Plannning for the next five or ten years can help you to focus on operational deficiencies, determine the proper level of funding for new projects, products or services, and can help you to build a strategy for business stability not available with shorter term planning.

You can begin long-term planning the same way you do short term planning. Define a few goals, or problems within the business that need more comprehensive solutions. Then set about creating a rough draft or outline showing how you intend to meet these goals or address the challenges. As the plan becomes more refined you can refine the detail with a comprehensive project plan.

The driving factor of long term planning is flexibility. Unlike near term problems, with a long term strategy both the approach and the milestones can offer you much more flexibility. The goal may in fact evolve in to something entirely different.

Think big!
Long term business plans and aspirations should be much bigger in scope than small term plans. This breadth of scope allows you to incorporate many smaller plans and strategies within a larger frame work.

Plan for yourself on the side.
The strategy and planning that the business sees, and employees work towards is a detailed set of documents and positions. For your own personal use the plan should be summarized in to a mission statement of no more than a paragraph or two to keep you on track and focused.

Tracking results.
The longer the planning cycle the more difficult it becomes to track results. Milestones should be verifiable and reporting and tracking made as easy as possible.

IMPORTANT NOTE!
You're initial business plan should not be long-term in nature. Too many factors influence a business in its startup phase for long term planning to be reliable. This can cause frustration, or in some cases loss of the business due to adherence to a plan that has become outdated or impractical. Long term planning is much more beneficial to the established small business wishing to stabilize or take sales or operations to a higher level of efficiency and growth.