Good day, fellow entrepreneurs – we have been receiving mail recently all with the same theme – ‘how quickly can I get a business started’.

It seems that everybody is in a hurry to turn their great ideas into a fully operating business. While we naturally applaud this great entrepreneurial spirit, we always answer the question with a note of caution. That caution is all about planning and as many of you know that follow our blog and social media communications we are all about ‘planning’.

I am quite sure that you could evolve a great business idea and turn that into an actual business in a matter of days or perhaps two or three weeks depending on local conditions and requirements. Our question however would always be ‘have you really thought the operation through’? At the risk of repeating ourselves it is a known fact that the failure rate with start-up businesses is very high. Our analysis of the situation shows that there are two main reasons that create the failure the first being lack of proper planning and the second being lack of adequate financing.

The lack of financing is also in part a by product of the lack of planning and so everything is focused on that one key crucial element – make sure that you have a viable and workable plan before you launch your business. The usual question that follows our enthusiasm for the plan is ‘how do I go about creating the plan and what has to be in the plan to make it work’. In this area we have a very simple answer and that is please check out our library of publications which are crafted to help new entrepreneurs through the planning and start-up stage of their business. We have prepared a number of guides that cover diverse topics and these guides have all been written in an easy to read format and certainly extremely affordable.

And so, the bottom line to the question is you can go at whatever velocity is good for you however make sure that you always have a plan before you set off on the journey.