Everybody loves to get things done right and doing so at the first attempt brings untold joy. To achieve this kind of result, we typically push ourselves to spend time - too much time - preparing. You must have heard that preparation is important, especially for something like starting a business. This is true. However, it is unhelpful to over prepare. A good way to keep off from doing this is to learn on the job. But before we come to that - perhaps in some other article - let us see four ways in which over-preparing affects businesses. 

How Over preparing Affects Businesses

Founders and entire teams may be tempted to put in way too much thought while developing a business plan. This is no good and here are all the reasons why we say so:

You Do Less Work and so Become Unproductive

All human endeavors can be broken down into two steps: planning and execution. When we spend too much time doing the first, then there will be little or no time left to execute. It doesn’t take rocket science to figure this out, but unfortunately, entrepreneurs and founders still get caught in this web. Businesses are important - no doubt. They are an asset. They also help us build meaningful connections, and they push us to attain personal development. 

All of this points to why entrepreneurs make lots of preparations. Nonetheless, it is counterproductive for any founder to stay too long planning how to source capital, how to develop a product, how to enter a new market, or even how to build long-term relationships with customers. The simple principle here is that by planning more than you execute, you fail to perform the work needed to turn your ideas into results. With this, your business quickly rolls down the path of unproductivity. 

You Fail To Achieve Your Goals

Spending most of your time setting goals or even planning more than you’re executing would create a backlog of unaccomplished tasks. You would have so many stones unturned. Once this keeps happening, each new goal or plan becomes more and more unrealistic. And since running a business usually requires achieving one goal before the next, a long to-do list will make it difficult to hit specific goals, especially if they are time-sensitive. 

You Waste Resources

Over-planning or over-preparing costs businesses their productivity as well as their resources. How? Let’s say, for instance, that Company A needs to develop a new product. After doing all the necessary development and market research, they go on to perform more analysis which often leads to a phenomenon known as analysis paralysis. In essence, their drive to get it right from the onset leads to indecision, over preparation and waste of valuable time. The company might make some interesting findings in the course of carrying out research and rather than utilizing the data they have, they keep on researching. The more research they do, the more information and variables they have and the more difficult it gets to make a simple decision. This delays progress and it’s a waste of resources. 

You Cannot Easily Adjust To New Developments 

Rigidity is one factor that is closely associated with over-preparing. The relationship between both is that when a business over-prepares, it has its own expectations (concerning events or outcomes) and accompanying plans for these expectations. As this is the case, the business finds it difficult to respond to unexpected events or trends. Businesses that over-prepare have a huge dependence on their process. This is what shoots them in the leg. They focus on their plans so much that they cannot learn on the job like they should. They are not spontaneous since they are not built to think on their feet, and so they easily miss out on new opportunities. 

Conclusion

The key to mastering anything is to start with repetition not with perfection. Having said that, businesses do not need to over prepare. In fact, rather than spending lots of time planning, they should simply practice. This would create experience which is relevant for making quality and well-informed plans. Another advantage of having to practice more than we plan is that we get to build spontaneity. With this, our efforts and our responses to sudden changes in the business becomes more deliberate, refined, and creative.

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