One of the most frequent questions we get from clients is how will they know if the money they spent on their ad buy or marketing plan was money well spent.

In other words, whether their campaign will goose revenues or whether it will end up like money down a black hole.

Since we’re in the full throes of the holiday shopping season it might be a good time to take a look at this question from a retailer perspective. For major retailers November and December sales can make or break them in a given year. For them advertising is a matter of life or death.

Kantar Media Ad Intelligence just released data on the Thanksgiving shopping weekend—including the all-important Black Friday.

Big box stores spend millions on Black Friday advertising.

Kantar and its research partner, location analytics specialist Placed, tracked the ad efficiency of major “category killing” retailers, including Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot, Lowes and Macy’s. This allowed them to evaluate the results of their November advertising leading up to Black Friday. The goal was to determine how efficient traditional “offline” advertising is in driving customers into bricks-and-mortar stores.

Don’t get the idea I’m anti-planning. Just the opposite. Chaddsford Planning Associates is all about planning. It’s just that so many organizations do it so poorly. Their business plans are either too vague to be of any real use or too inflexible to react to changes in their marketplace.

As the boxer Mike Tyson was famous for saying, everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.

So if you’re headed to the corporate planning retreat, the war room or the big conference room at the end of the hall, here are some tips from us to help you develop a “flexible focus” in your business planning.

The problem—beside the grammar—is that once you get something that everyone can support it doesn’t really say anything. You waste precious planning time coming up with something that is 1) overly inclusive; 2) inoffensive; and 3) nothing anyone would really like if they had the honesty to admit it.

If you’re a company your mission is is pretty simple: to make money. The planning meeting should provide a strategy for doing that. Period. If you’re a non-profit or a government agency your mission is to deliver great service to whomever you serve. It’s not that hard, and you don’t need an MBA to figure it out.

I once had a CFO explain it to me. “We’re a small company,” he said. “We make a little money, we spend a little money. Hopefully we make more than we spend.” When we planned our session focused on that last sentence. And we always made money for our shareholders.

Invariably there is one person in the planning meeting who loves the sound of his own voice. His mission at the meeting is to make you think that he's the smartest person invited to the meeting. My second piece of advice is to not invite him in the first place.

Folks like him usually have no operational or financial experience. All of their contributions are theoretical, with no thought as to how you would ever implement or pay for them. It is important to ensure that these actors don't play the lead and relegate everyone else to the chorus.

People like this will suck the oxygen right out of the room if you let them. Keep the discussion on a practical level and away from the bloviators.

There is always a temptation in planning to bite off more than you can chew. By that I mean a temptation to “over goal.” Goals and objectives are mandatory planning outcomes. But your goals for the following year have to align with your resources. Don't set more goals than you have the resources to accomplish.

If you’re a non-profit running a string of health clinics don’t plan to open more clinics if you have operational problems in your existing clinics. A more realistic goal for the upcoming year is to set a timetable for resolving those operational issues, rather than replicating them in new facilities.

As Clint Eastwood’s rogue detective Harry Callahan observed in the movie Magnum Force, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

There is an old Chicago newspaperman's saying that goes something like this: If your mother says she loves you, check it out. The point is to make sure you can verify everything in your story. It’s the same in planning.

One of the biggest problems in organizational planning is setting goals without a way to verify that the company or organization has reached those goals.

The way to avoid this problem is to make sure your objectives can be objectively verified. That means that the organization or whoever owns a particular objective, must exhibit some behavior that lets everyone know the objective has been accomplished.

Take our simple example at the beginning of this post: “Hopefully we make more than we spend.” A behavior objective for the company might have been to make more money than we spend.” Admittedly, this is an oversimplification. But at its most elementary level if we finish the fiscal year in the black, that's a behavior that let's us know we’ve accomplished our goal.

Always express the objective in the infinitive form of the verb: to save, to open, to develop, etc.

That’s about it. Keep your mission simple. Focus on the practical. Don't over goal. Verify. There are a lot of rules for successful planning. These are just four that have worked for us.

And know your limitations...

Today, November 22, 2013, marks the 50th anniversary of the death of President John F. Kennedy. Fifty years is a long time. This past week the airwaves have been flooded with remembrances of Pres. Kennedy and those tragic events in Dallas so many years ago.

CNN aired a nice piece this week, featuring the black-and-white coverage of 1963. In one 50-year old clip a newsman (they were mostly all men back then) looked into the camera and boldly predicted that years from now (1963) people would still remember where they were when they heard the shocking news of the assassination.

