Building your business and developing yourself are both growth processes that occur over time. Effectively building a business requires developing your skills and/or managing other people who can build the necessary processes to perform necessary business functions.

While many people equate success with working, truly successful people attribute their success to working smart. When you first start a business, you will need to do both. And if you do both, at some point you will find you have built something that is sustainable. The value of your business lies not in what it can do with you, but in what it can do without you. If no one else can do what you can do, then you don't have a business that is likely to endure. You have a business that is restricted by its inability to use its creative juices and expand into something bigger and better.

A business can be thought of as a series of systematic processes linked to overall organization goals designed to exceed customer expectations. Each aspect of your business can be process mapped, so that in theory, other people could perform it. To be most effective these functions and processes should be captured in writing. When business activities can be reliably accomplished by others , then your creativity can be utilized for continuous improvement, increasing sales or new product development.

Recognizing an opportunity and being in position to take action is one of the keys to success. If you are busy doing the day-today work of your organization, you may be too busy to take advantage of opportunities, and you are probably working harder but not smarter.

The benefits of planning are many. Planning helps to prioritize your activities and see beyond the immediate issues, remaining focused on the desired outcomes, which will help ensure that day-to-day activities are in line with your long-range objectives and vision. It also will help you avoid getting involved in seemingly endless crises, and even prevent crisis-stimulated activities that seem to be important and necessary but in fact may be neither. With this understanding you are better able to focus your energies on getting where you want to go.

A comprehensive plan is the important tool you can utilize to build a successful business.  Now, with only weeks to go before the end of 2017, is the ideal time to take a step back and develop a plan for where you want to take your business in 2018.  So build the plan....and make your business more sustainable.