Everything is a 5-year-plan

Last weekend I had far too many wines and ended up in a deep conversation with a 72-year-old woman. Which is, in my opinion, one of the best kinds of conversation you can have on a festive weekend away.

I sat engrossed by the pure passion with which she spoke, the genuine love of her own life radiating from every word of wisdom she let slip. After her son regrettably pulled her away with an apology I refuted, I quickly noted down “everything is a 5-year plan” in my notes app before finding my friends again.

It’s now the following evening, and I’m writing this article from that same phone note on the plane, nurturing my hangover whilst juggling fitting a cheese pastry, three different types of cold drinks, and said phone on the ever-shrinking RyanAir seat tray tables.

Margaret moved to Spain with her husband and son 50 years ago to build a better life for their family. They now own 5 different bars and restaurants across different cities, employing hundreds of staff. She was, rightly, visibly proud of all she’d achieved whilst humbly acknowledging how much work it’s taken. I asked what her number one piece of advice to pass down would be, and Margaret immediately declared, “Everything is a five-year plan”.

When elaborating, it became clear how both simple and straightforward this advice is.

So often, we get stuck thinking about the here and now. What needs to be ticked off in the next three months, or where we want to be in 10 years’ time.

But neither 3 months or 10 years is an adequate amount of time to test your plans and pivot or reflect.

If you’re trying to change direction every 3 months or decide whether a service or marketing plan is working, you’re never truly giving it time to work. Business often needs small iterations, ripples of change to move you closer to shore. Not big waves for you to surf for 10 seconds before crashing underwater.

And this is precisely what Margaret was describing.

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Try to reflect on your business and think about what you want to achieve in 5 years. Break that down into all the steps you need to get there, over the next 5-year period. You’re unlikely to achieve success overnight, so you need to give yourself enough time to understand whether your idea is working. Put your all into it and really work for those 5 years towards that one goal. Completing all the small ripples to get you closer and closer to your goal gradually.

Each year, you should be able to look back and reflect on how much you’ve achieved, and acknowledge how much further you have to travel. You can make minor tweaks and iterations to your mission as needed, but keep it the same for 5 years. Don’t get distracted by another island in the distance.

Of course, every business is different, and Margaret was talking in the context of the food and drink industry. For her, 5 years is likely the optimum amount of time for you to give to a big goal such as opening a new location. That gives you time to research the different areas, find the right property, decorate and launch, and to let initial opening sales settle and truly decide on the success of that venue. If your goal is to launch a new digital service, you’ll likely need a lot less than 5 years to determine its success. After an initial trial period (where I back out immediately if something definitely isn’t landing), I give myself 12 to 18 months to review the success of any new services. But the point is you need to define what is a sufficient time period works for you, and stick to that.

On the flip side, we discussed how giving yourself too long to determine success can be just as damaging. If Margaret were to wait 10 years rather than 5 to understand the success of a new location plan, she risks losing tens of thousands of pounds continuing with an unprofitable venue.

Interestingly, Margaret also reflected on how when she gives herself longer time frames, she’s found she ‘tried less’. I by no means took that as she didn’t work hard. Given she is still racing around this bar at 72, when she could’ve retired 15+ years ago, tells me that by nature Margaret is a hard worker. But you become complacent. You maybe think you’re trying harder than you really are.

I’ve definitely been guilty of this myself. The first business attempt I launched was selling illustrated t-shirts. I poured my heart into the t-shirt designs, with lots of research on the different t-shirt quality, manufacturers and shipping. If you’d have asked me at the time, I would’ve said I tried as hard as I could. But I would’ve known even then that my marketing sucked.

Back then, I was so focused on the product side that I forgot about the business side. And unfortunately, the latter is often more critical.

I lacked a good social media strategy. I had no newsletter or clear customer base. I hadn’t defined a USP or apparent angle to set me apart from the competition.

I can hear my past self arguing that my USP was feminine sport illustrations but that wasn’t enough. I could’ve attended those women’s sports events to hand out business cards promoting my website. I could’ve had a genuinely engaging newsletter and social media presence. I could’ve invested in my T-shirts by sending them to influencers or lesser-known female sports stars in my niche. I could’ve tried a cheaper product to increase my IPO (items per order) and AOV (average order value), ultimately boosting my profit. Given that my USP wasn’t about quality but about design, I could’ve switched to a cheaper, slightly lower-quality t-shirt manufacturer to lower product prices and increase profit again. Or used a print-on-demand service to test out the concept of people wanting those designs before going all in with buying a printing machine.

I only gave myself one year before stopping that venture due to lack of profit. And I definitely didn’t try hard enough in that year.

But even if I had, was 1 year ever enough to determine the success of a product-based business? Of course not. These things don’t take off overnight.

When we put so much time into a business vision, it can become challenging to step away from it. There’s a familiar rhetoric that you can begin to see it as your ‘child’, and you, of course, wouldn’t give them up. But it’s an important lesson to learn to not make business personal.

Just because you love something, doesn’t mean your customers will. And the best business decision you can make is to acknowledge that it’s not right, and take the learnings to come up with something that is.

But timing is the most important thing for that decision.

My 1-year timeframe wasn’t enough to make that decision if I really wanted to make the t-shirt business work. I could’ve kept trying for longer and really gone all-in and maybe it would’ve worked. Equally, 1 year is plenty for me to know now whether a service is working, take learnings from it, and stop if it’s not.

Whether you decide to give yourself 1 year or 5 years, make sure it’s a realistic timeframe for your goal. Make sure you break down all the little steps you’ll need to move the needle slowly. Sticking to them and keeping your focus on that one singular goal for the time period you allow.

Make sure you recognise that you’re always working towards that one 5-year plan.

Then hopefully someday, you’ll be by the beach handing down your own business advice to an ambitious individual who’s had one too many wines.

Need help defining what your 5-year plan should be, or how long that plan should even last? I’m a website designer and business strategist, and my business blueprint can help you with just that. I’d love to work together to help.

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