How prescient. I’ve seen several clips of now middle-age baby boomers talking about where they were when they heard of the President’s death. So here’s my story:

It was a day not unlike today is on the East Coast. Cloudy, but warm for late November. It was Friday, just as today is. I was sitting in my last class of the day at St. Paul School, the parochial school in the little town in which I grew up. The time on the clock was about 1:40 Eastern in the afternoon. The classroom door swung open and our principal swept in. The sisters of this particular religious order back then wore long flowing black habits that seemed to fly on the breeze when the good sisters walked with any great purpose.

The President has been shot in Dallas, she announced. Along with the governor of Texas. Then she began to lead the class in prayers. The President being Catholic, the staff and students had more than just a passing interest in the story. The teacher continued the prayers as Sister left to tell the next class.

We were dismissed shortly after 2:00. This was a different era. The town was small enough that most of us walked home from school. As I neared my house a schoolmate, Mike Shea—still remember his name—came running breathlessly up from behind.

“He’s dead,” he announced. “Kennedy’s dead.”

The first thing I did after entering the house was to flick on the television. And it stayed on for four straight days. Both of my parents worked so as they arrived they home they joined me in the living room. I remember being mesmerized by the coverage.

Even prior to the assassination I had been a little news junky. Probably why I ended up in a newsroom. I was aware that only three weeks before the president of the Republic of South Vietnam, Ngô Đình Diệm, had been assassinated, in a coup allegedly approved or tacitly agreed to by the American government.

I remember waking up Sunday morning and turning on the television. My father was with me. My mother told me to get ready to go to Sunday Mass. Out of the living room I heard my father shouting. I came running to see what happened. A gunman had just assassinated the alleged assassin live on national TV. And I had missed it.

Monday was like a grief-filled national holiday. Stores, schools and businesses were closed. We watched the funeral on television. I remember Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston presiding over the funeral Mass. I actually remember wondering for some reason what non-Catholics who were watching were thinking, listening to Cardinal Cushing intoning the Creed, the Eucharistic Prayer and the Preface in Latin. I remember the slow funeral procession.

Mostly what I think of when I remember those four days wasn’t the actual events. Sister Alice sweeping into our classroom. The President’s young wife with his blood incongruously splattered over her pink outfit. Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald on national TV.

I was Huck Finn on the raft and the Duke and the Dauphin had just come aboard. And they weren’t leaving any time soon.

That’s what I remember today.

Forget about the cratered launch of ObamaCare. There is one sign of life still among the rubble. That sign of life is the free market.

There are any number of new companies that have sprung up to take advantage of gaps in the sprawling new law.

Extend Health, Inc. is a start-up that launched one of the first private insurance exchanges. Last year it was sold for nearly a half billion dollars.

How about Castlight Health? Their products put the transparency back into healthcare costs so consumers and employers can make more informed decisions about their costs and healthcare utilization.

And there’s Benefitter, Inc., whose software and support products help employers and their workers navigate the murky waters of Affordable Care Act regulations.

All of these entrepreneurs share one thing: They saw a big change coming and decided to manageit, rather than being managed by it.

At Chaddsford Planning Associates we’ve been part of a similar phenomenon. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton pledged to “end welfare as we know it.” 

The cry against welfare reform, passed by Congress in 1996, was not unlike what we’ve seen with the Affordable Care Act. Each was a radical re-working of the social safety net.

I launched Chaddsford Planning the following year to take advantage of the fact that states, recipients and the private sector were facing a compliance issue with very little in the way of support.

Our first client was a trade association representing the food retailing industry. That was followed by another lobbying group representing the financial industry. Then came a major transaction processor. And a group of states. Then more states. And an equipment manufacturer. Then a company from France wanting to take advantage of its experience supplying product to that country’s social safety net. And then an Asian company wanting to sell to Hispanic Americans. And on and on.

The business environment changes all the time. If you’re a business you either take advantage of that, or be taken advantage of. That transaction processor? We helped develop two products that threw off $25 million in the first six months. The equipment manufacturer? A contract for 10,000 units within the first four months.

During the past 16 years we’ve helped more than 30 states plan for the adoption of electronic payment technology to replace their outdated paper benefit payment systems. All part of modernizing how we delivery social benefits. 

The next time change hits your business, tackle the problems it creates,  but don't stop there. Look for the opportunities that change can create for you.

As for the Affordable Care Act, who would have thought that a law, which at its core essentially converts one-sixth of the U.S. economy into a public utility, could rile up the animal instincts of the free market?

Welcome to America!