Turning passion into action can be a daunting task. Discovering how to potentially turn a skill, passion, interest, or talent into a business requires a detailed plan of attack or an action plan.
Without clear goals and ideas, the path to a lucrative business can become murky and overwhelming for many aspiring entrepreneurs. An action plan lays out the leadership, financial needs, projected revenue, product design, marketing plans, and so much more needed to make a viable business happen. It is an extensive insight into what it will take to create a successful business. If creating this plan seems overwhelming from the start, make it easy on yourself and steal this Shark Tank cash plan instead.
Once the action plan is fully developed, the next step is to actually make it happen. If you are struggling to put your business plan into action, check out this guide for everything you need to know.
Clarify Goals and Be S.M.A.R.T. About It
To implement an action plan, you must know what the actions you need to take are going to be. This means clearly outlining your intended goals and making plans to achieve them.
Good goals should not be broad, far-reaching, and vague. Instead, they should most assuredly be specific, measurable, attainable, resourced, and timely, or S.M.A.R.T:
- Specific—goals should nail down the who, what, when, where, and why of what you are going to accomplish.
- Measurable—outlines how to benchmark the goal to know when you achieve it or note when you are making progress.
- Attainable—realistic, sometimes a bite-size chunk of a much larger vision.
- Resourced—looks at what it will take to make the goal happen
- Timely—sets a timeframe or deadline to achieve the goal.
All of these factors combine to create a solid goal plan that will make your action plan a reality.
Share It
The next step can be simply to share it. Pouring over an action plan can be exhausting. Once you are too close to a project, you require a second or third or fourth set of eyes to give a fresh perspective and insight.
If you are struggling to implement your action plan, turn to someone else. A new mind can give new ideas, identify weaknesses or improvement points, and overall help find ways to implement the action plan.
Conduct Research
As you begin to market and build a customer base, research that base. You should be learning as much as you can about your target audience and ensuring the action plan matches their needs.
Researching market needs and interests can help save you money in the long run. This could mean doing soft openings, focus groups, or just providing free samples of the product to social media influencers who can help promote and review.
Benchmark and Adjust
As you begin to take the first few steps, take the time to reflect and benchmark progress. What mistakes have you made thus far? How did you learn from them?
Moving forward, make necessary adjustments or modifications to the plan to make it stronger or more realistic. Perhaps it will take a year to really get off the ground rather than the hoped for 6 months. Maybe the financial resources are too strapped and you need to scale back some goals. These are all acceptable and understandable adjustments that you may need to make as an entrepreneur to get the business off the ground.
Don’t Give Up
This seems like a rather simple piece of advice, but it is important to remember it. Starting a business, any business, is not easy. The market is a fickle place and changes at an alarmingly swift rate. The action plan should change with it while also maintaining the core goals you have set out to achieve. If you are struggling to get the action plan into action, try some of these ideas and find ways to be successful.
