There is a six P formula for personal and business success: “Proper Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance.” There are seven advantages to “Proper Prior Planning”:
First, the planning process forces you to organize your thinking and identify all the key issues that must be dealt with if your are ultimately going to be successful.
Second, thinking through what you must do to accomplish your goals enables you to plan your actions carefully before you begin, thereby saving you enormous costs in time, people, and money.
Third, a good plan, thoroughly discussed and evaluated, enables you to identify flaws and errors that could prove fatal to your business later on. It enables you to ask “what if?” questions. For example, “What are the worst possible things that could happen if you were to take a particular course of action?”
The fourth benefit of proper prior planning is that it enables you to identify weaknesses in your plan and make provisions to compensate for those weaknesses. Often, you can identify a “fatal flaw” that would lead to the failure of the enterprise. This is only possible by going through the planning process.
Fifth, planning enabled you to identify strengths and potential opportunities that you can take advantage of to increase the likelihood of success. Often, you will be unaware of your particular strengths or the opportunities that exist inn the situation before you go through the planning process.
The sixth benefit of planning is that it enables you to focus your time and money and concentrate all of your resources on the one or two objectives that you must achieve to make an enterprise successful. In the absence of clear focus and concentration, you will tend to spread your energies over a wide area and accomplish very little.
The seventh benefit of proper planning is that it will inevitably save you hours, weeks, and months of confusion, mistakes, and losses of both money and energy.
