It seems like something that every business should be considering along the way, but in truth many don’t. It’s profitability, including how long it will take you to get to the point where you’re profitable, what steps you can be taking to ensure you hit your target, and the decisions you make don’t negatively impact your goals for making money.

Today we pass along a very interesting post from the OnStartups blog, posted by Dharmesh Shah, who uses a very funny South Park video to illustrate the point of his post. Shah essentially argues that planning for growth is fine, but ignoring profitability altogether is an unwise move. He also offers three unique steps in the planning process that will help you consider profitability and essentially manage it over the life of the business. Not everyone can be a Twitter or Facebook, so to consider reasonable constraints is probably worthwhile for your business.

The entire post can be read here. What about you, do you consider profitability with your own small business planning?