There’s a number of things all good plans have in common, but one often overlooked aspect is one emphasized by Garry Mansell in his scaling plan is real post.
According to Garry, he can always tell within ten (10) minutes whether or not a scaling plan is real. Not because he’s clever, but because real plans have a particular smell to them … they acknowledge constraints. They name trade-offs. They make it obvious what will be sacrificed, and when.
And he’s right — because if a plan is frictionless, it’s not a plan. It’s a fantasy (and likely even worse than your RFP Fantasy). And many of these fantasies, as Garry points out, are immediately identifiable from their assumptions that everything is possible, nothing has a cost, everything is assumed to be easy, integration is assumed to be smooth, customers are expected to behave, and cash is assumed to cooperate. Anyone who’s been though a real startup knows that NONE of this is the case!
A real plan not only acknowledges constraints, but contains sentences about the harsh reality that are uncomfortable, sometimes very uncomfortable, to say out loud — especially for executives who believe that “leadership” is always maintaining positivity and exuberance. But the reality is that there are always risks, and if you’re trying to start something new, or grow considerably, there will be lots of big risks. And if you don’t acknowledge them, do what you can to mitigate them, and be prepared to work through, or at least around them, you won’t succeed.
This should not be a surprise, because, as Paul Martyn will be quick to point out, and I will be quick to echo, if you don’t acknowledge, and capture, your real constraints in your scenario analysis, you will not succeed. And if the most import constraint is left unspoken, other unspoken constraints will be implicitly captured in the constraints and costs that do get modelled, and the outcome will be determined before the first scenario is run. That’s not success, that’s doing everything possible to protect the status quo.
And you won’t scale anything that way!