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Want a new strategy for 2013? Start at the end.

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Early in his new book, Start at the End, Dave Lavinsky quotes Yogi Berra: “If you don’t know where you’re going, you probably won’t get there.” Mr. Lavinsky co-founded consulting firm Growthink, which since 1999 has helped about 500,000 business owners—some 15,000 of them in the city—create road maps for starting, growing and exiting their companies.

Based in part on his own experiences as a serial entrepreneur, he came to realize that “to create a winning business plan, you need to start by precisely identifying your business’s end game, and then start working backward to achieve it.” It’s a form of what techies call reverse engineering. In crisp, lively prose, Start at the End lays out a step-by-step plan for reaching your own ultimate goal or, in other words, “what you would like your business to achieve for you.” The wording there is deliberate, the author noted: “Your business should work for you, not the opposite.”

In a recent conversation, Mr. Lavinsky talked about why many entrepreneurs don’t reach their business goals, how to push ahead despite economic uncertainty, and more.

Over the years you’ve been with Growthink, you personally have written more than 100 business plans for clients. Is there one you’re proudest of?

One example that stands out in my mind is a Manhattan-based professional-services firm. When the founder first came to talk with me in 2002, he had four employees and under $100,000 in revenues. I created a new business plan which helped the company grow to $150 million in revenues and over 2,000 employees, including some in Europe and Asia.

Where do the ideas in Start at the End come from? Is the book based mostly on years of experience with companies, or was there an “aha” moment along the way?

It was both. I’ve always been very good at planning. If something complex has to get done, I’m naturally good at breaking it up into pieces and creating a plan to get it done. I started using those skills and creating business plans for individuals and companies in the ’90s.

Then, around 2000, I picked up a copy of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey. The second habit in that book is, “Begin with the end in mind.” I realized then that virtually every successful person I knew had started at the end and envisioned where they wanted to be, then figured out the steps needed to get there. So I started applying this principle to business plans.

Setting a clear goal and then working toward it sounds like common sense, yet you say most entrepreneurs don’t do it. What gets in the way?

Most of the time, people get distracted and overwhelmed by the pressures, and the little details, of the day-to-day. Every entrepreneur or business owner starts with big dreams of creating a great company. And then they realize how hard it is. They get sidetracked by all the little time-consuming things involved in running a business, and dealing with customers and vendors and employees. And then they quickly forget about their big dreams and move into survival mode.

Survival mode is our natural instinct. The unnatural but essential instinct is to build systems to handle all the little things so that you can always focus on the big-picture vision. Of course, you have to make sure the little things and short-term goals along the way are covered. But the point of my approach is to help you make continuous progress toward your big, ultimate goal—that is, the kind of success you dreamed of when you started.

What if you analyze your long-term goal and realize that you may have to change it?

The concept of “pivoting”—pursuing a different opportunity than the one you first identified—is not the right strategy for every company, but sometimes it can save you. There are lots of famous examples, like Mattel, now the world’s largest toy company, which started out making picture frames. Or more recently, Groupon, which [founder] Andrew Mason launched in 2007 as a business called The Point. It was designed to allow consumers to band together and boycott big companies that had wronged them, and then obviously ended up pivoting in a completely different direction.

Not every business needs to pivot, but, if your business is struggling or not fulfilling a large customer need, it’s something to consider. It’s part of the process of making sure you’re pursuing the right opportunity. In the book, I lay out Growthink’s step-by-step checklist for doing this analysis, and you can download a free worksheet from the website to help you with it.

For business owners who want to adopt a new, start-at-the-end business plan for 2013, doesn’t economic uncertainty make it harder to do? Might the “fiscal cliff,” for example, upset the best-laid long-term plan?

Maybe. But the economy will always go up and down. There will always be natural disasters and other unforeseen events. And you can never totally plan for everything that might happen. What you can do, however, is figure out where you want your business to go and then figure out what you need to accomplish to get there.

And then you can make sure that, each and every month, you create a plan that gets you closer to your goal. Surely some months you’ll make more progress than others, but you’ll always be moving in the right direction, and you’ll always be setting aside time to work on the growth priorities of the business rather than daily firefighting.


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