Episode 180: The Bottom Line - Blueprint

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 going to 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.

Are you an agency owner looking to grow your revenue, increase your bottom line, and better manage your taxes? Club Capital is here to help. Club Capital is the largest accounting and advisory firm for insurance agents in the country, providing monthly accounting, tax strategy, and CFO services. Way more than bookkeeping and your everyday run-of-the-mill tax prep, Club Capital is focused on providing financial and tax advisory services that help you plan and forecast your agency's performance. Their financial dashboards and agency forecasting tools help you better understand your agency's historical performance, create, measure future targets, and see how your agency compares to your peers around the country. Imagine what it would be like to understand the impact to your bottom line when deciding to hire a new employee, or forecast the impact rate changes or commission rates will have on your business. With over $200 million in tracked annual revenue and $140 million in tracked annual expenses, Club Capital has the data and the team to help you make better informed decisions for your agency. They will help you turn that back office stress into the backbone of your agency's success by giving you the tools to take your agency and your leadership to the next level. Visit club.capital today to book a solution overview with one of our business consultants. Club Capital, way more than a CPA firm. Are you an agency owner looking to grow your revenue, increase your bottom line, and better manage your taxes? Club Capital is here to help. Club Capital is the largest accounting and advisory firm for insurance agents in the country, providing monthly accounting, tax strategy, and CFO services. Way more than bookkeeping and your everyday run-of-the-mill tax prep, Club Capital is focused on providing financial and tax advisory services that help you plan and forecast your agency's performance. Their financial dashboards and agency forecasting tools help you better understand your agency's historical performance, create and measure future targets, and see how your agency compares to your peers around the country. Imagine what it would be like to understand the impact to your bottom line when deciding to hire a new employee. Or forecast the impact rate changes or commission rates will have on your business. With over $200 million in tracked annual revenue and $140 million in tracked annual expenses, Club Capital has the data and the team to help you make better informed decisions for your agency. They will help you turn that back office stress into the backbone of your agency's success by giving you the tools to take your agency and your leadership to the next level. Visit club.capital today to book a solution overview with one of our business consultants. Club Capital, way more than a CPA firm.

