A host of angels sang in my head when I read a post from the ever-smart Charlene Li. She was writing about Social Media, but this goes for all marketing.
“Budgets are the numerical depiction of your strategy.”
This is a very, very important statement. It is our responsibility as people who are responsible for managing firms, practices, companies and any organization to be strategic about what it is we intend to do from day to day.
Would you build a house without plans? Of course you wouldn’t because you might end up with a house that either costs more than you intended, doesn’t serve your purposes, ends up smaller or larger than you need, doesn’t look like what you dreamed about for the past 10 years, can be worked on by anyone who thinks they know how to hammer a nail, or is surrounded by a lot of angry and frustrated people who are tasked with building and finishing that house for you. That sounds expensive to me.
It’s no different with our firms. If we don’t bother to take the time to discuss…
- What we want to accomplish
- For whom we want to accomplish it
- What messages or solutions we have that might solve the challenges others are facing
- Where and how we can find those who need us
- When and how often we should offer our solutions, and
- How we can determine whether we have been effective in those efforts
…then we are not approaching our business efforts as responsible professionals and businesspeople. There is no way we can create a real budget if we haven’t outlined the strategy first.
Strategy and budgets go together. You can’t have one without the other.
Without the strategy, our activity is not focused.
Without the strategy, the budget is just a bunch of numbers we hope fit at the end of the year, right?
Related articles
- Firm Leadership-part 2: Planning & Budgeting (myrlandmarketing.com)
- Firm Leadership: Please Stop It! (myrlandmarketing.com)
- Is Being Reactive Good Marketing Strategy? (myrlandmarketing.com)
