Episode 116: The Bottom Line - QUARTERLY PLANNING

So the big question is this: how do small business owners like us grow our leadership, develop our teams, and scale our business in a way that allows us to get our products and services out to the world yet still remain profitable?

That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers.

I'm Bradley Hamner, and this is the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.

Welcome to The Bottom Line, a new weekly podcast series that we drop every Thursday to complement our weekly Monday podcast interviews with the industry leaders. These podcasts are gonna be designed to give you short, impactful, and value-driven information that you can start using right away in your business. I value your time and attention and will do my very best not to waste it. Just get what you need and go. So with that, let's get into today's episode.

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Hey everyone, all right, so it is week 13. Can you believe it's already week 13, the very end of Q2 2022? And so we wanted to drop this episode because I think this week of every quarter, week 13, is the perfect time to take a moment, reflect back on the previous quarter, and then to plan for the quarter ahead. Now before I get into how do you do that? And what's a kind of a structure that you can use each and every quarter to be able to plan for your business? I want to tell you a little bit about why I think 13 weeks or a quarter is the right amount of time. I think that if we begin to kind of look at, um, and you'll hear, I'm at some point I'll share the importance of setting a 3-year vision for your business, but the further out you go, the harder it gets to actually predict exactly what's going to happen. I mean, certainly if you were planning for You know, you started in beginning of 2020, you set a 3-year vision. Well, obviously what happened just a few months into 2020 changed all of that, let alone it changed your, uh, 1-year plan. Well, I think that is very true even whenever we're setting your annual business plans. I think if you go back and you listen to the podcast I did with General McChrystal, I even asked him that question and said, you know, well, if we know that most plans don't ever work out the way that we intend them to, why do we even do it? And I think it's the value is not in the plan itself, but it is in the planning. But as you get shorter and shorter in a time period, it becomes easier to be able to predict exactly how to, you know, what's going to happen over the next 90 days. Now, that's not always exactly the case. But you certainly have a heck of a lot better shot than you do over the course of 12 months. I also would like to say, for as I've gone from further and further into business, I have set more and more realistic goals. You may say, well, what about the ideas of thinking big and having a big vision? Whenever I'm setting a 3-year vision for the company, yeah, it stretches me, and try— I try to think bigger. But for the team, especially on a quarterly basis, it is so important that they have and feel like they are winning. Have you ever had the feeling— maybe I'm the only one, that has set really big, huge— I think Jim Collins even calls it BHAG, Big Hairy Audacious Goals. And by the end of that, maybe even just a couple of weeks into setting that goal, your team is already behind and they feel defeated. And so I'm not saying that you lower the bar so low that it doesn't move the needle forward in the organization. But 90 days, I think 13 weeks gives you a perfect amount of time to be able to set numbers, set targets, set goals. That you and the team can hit. And if you stack those wins on a quarterly basis, 4 quarters in a year, you'll be amazed at the growth that your organization will be able to have if you continue to do that. And then momentum— winning begets winning, and they enjoy the feeling. They love the payouts. They love to celebrate winning. If you're listening to this podcast, you love to win too. And so I do think that 13 weeks, if you've read the book The 12-Week Year, and many other books. EOS, which some of what I'm going to share with you today is, is, is based off the book Traction. In fact, we're having— Gino is coming on the podcast, uh, hopefully in the next few weeks, as a matter of fact. So we're really excited about having him on. And so if you've not read the book Traction, based on the Entrepreneurial Operating System, it is fantastic. So there's a few things that I'll put a few little different spins on, uh, for my business, and you may be able to do it as well. So here is the structure and the framework. Now that I've shared why I think 12 to 13 weeks is the perfect amount of time. It's short enough to get some meaningful things done, but it's also not too far into the future that becomes really difficult to predict. Plus, honestly, uh, it's, it's easy to kick things down the road whenever you feel like you have 12 months. I think it was Jim Rohn that said, if it's easy to do, it's also easy not to do. And so, uh, I think 12 weeks, you know, you give yourself just enough time to get some meaningful things done, but at the same time, you really can't horse around. Uh, And because if not, you're, you're going to get behind pretty quickly. All right. So here's the structure for running a quarterly, and I'm going to give you some key questions to be able to ask yourself at the end. Number 1, what are the 3 big rocks that we want to get done this quarter? Now, I sometimes refer to these as critical numbers. I do believe that these rocks need to be tangible numbers or percentages that we hit in the organization. Uh, one of them is almost always going to be a revenue target that we want to be able to hit. It may be a growth target that you're looking for, or a specific line of business or a department that you're wanting to hit a production number. So what are the 3 big rocks that we want to hit this quarter? Now, I've played around with and actually worked with business owners around having many different numbers— 5, 6, 7— but I do think 3 is the number. You've got 3 months. Let's have 3 big rocks for the quarter. Number 2, let's choose a theme, a theme for the quarter. Now, I really struggled with this early on. I'm the one— sometimes people refer to me as Business Bradley. And so it's sometimes it's harder for me to just naturally inject fun into the organization. I've been around business owners and, you know, they just come up with such creative things to involve the team. And, you know, I kind of aspire to be that way. But it's just not my natural gift to do that. And so many of you listen to that, that it may be yours. For me, it wasn't. But by doing this on a quarterly basis, having a theme for the quarter, it really— and if it's not easy for you, then involve your team. They will really enjoy doing that. A friend of mine, Dustin, I'm sure he'll be okay with me sharing this. They had a number in the