A DIFFICULT CHALLENGE facing businesses today is determining the best balance between preparation and execution of a project or program.  Too often, we drag out the preparation of an important initiative, beyond the critical window of time, when it is still effective for the original objective.  Alternatively, we may proceed too quickly with an execution and neglect vital preparation details, thus causing us to fail to achieve the objective.  What is the correct balance between preparation and execution?

 

The secret lies in the understanding of the cycle of your business’ development or “life-cycle” of your business.  Businesses that are just getting started and need to move from square-one to some level of revenue momentum, in order to achieve a financially sustainable position, need to over-execute, even at the risk of more limited preparation.  Preparation, however, should never be ignored or slighted in the process.  Execution is the critical variable that leads the formula. 

 

When building a start-up business, you organize a plan-of-action and proceed down a path that may require continuous adjustment, until you achieve the necessary outcomes and momentum.  This can be frustrating if you need to adjust more times than anticipated, and you expend more capital than planned.  I often reflect on a comment from Thomas Edison, who said, “I have learned over a hundred ways how not to make a light bulb.”  His quote serves as an example of the extensive executions in pure volume that may be required in the initial start-up cycle of a business.  Knowing that, in most cases, capital is limited, it is critical to execute a pace that reaches a positive outcome before capital is depleted.  Therefore, it is understood that you may need to limit the time in preparation, out of the necessity, to execute more initiatives in the time available with limited capital.  In start up, you acquire significant knowledge by taking action.  In short, losing small battles and learning from it often wins the war.  The key is to learn and adjust, not make the same mistakes repeatedly.  Small degrees of preparation shortfalls are more than offset by the ability to execute more initiatives.

 

As a business matures and becomes more established, the cycle of business needs a different balance to the process.  With age comes a new variable: experience.  As such, there is more accumulated knowledge from the prior growth of the business.  There are likely more established components of the business that would be negatively impacted by any preparation errors with a new initiative.  There are more definitive established customers and programs that might be jeopardized by an initiative that is poorly conceived. 

In more established and mature businesses, it is important to be thorough in the preparation process and understand all the complex impacts to the entire existing business model.  The larger danger here is to get so deep into the preparation process that the execution never happens.  In these situations, it is imperative to build a project timeline that delineates each step of the preparation process into a definitive deliverable with a specific deadline.  Then, at each scheduled deadline, there is an opportunity to assess the continuing viability of the initiative and determine if you will amend the plan, abandon the plan, or continue toward the next step and possible execution. 

Compartmentalization allows for close examination of each facet, in order to more easily identify issues at a magnified level.  The task of trying to identify an issue is much more daunting if a company with multiple divisions or appendages is being analyzed holistically.  In more established businesses, this process often moves more slowly because the urgency felt in a start-up business has been replaced with a greater tolerance for planning, meeting, discussing and debating.  The key here is to accept the nature of a more elaborate preparation process, but manage it to execution with a clear timeline management process.