What you do depends on where you are and where you want to go by when.
Being clear on your Phase, despite being very general and high-level, reveals many underlying assumptions.
Let’s look at the Phases:
- Launch
- Scale
- Compete
- Execute
- Land
These are probably self-explanatory. What needs your time, however, is to evaluate what it means to succeed in a given phase against your own timelines.
If you believe you are in Compete mode and really need to get to Execute in a year, that is different from someone who feels they are still early in Scale mode.
I know that early in my career I didn’t even think in these terms.
So I wasn’t really laying down groundwork in terms of what I needed to do in the Scale phase to pay off dividends later.
That’s the most critical reason why going through a planning exercise as early as possible and regularly referencing it regularly is an investment that can really pay off in dividends.