By Ahile Shima
If someone says you do things short-term, it just means you don’t make a lot of plans with the future in consideration. This can be translated to living life on the fast lane. How you think affects how you respond to stuff going on around you. In this case, how does short-term thinking affect your money? Someone with short-term plans obviously doesn’t care about budgets, savings and investments. If you cannot think and by extension make plans for a very long time ahead of you, it means you cannot adequately plan for emergencies and impromptu expenses. What this means is that everything can become an overwhelming situation for your brand because you have not adequately planned for a long period of time.
(Source: Hobo.Video)
Why is short-term planning affecting your finances?
Now that is an easy question to answer. The chances of you have sustainable income from the lottery is pretty slim. Even with that, without adequate planning and organization, the money will not sustain you after a short period of time. Short term thinking means you have put no mind to what happens after the immediate future. You haven’t made a plan for recurring bills, restocking, for a sustainable income. It means you are in the business of spending and not considering how to create wealth. You can argue that you have a job and so you are making these needs met, but when you don’t think long term, there you don’t consider emergencies and uncertainties.
(Photo credit: Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash)
The value of one Indian rupee in 1917 was thirteen US dollar. In 2020, sixty-five Indian rupees made one US dollar. This makes it obvious that when you think and limit yourself to what happens in the nearest future, you lose money instead. An individual who made investments years ago may lose money but not a lot because he or she is continually generating income on a long-term basis. If an individual didn’t save and invest, and just lived hand to mouth without thinking about how to exponentially increase the income he has, after some years, although the same amount of money is still coming in, he will have less purchasing power.
One way that short-term thinking is costing you more money can be illustrated with a grocery list. When you go to a supermarket and buy groceries four times in a month, you buy less but at a higher cost than if you bought a month’s groceries at a go. This is because buying in bulk saves cost.
“Building a brand is like watering the tree. Not something that will pay immediate dividends, but an activity that will pay off in the future” -Alastair Smith
One of a brand’s requirements for success is to have a long -term plan that ensures the brand maximizes bulk effect, marketing strategy and collaborations. Focusing on short-term thinking and planning does not pay off in the future; rather, it pays off almost immediately and as a result has little to no real influence on the brand’s growth. As a brand, any short term thinking and planning needs to be accompanied by a more detailed long-term planning because that is the only way the brand will grow. A brand, especially a starting brand requires business tools such as digital and marketing contracts, advertising strategies, a website and several others that are meant to improve visibility and result in sales.
It would actually cost a brand less money to go into long-term deals of about a year and more. Check out (Gunjan Chandok, 2021) for how to make meaningful marketing strategies. Making deals of longer terms reduces the time to be spent subsequently on brand promotions. It also opens up time and resources to be spent on other aspects of the brand development. Even existing brands will benefit from long-term thinking and planning because short term thinking and planning will leave you open to financial instability even in cases of minor inflations in the market.
How short-term planning is costing your business
Photo credit: Huyen Nguyen saved to illustration
1. You are consistently spending more than you should.
It doesn’t matter if you are a brand owner or an influencer, if your business does not long-term and favors short-term, you will have a lot of recurring expenses. While this can simply mean that a brand is consistently spending money trying to get collaborations and secure the most appropriate market strategy deals, an influencer will also have to more often than required, spend more looking for brands to represent. A short term plan means that you have to keep renegotiating resources when you can easily do these strategy deals for a longer period of time.
2. You have to spend more time readjusting business plans.
Short-term plans do not take into account changes in the marketplace because they don’t last long. While this means that you don’t have to constantly adjust your plans to fit with the market because your plans don’t last long enough to be irrelevant, investing in several short-term plans will result in you spending more time on planning instead on actual execution.
3. Short-term plans don’t take growth into consideration.
Short term plans are made to satisfy immediate plans. Earlier, I mentioned that every business needed to have a sensible long-term plan while implementing several small-term plans to address issues that come up. Short-term plans are important in every business, it is a short-term plan that an influencer will use to deal with a crisis such as controversial content on their page. However, a long-term plan is important for growing the audience base.
How your business can suffer fewer losses from short-term plans
1. Focus more creating long-term plans for your brand.
Photo credit: Susan Freeman saved to Ben’s stuff
According to the article by (Agnew, 2020), most executives in big corporations are of the opinion that short term plans yield goals especially when they are just short of a target. While this is proven to be true by some studies, constantly thinking up short-term plans can result in more money spent on a particular project than should be. Short-term plans are meant to be a life line but frequently relying on short-term plans to save your project goals will end up incurring more costs for the project.
Photo credit: Scott Graham on Unsplash
It is not too early for a brand to have a design and management team. Even for a start-up that has just one staff, it is prudent to acquire the services of a professional who can work contractually in preparing a plan that is organized and easy to execute over a long period of time. Most brands are stuck with short-term plans that are high costing because while they have a clear picture of what they want for their brands, they don’t have any idea of the most efficient process to get to their goal. A professional will be most suited for deciding what short term plans can be employed at each point and how to ensure that these short term plans do not result in increased cost for a brand.
“The next big step is identifying investments that will help you get to these goals in the time frame you’ve set while still matching your personal risk tolerance” – Bryan Barnes
3. Make use of tools that ease having a business.
It doesn’t matter if you are a brand owner or an influencer, or even just someone looking to cut costs. There are several platforms for making sure that brands and other professionals have an ease in business. Facebook, Twitter and Hobo.Video are some of the more convenient platforms that can be used by businesses in order to rely less on short-term plans.
Conclusion
Every brand ought to be interested in where their money is being invested. It is important to know how much value they get in return. It cannot be denied that short-term planning has its advantages. However, short-term planning needs to be closely monitored and limited to avoid it resulting in excessive costs for a brand. There are several platforms that provide a guide on developing the best marketing strategies and collaborations. That will result in long-term plans that save costs and improve value to your brand. According to (Community Tool Box), making long term plans of about a year help your brand to pinpoint the goals. While taking into consideration the financial expectations and implications of the brand. Ultimately, a long-term plan will be more money-saving. When the goal of a brand is to steadily grow rather than to quickly meet a set target.
