Editor's Note: In this first part of a two-part series, Marcus looks at the unique challenges small service firms face when creating a strategic plan.

When you're deeply immersed in wondering where your next client is coming from, and whether you have the resources to deal with a few more clients without straining the overtime budget, it's difficult to think of such esoteric concepts as strategic planning. How easy it is, when you're a harried practitioner, to dismiss strategic planning as something you'll leave to the larger firms in the high rise buildings.

And that would be a significant mistake.

If you consider what strategic planning really is, and what its values are, you begin to see its relationship to planning and building a practice. Strategic planning is, after all, looking ahead to the changing nature of your market and your practice, and figuring out what you have to do today to be ready for tomorrow.

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