The early stages of business planning : difficulties and strategies

Amanda and I have been working on our business plan for our center for natural medicine for a while.  We started planning long before I had any business classes in my program at NCNM.  In fact, we’ve been planning since I started school!  However, we still have a lot of work to do.  Why?

I believe that the early stages of the business planning process are the most difficult.  We have had multiple meetings of 3-4 hours where we did nothing but flesh out the basic idea behind our business model.  We’ve revisited notes from these meetings several times, only to come back at some later meeting to rehash similar ideas.  This process is slow and sometimes frustrating.  Every once in a while I despair that we are making no headway at all!

Still, I think this is all a very important part of building a sound business.  While we haven’t done all that much that could be put in an official business plan and submitted to a bank for a loan review process, our work has been extremely valuable.  There are three major reasons I believe it’s important to take plenty of time to ruminate over the most basic elements of a business plan.

1. Good ideas take time : Just like cramming for an important test doesn’t leave you the time to comprehend the material, trying to cram for a business plan will find you in a business to which you do not feel passionately connected.  When you first start conceiving of your new clinic, your ideas will be rough and disconnected.  As time goes on, you start to see the relationships among your various ideas and new ideas are born from that fertile ground.  Further, as you accumulate experience simply by going through your normal days you will be better able to refine your current ideas and come up with new ones.  All this time spent will pay off with handsome dividends in the end
2. It’s more complicated than you think : While your clinic idea may seem simple, with enough time you begin to see the complexities involved.  If you don’t leave yourself enough time to fully explore the plan, you may end up rudely awakened by some unexpected difficulty.  Failing that, you may simply miss out on a great opportunity that you would have been able to take advantage of if you had fully comprehended the intricacies of your situation earlier.
3. It’s more fun / less stressful if you take your time :  It’s simply more fun to have big ideas and work out their implementation when you have time.  Trying to cram a business plan into the last 6 weeks of your schooling is only going to stress you out.  That’s pretty contrary to the spirit of natural medicine, isn’t it?  Give yourself a break!

Anyway – our business plan is really coming together and with every meeting I get more and more excited about our basic concept.  I’d like to explore that concept in future posts both here and at Deepesthealth.com.  Until then, thanks for reading.

Eric

Related articles

• The power of networking in natural medicine (3)
• Open For Business…I Think (0)
• Getting started in the business of natural medicine : Our story, part 1 (0)