I was getting ready to head north to Seattle. The drive time according to GPS was 2.5 hours. That might have been the case at the moment, but many times the traffic clogs up around mid day. By the time I was nearing Seattle, surely I would hit traffic that GPS wasn’t forecasting. And I did. It added about an extra hour to the drive. Good thing I planned for it, as I would have missed my first appointment had I not.
In business, there are many situations that are known, but don’t always show up in the tools you are using to plan for the future. It could be seasonality or cyclicality in your business. If you take your current month or annual sales and project them forward, you are likely to miss your projections all together. This happens more than you would expect. How are you taking predictable changes into how you run your business?