Good planning requires a convergence of ideas, and accepting responsibility for your choices ultimately allows you to weigh each facet of your action plan and determine its influence on the outcome. Basically, it is your responsibility to balance the seemingly competitive traditional and nontraditional elements that comprise successful portability.
Continuity
Since lifetime employment no longer exists in the marketplace, as a portable executive you must concentrate on developing continuity of assignments that will yield a stable career path.
When compared to an organizational employee whose work is often defined as going to an office and maintaining a set routine, the type and flow of work for can be pretty sporadic. As Dusty Bricker sees it:
Until I build a reputation for staging world class business events, I think I have to be flexible and consider other methods of bringing in revenue.
Planning the Expansion of Your Skill Base
In our knowledge based society, the only way to add value in the marketplace is with an up to date, relevant set of core skills. Since your core skills and capabilities are your only real assets, it is essential to plan for their growth and expansion. Within the context of your business plan, you must account for the amount of time you spend learning or preparing for future work against the amount of time you actually spend working. When it comes to core skills, portable executives must plan:
- How to objectively price their skills.
- How to protect or insure their skills.
- How to enhance or add value to them.
- How to market them.
One of the major factors that portable executives must adjust to and plan for is that, as individuals, they have only a certain capacity. One of the most common complaints heard from portable executives working alone is, "When you market, you can't work, and when you work, you can't market." While this serves to illustrate that an individual portable executive can do only so much alone, this and other problems can, as suggested earlier, often be overcome through the formation of strategic alliances, partnerships, or buying the services needed to augment business. During the start up phase of his market research firm, John Trots came to understand it when:
I was staying up until 2:30 A.M. every night because I was handling production, staffing, and all of that stuff. One night, I realized what staff support was all about-we were truly overloaded with work and it occurred to me all of a sudden that this was not a very good way for me to spend my time.
Financial Limitations
Financial limitations are closely related to the capability re source limitations mentioned above, and often extend beyond the simple economics of raising capital or generating income for a business. Since portable executives tend to seek an integrated, balanced lifestyle, the financial limitations that should be ad dressed in a business plan should include not only those issues directly related to running the business, but also personal cash flow needs, such as the cost of the children's education, home maintenance costs, retirement savings, and any other major financial outlays that need to be projected over time. A business plan made by an executive in his early forties, working eighty hour weeks, with three young children and a whopping mortgage, will obviously differ from that of an executive in his early sixties, who, though his children may be fully independent and the mortgage long since burned, nonetheless must adjust his plan for retirement needs, health care contingencies, and the prospect of decreased work hours or full retirement. Since portable executives in many cases operate alone, they must also plan for business catastrophes that could affect their welfare as well.
Endgame Planning
One overriding reality that differentiates the situation of from that of an employee of an organization is that it is usually assumed that the organization will exist indefinitely even though the players, personalities, and culture may change over time. This certainly makes business planning easier. As there is no need to plan for the "endgame." Portable executives, however, as individuals, are finite beings whose lives will one day end.
