Читать книгу Launch a Kick-Ass T-Shirt Brand - T-Shirt Magazine - Страница 12

After stressing how important it is to plan, you’ll probably go into a planning frenzy, trying to create the perfect plan for your brand to guarantee success. But while total lack of planning can guarantee failure, so can over planning. It goes along with the phrase “too much of a good thing is bad.” Planning your goals, objectives, and daily tasks will put you on the right path, but if you overanalyze your goals, second-guess your objectives, and obsess over perfection when trying to get tasks done, you’re not going to get anywhere.

When running our previous t-shirt brand, we used to meet every Sunday and spend three hours planning and evaluating our marketing efforts, creating new objectives, and writing new tasks that we felt would put us closer to our goals. We’d also go as far as projecting sales figures five years into the future and rewriting some of the same objectives and goals that we set last week, since we never accomplished them.

While some of the planning done during these sessions was helpful and served as a guide for our business, much of the planning was just a waste of time and an excuse for inaction. By the end of the month, we’d realize we kept ourselves busy with hours of planning, but no significant progress was made. We actually spent more time planning than executing. Nowadays, we keep planning sessions down to one hour, one day a week.

To avoid getting too wrapped up in planning, it’s best to focus on one or two main goals and the objectives surrounding those goals. If you set a goal that may take three years to achieve, break it up into smaller, one-year goals. Even further, break that one-year goal into goals that can be achieved within three months each. It’s easier to stay focused on something that can be achieved in three months versus three years.

If there are plenty of tasks you must execute to achieve a certain goal, consider writing only the daily tasks for the current week that will lead to some progress on the set objectives. Then when the next week rolls around, write the tasks for that week.

As obvious as it sounds, it’s important that you actually understand your own plan. We used to print out business plan templates from the Internet and fill in the blanks with a bunch of jargon about how we’re going to run our business, based on other business plan examples we saw online. While we had several pages full of planning written out, we couldn’t really comprehend our own plan. It looked like a professional plan (at least to us), but the only thing it guaranteed was confusion and lack of sufficient action.

It’s better to over-act then over-plan. Yes, there are financial risks associated with running a t-shirt brand, and mistakes can have negative effects on your bottom line, but don’t be afraid of taking action and making mistakes in the process. You can have the perfect business plan and still fall short of your goals. That’s okay. Just review what went wrong and reset your goals and objectives. The point of planning is to provide you with clear direction and focus to make your brand successful.