Yesterday I had the honor of being the closing keynote speaker at the 2010 Wyoming Procurement Technical Assistance Center (PTAC) Conference. With over 200 attendees, the conference attracted a wide variety of people, including entrepreneurs, university faculty, and representatives of different government agencies. The title for my keynote was “Diversifying Your Business During Difficult Times -how to plan and execute a business strategy for acquiring more government contracts”. As we are in the early stages of leaving behind us one of the worst recessions in modern time I am confident that those businesses that have survived have become leaner and stronger businesses and will stand to benefit from significant growth as the economic engines yet return to growth. At Handel we credit our survival to disciplined business planning that is tied directly into the DNA of the company. Writing and maintaining a business plan isn’t an occasional endeavor that produces a fat 100 page Word document. It should be an on-going process that is directly integrated into the operating system of the organization, which in our case is RiteTrack. When we do business planning we start with our overall corporate vision and work that into goals. Goals are subsequently broken into individual tasks that are assigned to departments and people. As these tasks are being worked on, RiteTrack generate time-log entries that allow us to measure progress on tasks and ultimately the over-arching goals that those tasks serve. In my opinion, this is the only way to do business planning.
A plan that is incorporated directly into the operation of the business and that can be monitored, updated, and altered as the business landscape changes. I am a firm believer in a quote from Meg Whitman, former eBay CEO, and current candidate for the California Governor’s Office: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t control it”. At Handel, RiteTrack is the measurement and control component of our business plan.