organization they want to hit. I think it was a life production number, if I'm not mistaken. And he realized that everybody had to have their fingerprints on that number. And so they did it around this bank robbery theme and they decorated the office. And at the end of that period of time, they hit the number, they won. Then he paid everybody out in brown paper sacks and I think he ended up paying cash, etc. And so I think they maybe did an escape room that night, etc. So everything was about having fingerprints and they tied it with this bank robbery thing. I think it was such a creative, great great idea. Both the sales team and the service team was involved. And so that's fantastic. So hopefully that gives you kind of an idea around a theme. And then lastly, is focus. What are we going to focus on for the quarter? Now, when I was talking to business owners about this before, they kind of struggled around, well, what should the focus be? And so sometimes I noticed that the focus ended up being something really things that were just not that important. And so I kind of stepped back and said, well, how— what are the things that are ultimately important? I think that there is— it needs to be probably one of these three things needs to be the focus for your organization, because there's really only three ways to be able to grow a business. You either do it through acquisition— how do we get new customers? Number two, how do we get those customers to pay more or buy more? And then number 3, how do we keep them longer? I mean, think about it. That's it. That's it, right? That's how you grow a business. Everything else is secondary to that. Number 1, how do we get new customers? Number 2, how do we get those customers to buy more, pay more? And then number 3, how do we get them to stay longer? So many of you have heard the term that's used in the military, AAR, after action review. And this is kind of a new definition for that new acronym. So number 1, acquisition. Number 2, ascension. And number 3, retention. Okay, so let me go back again. Number 1 is what are our 3 rocks or critical numbers that we're going to hit this quarter? Number 2, what's the theme to be able to kind of galvanize and rally the troops around? Number 3— number— that's number 2. Number 3 is what's our focus going to be? And your focus needs to be one of these three things. It's either going to be on acquisition, it's going to be on ascension, or it's going to be on retention. So an acquisition, that may mean a new marketing channel. What are all the things that we can do in order to be able to acquire new customers? Maybe that's getting involved with local centers of influence in your business. Maybe that's standing up new social media ads. Maybe that is turning social media ads on for the first time. Maybe that's looking at Google Ads. What are all the things that we can do to be able to acquire new customers? I think it's a really powerful question for you to ask yourself, to spend some thinking time on, but then also engage your team in asking that question. Team, what are all the things that we could do to acquire new customers, to have more inflow this quarter? And then once you decide on that then choose a path. Number 2, ascension. How do we then, once we get a customer, how do we get them to pay more? Now, if you're an insurance agent, a lot of people use the term, you know, how do we multi-line that customer? Whether you're an insurance agent or not, how do we get those customers to pay more? Sometimes in e-commerce, this is referred to as average cart value, ACV, or sometimes referred to as average order value. A company I really love is called Best Self. In fact, it's the planner that I love the most. Best Self Plan— it's actually called their Self Journal is the one that I like. And I was buying a new one the other day that's going to come in getting ready for Q3. And when I was there, it said, hey, you can you're only $10 away from free shipping or something like that. And so of course, what did I do? I added something else to the cart. Well, that increased my average order value. Well, the same thing is true in your business. If you can ascend those customers through Ascension and get them to pay more, the average household value, maybe, is a good way for you to look at it, or the average order value goes up. So what are all the things you could do, potentially do, to get the average household value up? Now that may include, I need to train my team. They just don't know how to have a better conversation to get that up. And then lastly is how do we keep those customers longer? Lifetime value is critical. Again, if you're an insurance agent, you know that first, what, 2 years or so is so important to being able to keep a customer. Well, if you can keep a customer for 5 years, they're certainly more valuable to you than a customer that you only keep for 6 months or a year, right? And so what I'm encouraging you to do is to decide where is the biggest gap in our business? And what do we need to focus on this quarter? I was talking to somebody the other day. And in their business— excuse me— what they needed to focus on was actually retention. Their new sales, their marketing and sales was doing really well. So acquisition was not a problem. Ascension, they So there were potentially some opportunities there for us to work on. But the thing that we dialed in on that they needed to focus on more than anything else was on retention. And so that is now his focus for this quarter. So again, here's the structure that you can use each and every quarter. Number 1, what are the 3 big rocks or critical numbers that we need to hit this quarter? And I encourage you to make those You know, stretch yourself, of course, but make those numbers that you can hit. And if you hit those numbers, then end of Q4, we'll hit those numbers as well. And if you can continue to stack those wins quarter over quarter, you'll be amazed at what you can accomplish in your business. Number 2, what's the theme? What's something that we can do? You know, it's going to be July, August, and September. Kids will start going back to school and roughly around August or so. So what is a theme that we can have? And if it's not easy for you to do, engage with your team. And then number 3, what is our focus going to be? And I think your focus needs to be one of 3 things. It either needs to be acquisition, it needs to be ascension, or it needs to be retention. A-A-R. Choose one, and then decide what are all the possible things that we could actually focus on in that. So if it's retention, what are all the possible things we could do? Choose a strategy, stick to it for 90 days. All right everyone, hope this was helpful. Look forward to hearing your feedback. Lead well.

If you're listening to this podcast, I know you're someone who has a growth mindset.

You probably want to be able to grow your book of business as well.

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