This plan for your business was developed by John Heinrich, based on an idea promulgated by Suzy Welch (wife of Jack Welch, the legendary General Electric boss).

Why Suzy didn’t push it into the business world, we don’t know (she, at one point, was an Assistant Professor of Management at Harvard), but the process appears well-suited, with some modifications, to thinking about a new business or expanding your existing business.

We advocate the 10-10-10 Plan because entrepreneurs can both be procrastinators (no hard decisions today, please) and unwise risk-takers who don’t do much advance planning or analysis of new ventures.

Here’s the way we look at the 10-10-10 Plan:

The first 10 represents what you might do in business in the next 10 minutes.

The second 10 represents how that decision in the first ten minutes will work out in the next ten months. This means: How will the implementation go? If it goes badly, you will need to rethink and pivot. What does that look like? What’s been your cash-on-cash return at the 10-month point? Is it above or below expectations? If it’s below, what happened to adversely affect it? What can you do about the adverse effects?

The third 10 represents what might happen in 10 years. Honestly, this is where things might get messy because you can’t forecast with certainty what might happen in 10 months. When I first presented the 10-10-10 idea to a local business club, one of the members pointed out that you could have several courses of action in the first 10, refined down to one that you might project into the next 10 years.

You might want to take a look at your 10-year plan at a 5-year interval, too.

You can develop several plans, make some projections, and determine the probability that each will come true. As a simple example, say you have a 50% chance of making a 10% cash-on-cash return on your investment in a new business. Let’s also say that you have a 50% chance of making a 20% cash-on-cash return on your business investment. So, the likely outcome is a 15% cash-on-cash return on your business investment.

A caution is to not suffer analysis paralysis because if you overanalyze a decision, you’ll never do anything and then get mad at yourself for not doing anything.

Entrepreneurship is all about making your best decision based on what you know at the time, and then adjusting that decision on the fly, because things never go according to plan. Such sages as boxer Mike Tyson and ADM Bill McRaven would agree.

So, in the final analysis, “Just Do It.”

John Heinrich Business Success School
John Heinrich

Expert in Business Plans and Customer Service