“I’m building a hotel, Daddy. A big hotel!”
And so it was. I wondered why it wasn’t a sandcastle at the edge of the water. But no. It was a hotel.
“What do you do with a hotel, sweetie?”
“We can sleep in the hotel Daddy; together…”
In any event, he was off and running with the hotel, not the sandcastle, right at the edge of the water.
I suggested to him that he might want to move the hotel, before he gets too involved, to higher, dryer ground. But he would have none of it. The hotel was there, and it was going to stay, no matter what.
Of course, you know the end of the story. The tide slowly came up, washed the hotel away, tears flowed.
And a lesson was learned.
I wondered, as I was watching him in his labor of love, how many of us build our great works on the wet, shifting sands? How many of us start building long before the planning is done? And how many of us don’t seek out a solid platform — a solid footprint — for our businesses before we begin the far more difficult work of building it?
In the final analysis, business is really not all that complex. We have the tendency to want to make it complex, but it really is not.
A business is a construct — an artificial operation — which has been assembled for the purpose of filling a particular need or desire on the part of other people with a product or service, which accomplishes that.
Everything else is surplus.
A business has only three fundamental elements: a market that is looking for a product or service, the product or service, and the operations to bring one to the other.
That’s it.
If we think about all the other things that we do in the course of the day that simply distract us from the objective of the business, you’ll probably find that 90 percent of your business is spent on the distraction, not on the business itself.
The purpose of planning our labor of love before we build is simply to make sure we have the elements of an effective game plan. Some people might call that a business plan. I simply call it a road map or blueprint.
The purpose of a blueprint is to make sure our building can be built before one ounce of concrete is poured. The purpose of a blueprint is to make sure the pieces fit together properly. The purpose of the blueprint is to make sure you understand what you are building before you actually begin it.
When it comes right down to it, the purpose of a blueprint is to make sure you’ve got a market that wants your product or service, the product or service that will satisfy your market, and an appropriate way to make, deliver and support it in the marketplace.
Every building — each business — needs a blueprint. Every building — your business — needs a solid platform. Each building — your business — needs a concrete slab supporting a solid footprint, for it to be successful.
Spend the time on the planning stage and you’ll probably find that your labor of love will withstand the shifting sands of the marketplace a whole lot better!
Original writing date: May 2000