No business plan works if it doesn’t also work for your body.
Here’s a truly amazing way to think about a business plan.
I am a business coach.
I am a startup founder.
I am a self-taught designer.
I have a Master’s Degree in Architecture.
I have a certification in Life Coaching from The Life Coach School.
All of these things (and so many more) influence my life and my business. And I’m sure you are also multifaceted and have many interests.
I also have OCD, general anxiety and have experienced things in life that require I have therapy and coaching so they don’t make my life fully dysfunctional. I’m certainly not the only one.
What’s going on in my body affects and influences my business, and I truly don’t think that it means I can’t have a business.
The world is constantly changing, in ways that support my business and in ways that make it more complicated, and everything in between. And that is just the world.
The humans inside of my business and outside of it (customers, followers, collaborators, team, clients) are all humans with their own needs and thoughts and values and struggles and capabilities.
Knowing all of this, accepting all of this, I created a business operational plan that simply and humanely accounts for all of this complexity while keeping us moving toward our goals and not getting stuck in indecision or collapse of any of these parts.
I think of these things as a system.
There is not your business. There is YOU + Your business + The World. And this planning method offers a chance to create decisions that support this entire system over time.
There’s YOU.
You are a multidimensional being with skills and capacity limits and interests and other limiting factors in your life. Maybe you’ve got a few important relationships to support. Maybe you excel in certain ways and feel limited in others. Maybe you fall asleep during the day and are up all night. You are a unique being with unique desires and capabilities. The best business to build is one that supports you, not oppresses you.
There’s Your Business.
Your business is much simpler than you! It might be new to you so you might tend to believe that means it is complicated or complex and I’m here to tell you that your business is fairly simple compared to you. How we define your business is straightforward– value, products, revenue, industry, regulations, best practices, and a little bit more. But once we know these things (that we define, or that we’re able to find guidance on from others) then much of it is managing our own selves as the one human who is activating this business experience.
There’s The World
Oh, the world. The world is made up of the humans your business serves and interacts with– employees, collaborators as well as the environment and truly any entity that believe deserves to be considered. It’s a little philosophical and also quite practical, too. It will be informed by your own values that we will define together and that evolve over time.
Some simple and truly helpful questions that this simple of approaching business presents are–
What’s good for me?
What’s good for my business?
What’s good for the world (you can put in there specific people or entities, like ‘my employees’)?
When you run a decision through this filter, you do some really broad and also specific thinking about all those who you take into consideration when making decisions. It’s a way to approach decisions that allows you to think about all that matter to you and your business.
It is simple, effective and creates some of the highest-value offerings, I believe.