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I had a wonderful conversation this morning with Jayne Weatherbe, a family and couples therapist (okay! she’s a sex therapist! I said it!). Aside from showing up in the most fantabulous, colorful jacket I’ve seen in ages, Jayne got right to my heart by telling me about her love of dance. We also talked about what I do, and Jayne shared of some of where she is at with her business. That’s HER business and I’m not telling tales out of school here, but as a result of where our conversation went, I found myself reflecting on something that I felt was worthy of a blog post. Here it is.

In my workshops, I teach people about strategic planning so they can use those skills themselves and build a stronger business (or non-profit). But sometimes you get to a place in your business where you’re not sure if you are still totally in love with it (maybe the same as marriage?). I just feel it’s important to tell you this: strategic planning will not make you fall back in love with your business. Similarly, if you are not sure whether the life of entrepreneurship is right for you, no amount of business planning, strategic planning, marketing, social media, yadda yadda etc. etc. will make your decision to go into business for yourself any easier. You’ve got to feel a drive for it.

You MUST have passion for what you want to do as a business. Don’t just do it for the money – do it for love, and the money will follow (or not – let’s be realistic – but at least if you’re doing it for love you can still respect yourself in the morning).

So what happens when you’ve got a business that used to give you the “shock tingles” and now leaves you somewhat “meh?” There are a few ways that I know of to deal with this situation:

1) Find something new about your business that draws your heart into it again. I used professional development and some personal soul-searching activities (yes, involving visuals) to help me through the transition I needed to make when I moved from Vancouver to Victoria, after I became a mom. Allowing yourself to renew your skills may refresh your passion for work, or give you some new flavours to work with. Learning graphic facilitation did it for me in December 2008, and since then I’ve invested in continual professional development because it keeps me falling in love with my work over and over again. I’m lucky like that.

2) Make an exit plan. Identify the value of your business, and ask whether it could be operated by somebody else. If you’ve been in business for a while, your client lists and reputation may be worth something – but you can’t just dump them on some poor unsuspecting buyer and flee. That’s not doing your clients or your buyer any good. Instead, make a short-term plan (6-12 months) for how you will get your business ready to be operated by a new owner, and do what needs to be done. Finding a buyer is challenging; I will not fool with you on that one. Business brokerage is not my line of work, alas, but there are professionals out there to help you!

3) Take a break – without a firm return date – and see if you can rediscover your passion after you’ve been away from the day-to-day crush for a while. It could be that you’re just burned out and need a rest. Some time away will help you see your business more clearly, and you may realize you need to make some changes to continue being happy.

Options 1 and 3 can probably be combined quite happily!

The bottom line is that there’s no point in being in business BY yourself – be in business FOR yourself. If you’re not in love with what you’re doing, take action. Life’s too short to stay shackled to something that doesn’t make you feel happy.

Sometimes customers know what they want – they want a public relations expert, perhaps, or someone to give them HR advice. They know what that person should be able to do for them and what the results should be. No fuss, no muss. It’s simple. Then they start looking out there for a service provider and find… complexity. Lots of verbiage that says in 500 words what they’d really like to find in 50 words or less. Promises of engaging, visibility, transparency, accountability, reassurance (insert other words from Marketing Buzzwords 2010).

I recently discovered this when I went looking for a few good folks to help me out on a couple of management/marketing tasks for Directis. So it occurred to me to ask myself, does a visitor to my website know what services I provide, for whom, within 30 seconds of landing? I’ll be making some changes to the Directis front page over the next couple of weeks to try to answer that question.

It’s been a reminder that despite your desire to add all kinds of flowery language about value, benefits, etc., those messages should be secondary to the basic “For Who” and “Do What?” that is the core of your business. Answer the simple questions first!

Recent coverage of the Dervaes family’s attempts to trademark and protect the phrase “urban homesteading” reminds me of a question I used to hear when I was teaching at the Self-Employment Program at Douglas College, in Vancouver.

“How should I copyright or trademark my business idea?”

My answer was usually, “don’t bother.” If you’ve got a business idea, that’s fantastic. It’s not worth a DIME until you successfully roll it out to the market and begin racking up sales. If you can build a good reputation for your product or service, consistently manage to distribute and sell your offering, and experience positive returns on your investments of time and money, then you are very much ahead of the game.

“But what if somebody steals my idea?”

You should be so lucky. If somebody wants to rip off your concept and take it to market, it’s probably a good idea.

Is this the core of your business plan?

Now, don’t get me wrong. If you’ve invented something fantabulous, like a great new polymer that makes soft squishy shoes that can go in the dishwasher, float, and somehow be appealing to ages 13-93, then yes you probably need to speak to a patent lawyer. Real scientific advances should be registered with a patent so that the intellectual property is validated and registered, so that your brilliance is not lost to mankind if you are hit by a bus. Also, you need to get working on a business plan for marketing, sales, distribution, human resources, finance and IT to support your invention. Because it’s worthless otherwise.

But if all you’ve figured out is a better way to get people to part with their money, for something that is perhaps a little novel or particularly useful, it’s still not worth anything – and not worth protecting – until you have demonstrated its market viability. And once you have validated that viability, then you are probably sitting on a healthy business that can easily weather competition from others who wish to copy and compete.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. When you’re starting a business, don’t be worried if somebody wants to copy you. Be worried if NOBODY does.

That term “strategic” gets bandied about quite a lot. Seems like everything these days should be considered strategically. That word is getting a lot of airtime! Today I’d like to define what is strategic and what other kinds of planning are out there.

Strategic planning takes into consideration the whole context and environment in which you are operating. Before setting goals or developing to-do lists, you make a disciplined effort to understand what forces or influences are at work both inside your business or organization, and outside it. You acknowledge that you are not working in a “closed system” therefore your context will be shifting as you put your decisions into action, so you continue checking – internally and externally – that the information you have and the assumptions you’ve made about your context are continuing to be correct. Strategic planning also means that you look at your business/organization’s resources in an ‘overall’ perspective and make decisions about how to apply your strengths & resources while defending your weaknesses.

A marketing plan by itself is not strategic. Neither is social media. However, when you have assessed your own strengths/weaknesses, and gathered sufficient information about your potential customers, you are able to make decisions about what products to offer to the market and what marketing techniques to use: advertising, networking, public speaking, community sponsorship, social media, writing, etc. Those decisions are strategic. From there you move into the tactical/operational planning, in which you determine how to apply the chosen techniques.

Similarly, decisions about exactly which person to hire are not strategic on their own. Deciding that you will move from being a one-person company to employing others is a strategic decision, as is deciding you want to develop a reputation as an “employer of choice” for a certain type of employee. With those strategic decisions made, you move into operational planning: how will you make that change?

In each area of business (finance, operations, HR, marketing) there must be some strategic choices made, and then they are backed up by good operational planning and implementation.

A strategic plan is useless if there is no operational plan and the implementation is haphazard. But on the flip side, you can waste a lot of time and money by continually making operational changes and trying to implement new tools, programs or decisions without popping your head up into the “strat-osphere” to look around at the context and big-picture environment in which you’re operating.