A PASSIONATE BUSINESS PLAN
by Greg Arnett

There are a lot of articles and books that are written about "planning." I am not going to try to be clever in this article, nor am I trying to "re-invent the wheel." What I am going to try to accomplish is to communicate a very important aspect of planning that is too often overlooked.

All of the planning in the world will usually fail if one prime ingredient is missing. You must have a "passion" for your work. Without passion, you will never be persistent with your planning. Passion for your work inspires genius, determination and boundless energy.

If you dread your work, planning won't change that negative approach. Planning may temporarily improve your work, but the dread will eventually dissolve the benefits of your meticulously plotted plan for success! It is not a great jump of deductive reasoning to assume that I believe that in order to succeed at whatever your chosen vocation, you must have a passion for it. If you have a passionate interest in what you are doing, that passion will generate a burning desire for success.

"Success" isn't just measured monetarily. If your passion is medicine practiced as a religious medical missionary, your success will not be measured monetarily but rather as to how many you can treat, and how well you treat them. If your passion is art, you may or may not achieve financial success... and that which will sustain you will not be the monetary gains, but the success with which you translate the creative spark into a real-world expression or illustration.

Now that the groundwork has been laid for your business PASSION, we can address the planning needed to make your business succeed. For passion undirected will not grow your business.

Your business plan should track all of the best advice from all of the innumerable sources you can turn to and learn about how to plan. Yet, there are certain basic ingredients that you need to include for your business to succeed.

First, you must select a product or service to offer. This should be a product or service in which you have a great interest, and preferably a lot of experience and expertise.

If you do not possess much experience or expertise in the area in which you have decided your passion resides, then that experience and expertise must be AVAILABLE. You must be able to borrow someone else's experience and expertise. I am not saying you should steal or plagiarize another's work. That is not necessary. I am suggesting that if you are striking out in a new direction for yourself, then you must have access to knowledge so that you can teach yourself your new vocation. Then, you must be able to successfully transmit your newfound knowledge to your clients.

After selecting your product or service, you must select the format that you will be using to offer it to others. Having selected your format, you must learn how to present your product or service on your website. You must learn how to design and publish your website.

Once you design and publish your website, your planning becomes crucial if you aspire to make money from that site. For now, your planning must be tightly focused on how you are going to generate traffic to your website. The finest products and services in the world, offered from the best, most beautiful and effectively designed website on the Internet, would not make a dime for the website owner who is unable to generate visitors to the site.

So, you are now down in the trenches. Your planning has resulted in selecting a product or service to offer, knowing and/or learning all you can about your products and services, designing and publishing a website, and all of that has only "built the pump." Now, you must "prime the pump" to get traffic coming to your site.

Planning your Internet promotion tactics will take even more knowledge. For example, I sell a book on ecommerce. In that book is a promotion checklist that contains over 20 Internet promotional tactics. By combining your passion with your knowledge, your planning should result in sustainable promotion tactics. If your passion is not sufficient to keep your promotional efforts in high gear for an extended period of time, you will likely not experience financial success or any other kind of success from your business. You must select those primary promotional tactics that you believe will best apply to your particular products and services, utilize those tactics consistently week after week (on into month after month), relying on your passion to sustain your long-term efforts.

To summarize, your business relies upon a passion for your products and services. Your passion will sustain you over the long haul. Your passion will stimulate creative genius. Your persistency is a function of your passion to succeed. And your passion will help you develop a game plan to follow and sustain you all the way to business success.