Episode 183: The Bottom Line - Build The Plan

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 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 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.

Hey everyone, all right, so last week we talked about what is a blueprint and why is it important, why, why do you need one. And so when I, we try to use words very intentionally. I used to be very flippant with the words that I was used and use words that would kind of mean the same thing. And now try to be very specific with the words that I use. So blueprint, in my opinion, is what is the 3-year vision? What is your 1-year OKRs, your objectives and key results, which I'll talk about in another episode? And then what are you trying to get done this quarter, your quarterly targets? So it's your 3-year, it's your 1-year, and it's your 90-day. And so today, what I'm going to talk about is kind of the second of what we believe are 4 key pillars. One is the blueprint. The second is building a plan. The third is Scoreboard. And then number 4 is your habits. And so today is all about, well, what are the things that you can have in a plan, a Plan that actually works. Now, there's been a lot of tremendous books that have influenced me on building a plan that works. Execution— the book Execution, uh, was big. Certainly Four Disciplines of Execution has been big, and just several other, uh, Michael Hyatt has influenced some of this. Uh, so we definitely want to give credit to those who have influenced my thinking along the way. Uh, very few of these things are, you know, original ideas. It's more about how I've taken those ideas, interpreted them, and putting to put them together in a system. So what I want to share with you today are 5 steps to building a plan that works. I think step number 1 is the how. In other words, what is your strategy for making a comp— to accomplish what it is you want to accomplish this year or even specifically this quarter? Okay, what's your strategy? Can you specifically say we're going to do, we're going to do X, Y, and Z? Step 2 is the what, which is the key result activities needed to accomplish that. So you may say this is my strategy, but these are the key result activities. Number 3, what are your standards of the performance? And so you may say, well, this is the number, minimum number of calls, this minimum number of outreach that we need to have to be able to hit that standard? Number 4 is going to be what's our cadence of measurement and reporting? Our cadence. So in other words, how often are we going to report out to ourselves or check on our numbers of how we're doing? Oftentimes this is weekly. And then step number 5, who owns the outcome? Now, for many of you, your name as the, as the founder, the entrepreneur, the business owner, your name is going to be, I own the outcome. The more that you can shift to where someone else other than you owns those— that outcome, the better off the business is going to be. So let me go over those 5 steps and then I'll give you an example. Number 1 is what is our strategy? Number 2 is what are the key result activities we need to measure? Number 3, what's our standards of that performance? Number 4, what's our cadence of measurement and reporting? So how often are we going to report to ourselves and to others how well we're doing? And then step number 5, who owns that outcome? All right. So let's go through an example. So one of the major strategies that we're employing this year is podcast guesting. I mean, no surprise having the podcast and its growth it's had over the last 6 months or so, thanks to all of you. We've wanted to be able to kind of utilize that strategy to be able to grow the company and also to be able to grow this podcast as well. So me going on other podcasts has kind of a double-edged sword. It both helps grow this podcast, bring, bring people, because people who listen to podcasts listen to podcasts. I'm sure much like myself, you listen to many other different podcasts, not just this one. And so, uh, we believe that that strategy has a two-fold effect. One, growing this podcast as well as growing, uh, Business Growth Curator. So that's, that's our main strategy for 2023. Okay. From there, how many do we want to be on? I want to be on 12 podcasts every single quarter. Effectively, we want to have— we want to be— do 50 podcast guesting appearances in 2023. So it almost works out to be 12 a quarter, one a week over the course of 12 weeks. All right. So that is our main strategy number 1. No, step number 2 is what are the key result activities? Well, one of them is going to be email outreach. And so what that means is, is we have our strategy of going and looking at the people that we've had on the podcast, looking at other episodes or other pods that they've been on, reaching out to the host of that. And there's a way we've figured out how to be able to do that. Obviously, we have people reaching out to us. And so we kind of have a workflow step by step to be able to do it. And so email outreach is a big part of it, reaching out to the podcast host to be able to pitch effectively me going on that podcast. All right, well, that's step 2. That's one of the key result activities is email outreach. But it doesn't tell you what the standard is. And so the standard is, we've got to do that at least 5 times a week at a minimum to be able to hit our target. If more is needed, then we'll do that. We currently believe if we do that 5 times a week, that's 60 times in a quarter, and we convert, so to speak, get 20% of those podcasts to be able to say, yeah, that sounds great, let's have Bradley on to talk about the Rainmaker's Dilemma, then that works. Now, do we know whether or not that's going to work perfectly? Is it going to be— need to be more email outreach? Maybe, but we'll figure that out. And we've actually started testing this in November. And so we have a pretty good idea of what our cadence is going to be or what our rhythm and what our statistics have been so far. So we feel pretty good about that. Well, number 4, what's our cadence of reporting? Well, we have that key result activity on our scoreboard so that we can track it. And Courtney updates it every single week on Monday. And then step number 5 is who owns the outcome? This case, actually, Courtney owns the outcome. So strategy, podcast guesting. Step 2, what's a key result activity? Email outreach. Are there others? Sure. But I'm just giving this one as, as one example. 3 is what's the standard? Well, 5 email outreaches per week. 4 is how often are we going to report that? We're going to do it every single week on Monday. She probably does it either Monday morning or Sunday evening. She reports it, how many did she actually do? We set her standard as 5, we want to do 60 for the quarter. And then step 5, who owns the outcome? Courtney owns the outcome. Now, some of you may say 5 email outreaches a week, that's not enough. I get it. Look, context matters with what it is that we're doing. It takes time the way that we send the email specifically to say that we've listened to that podcast host. I mean, so we're very— we're curating specific things. I get for some of you may be making, uh, some of your standards of performance may be 100 dials a day, uh, let alone 5 emails every single week. I get context really matters with this. And so what is your plan? Can you specifically say this is not only our strategy, but these are the key result activities with that? Here's our standards. Here's how often we're going to measure it and who— here's who owns that outcome. To me, those are the 5 elements that really make up a great plan. You've laid out this is where we want to be in 3 years. This is what we want to do in 2023. This is what we want to do the quarter. Well, here is our strategies. And I will tell you, if you have 3 or 4 different strategies, I think you've got to go through and say, okay, here's our strategy, here's our key result activities, this is our standards, this is how we're going to report it, and this is who owns the outcome for every single one of those strategies. You may say, Bradley, that's, that's exhausting. Well, but it's the difference between a plan that's just, you know, this is our target, this is our goal, and then I hope we hit it, versus actually being able to say we can look back, we can measure, uh, and see how we did relative to our performance. I'll be able to report back, uh, as we go throughout the year and say this— how many email outreaches we did, this was our conversion. Was I able to get on, uh, you know, 50 different podcasts this year to be able to pitch the idea of the Rainmaker's Dilemma? We'll be able to see that. So hopefully that serves all of you. And so next week, what we're going to talk about is objectives and key results. You've heard me say that before, or recently especially. And so I'm going to actually detail out for you what I mean by objectives and key results. And why does— do I think that that's a superior way to be able to set targets for the business in a year versus maybe some of the just traditional goal setting. So So anyway, look forward to that. Appreciate all of you. Hope this served you. Until next episode, lead the way.

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