The Foundation of Business Planning and Organization Design
Form follows function in every design effort.
But what is the function of your business? If you haven’t thoroughly defined the function of your business, the form is going to be arbitrary to a greater or lesser extent. Arbitrariness in the design of a business (or anything else) translates into confusion, inefficiency and noise.
One of the functions of your business is making money, sure, but in some ways, money is the most superficial need the business satisfies. 
One thing to be very clear about is that your company does not exist to satisfy customer needs. The proof is that if you weren’t there, they would just go find someone else to satisfy their needs. Your company exists for one reason only, to satisfy the needs of its owners. Taking great care of customers and creating opportunities for your employees are the “hows”, not the “whys”.
There are lots of ways of making a living in this world. Owning a business is complicated, challenging and often difficult. The only justification for the risks and sacrifices is to create a fabulous life. But, if you haven’t defined clearly what a fabulous life is, you run the risk of the business absorbing far more of your time and energy than it should. Your business should be working for you. You shouldn’t be working for it.
We live in amazingly dynamic times that are both a challenge and filled with opportunity. You need bandwidth to think, plan and keep an eye over the horizon. You can’t do that when you are buried in the trees. Your job is attending to the forest.
To accomplish this you need a clear vision for your life. You need a clear sense of how you want the business to support the fulfillment of your and your spouse’s life aspirations. You need a clear design of the company you want to create and a path forward to accomplish these things.
The Life Planning Session is designed to lay the foundation for the accomplishment of your life aspirations as a couple and as a business leader. At a two-day meeting at my offices in Albuquerque NM USA, you, your spouse and I will work together to answer the four critical questions, that will give you a bedrock foundation on which to build your business planning efforts:
- What do we need and want from our lives?
- How can the business help us accomplish these things?
- What would the business need to look like in order to help us accomplish our life aspirations?
- How do we get it there from here?
Probably the most prevalent cause of strain and breakup of partnerships is lack of common Vision. When you share a dream, the bumps in the road are manageable. When you don’t have a common dream, every bump in the road is a mountain to climb over.
Since 1980, I’ve helped many couples and business partners do the Life Planning that unleashes their optimism, creativity and enthusiasm and set them on the path of creating a dream life and dream business. Click here to find out more about the Life Planning Session.
