by Nigel Hilton
Being prepared is something that will help you in all walks of life, but when you run a business, it is crucial. A business owner with no plan will find it hard to make decisions because they won’t know what steps are next in their plans for growth, and this in itself can be detrimental. Why else is it vital to be prepared in business?
Better Strategic Thinking
Preparing for something in advance means that you will go through all the different scenarios that you might come up against and work out the pros and cons of each one. This means you will be thinking strategically, ensuring that you are making the decision, and coming up with the best plan that will benefit the business the most.
If you don’t plan ahead and are not prepared for the business meeting, client meeting, or job you have to do, everything could take a lot longer, you will look unprofessional, and the decisions you make might be of no benefit at all. Strategic thinking is a way to determine just what kind of business you want to have, so it’s important to get it right by planning ahead.
More Flexibility
When you are prepared for any event, you are much more flexible. If you were to carry out plumbing repairs, for example, and only brought exactly what you thought the job would entail, what would happen if the task was different, or if something changed and you needed tools like pipe testing plugs and more work had to be done? You would have to stop work, re-plan everything, and potentially upset a customer.
When you are prepared, it won’t matter if things change. You can be as flexible as you need to. This might mean bringing more equipment with you than you think you need, just in case it is required, for example. It might mean having a backup plan in case the job takes longer than you had planned for (or a backup plan in case it takes less time and you can fit in additional work). Being flexible means you can work in a way that is best for you, your customers, and your business.
Better Resilience
When you are better prepared because you have planned everything out in advance, even if that planning took a long time, it will be worth it because you will be more resilient should something go wrong. In business, problems and challenges can occur at any time, and not all of them are anything you could have predicted. Even so, when you are prepared and you have contingency plans in place or other ideas you can implement, it won’t matter if you come up against challenges; you will always be able to find the right solution.
If you are not prepared, any setbacks could easily halt your business for some time while you come up with a solution. Or you might even decide not to continue because you don’t feel there is a way past the problem. Being prepared might be the thing that saves your business when it would otherwise have failed.