Hey everyone, so what I wanted to do is start out with our first solo episode of 2023 and talk about what I consider to be a blueprint for your business. And I want to give you kind of this analogy. Whenever you're building a house, let's say that you were going to go and, and, and you had a plot of land and you were going to build a house and you started to gather information and you, uh, pictures from magazines, from Pinterest, from, uh, maybe just different houses that you've seen over the years that you really love. And you begin to kind of put all these ideas together. Uh, we're going to have this many bedrooms, it's going to be 2 stories, it's going to be 3 stories, it's going to have a basement, not have a basement, it's going to have a pool, not have a pool, whatever, all those things. You know, you begin to kind of get an idea, uh, of what the house is going to look like, at least vision-wise. Some of you are maybe very contemporary, some of you are very modern, some of you are very classic, um, and some of you may be like an old antebellum home, etc. So you have this idea of the house that you want to build, and so what you do is you end up, you know, going to an architect and, and you share with the architect, here's all of these ideas that we have for this house. And the architect comes back after some period of time and shares with you this effectively a sketch of what the house would be. And you begin to say, yeah, that's exactly what we had in mind. And can we change this around and change this around? And so in the end, you begin to kind of see what the finished product looks like. And so I consider that to be the blueprint. Now, if you took that blueprint and you gave that to a general contractor, they were not going to be able to build the house. They're going to need specific plans. In fact, they're going to need plans for the HVAC, they're going to need plans for the plumbing, and they're going to need plans for the electrical. Well, I think the same thing is very true in your business. You need both a blueprint and you need a plan. You need a blueprint of what it's going to look like when it's done And then you need to be able to have an idea of exactly what the plan is to get there. Now, I will say people will use words interchangeably. Maybe you do. For us specifically, and even the program that I have is called Blueprint, we use blueprint in a very, uh, special or specific way. And so I'm going to share with you today what a blueprint is, and then over the next couple episodes, I'll dive a little bit deeper into what I specifically think of as a plan. And so in working with, uh, other business owners, I think a blueprint is really 3 things. I think it is first the 3-year vision of where you want your business to be. Now, you've heard me talk about the importance of that on many different episodes, and I'm not going to dive specifically into that today, but a 3-year vision of where you want to be. And that alone has been incredibly powerful. I think for a lot of you you get into this habit of instead of having 20 years of experience or 10 years of experience, you have the same year repeated over and over and over. Have you ever thought that, well, you know, 5 years ago looked just like last year? And maybe you had a better year 5 years ago or had a better year last year than 5 years ago, but you don't necessarily— it seemed to be almost like Groundhog Day. It's the same year over and over and over and over again. I've had some people share that with me versus being able to kind of look past just one year and look three years, lean out three years into the future, and then begin to reverse engineer. Secondly, I think as part of a blueprint is your one-year OKRs, your objectives and key results. Now, some people would use, again, goals, you know, your goals for this year. I love to use OKRs. I maybe will talk about that on a future solo episode. And then thirdly is your 90-day or your quarterly targets, your 90-day targets. What do you want to get accomplished this quarter? Now, look, you may say, well, where does monthly, where does weekly, and where does daily? And for a lot of businesses, those additional things are incredibly important— monthly, weekly, and daily. But for almost every single business that I have personally encountered or been a part of or helped to, um, in, in coaching them, those 3 things is what I think of as far as a blueprint. The 3-year, your 1-year, and your 90-day. What is your blueprint? What do you want it to look like after Q1 of 2023? What do you want it to look like after, uh, at the end of 2023? And what are you trying to build towards over the next 3 years? That is a blueprint. Now, is that a substitute? A blueprint alone is simply not enough. In addition to a blueprint, you need the plans to make that happen. But have you ever considered if you only have the plans— if you gave back to our analogy of the house, if you had just the plans and you said this is where the electrical is going to go, someone would say, okay, that makes sense. I'm going to kind of get an idea. These rooms are going to be this exact size. The ceilings are going to be this size. I mean, I get that. I get the layout of the house, but what is it going to look like? Well, I don't know. And that's where the blueprint comes in. And so I have some visuals of this to be able to share with people. And you can begin to kind of say, oh yeah, I, I see what that house is going to look like. Uh, you either love that, maybe that architectural style, or you don't, but you have an idea of what it's going to look like. But it's not enough to be able to build the house. You got to have a specific plan, because with a plan you can go back to and say, did we execute on that plan or did we not execute on that plan? You can't really execute on blueprints, but you can execute on plans. Doesn't mean that you're going to achieve what what it is that you're hoping to, but it certainly gives you an idea so that you can course correct along the way and see where maybe you fell short. So next week I'll talk about, well, what actually makes up a plan that works. And so when you begin to get— as we— I want to share this, uh, going into 2023, as you begin to kind of look at this year, what do you want to get accomplished in Q1? What are the specific targets you want to get done in Q1 of 2023? Then what are the objectives and key results that you want to accomplish this year? And then how do all of those have vertical alignment to what you want to get accomplished over the next 3 years? If you think about all of 2023, all of 2024, and all of 2025, and you kind of lean out, it's December 31st, 2025, and you're thinking back, you're looking back over that 3 years, what do you want to have accomplished? And how is this year and even this quarter going to help to be able to get you there? So anyway, I hope this serves you. I hope you've already gotten off to a great start. I hope 2023 is the best year ever and appreciate all of you making the Club Capital Leadership Podcast as part of something you listen to every single week. This was helpful to you. Would you consider sharing it with one other person? Until next episode. 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. What DirectClick specializes in helping insurance agencies leverage Google Ads and SEO to drive inbound phone calls, leads, online visibility, and even organic traffic. You can be confident in knowing exactly how well your ads are working and getting support in what really matters in your business. Get exclusive online marketing support today when you visit directclicksinc.com. You know how important it is to develop yourself and to develop your team. Well, if you're going to do that, you want to do it with the best. Work with Coach P Consulting to learn and implement the same strategies that he used to sell over 700 life policies in 2021 alone. You'll get personalized coaching 2 times a week and an in-depth look at how his office is run, and Coach P will train your team alongside his own. Get your first month free when you mention the Club Capital Leadership Podcast during signup. Visit coachpconsulting.com to get started. If you've listened to this podcast for any amount of time, you've heard me say many times, the best use of money is to be able to buy back your time. 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