Episode 311: The Annual

What if you could step out of the day-to-day and see your business from a whole new perspective? Welcome to Above the Business, where we empower you to rise above the daily grind and embrace a higher way of business ownership. It's time to build your business by design. Hey everyone. Well, if you're like me, you have planned and tried to set out an annual plan many, many times before. Has it ever felt like Groundhog Day for you to where it's like it's December and you're like, I'm supposed to start planning for next year, but I really don't want to. My, my mind is kind of checked out for this year. I'm kind of tired. I'm ready for this year to be over. Or maybe I've had a great year and it's just easy to kind of rest on my laurels. But at any case, whether you've done it in December or whether you've procrastinated and waited till January, maybe you've waited till March. To do your annual planning, at some point you're going to get around to setting whether you call it goals, targets, outcomes, objectives, whatever you've called it up to this point. You've set out to say, all right, at the end of the day, what are we trying to accomplish this year? And I can't tell you how many times I have done this only for my efforts to be futile, only for my efforts to really have been a waste of my time, if I'm just totally honest with you. And I think that there's a few things with that. Now, look, if you want help in putting together an annual plan, I'm going to give you a specific call to action at the end of this that will, uh, kind of share with you what we can do and how we can help you build an annual plan for 2024. That works and is one that you can believe in. At the time of this episode, we're actually having that next week. So I'll share that with you in just a second. But more so, whether you decide to join us or not, I really care about trying to give you something that helps you in the business, something that you can actually walk away with. So when you start to do your annual plan, whether you decide to join us for our annual planning event our annual planning workshop or not, this will help you. Number one, when I look back on the plans that did not work, I was absolutely very unclear about what it was I wanted to accomplish. That's the absolute biggest first mistake that I made, is I was just loosey-goosey. I was too generalized. And I don't mean just specifically lack of numbers. There are times that I'll set out objectives that don't necessarily have a percentage or a number tied to them or a revenue target. So they're not a dollar sign. They're not a number. It's not a percentage, but I still am unclear. Keith Cunningham says generalizations kill clarity, and I completely agree with that. And the reality is, to be able to build a plan that works, we number one have to have clear outcomes. What is it specifically that there's no way that you can be confused about what it was that we were trying to accomplish? And anybody else, it's so clear that anybody else would be able to know specifically, like, yeah, I actually see what they were going to have to do to actually put points on the board or to put the ball in the end zone. I use that analogy a lot. I don't want to move the ball down the field and then go, wait a minute, what, what did we actually say we were trying to do? Oh, put the ball in the end zone. Well, how do we actually do that? What does that actually look like? And so honestly, that's the number one thing, is lack of clear outcomes about what success specifically looks like. Number 2, a lack of a clear plan to make that happen. And this was probably the one that I completely whiffed on. The first one, I would set out, we'll say, these are our goals for the year. Again, I don't specifically subscribe to that language. I've shared that before. If you use the word goals, Totally fine. Goals oftentimes for me become too synonymous with wishes. So therefore, I tend to use language that connects me much more specifically. And on an annual basis, I use the word objectives. We subscribe to the OKR framework. Look, I have used almost every goal-setting framework there is out there. If you're familiar with Michael Hyatt and anybody else's framework, I have, if not tried it, I've certainly looked into it and studied it. And those have not ever really worked for me personally. So language does matter, but for lack of a better term, most of the time I've at least set out some goals. I've set out some objectives, some things that I wanted to accomplish. But what I can look back on and was often a complete whiff was no plan to actually make it happen. Okay, that's great. I see what you're trying to accomplish there. How are you going to do that? So I might have been semi-clear on the what, but absolutely not clear at all. Nothing in place to figure out how we were going to do that. Now, the dirty little secret in setting annual planning is not the value of those things, but it's the actual planning process itself that you go through that you get a ton of the value. Because if you can ask yourself the right questions, you can come up with really great answers. You've heard people say the person who asks questions is in control of the conversation. Now, on Mondays, I interview people. And so I'm clearly in control of the, of the conversation because I'm the one asking the questions, not because I'm a control freak, because I'm just the one asking the questions. So you can navigate through that. So the question then comes, how do we ask ourselves? And what are the questions that we need to ask ourselves so that we can come up with better answers? And one of them is like, what does success look like specifically? Number 2 is, what is my specific plan to make that happen? And then we could go even further is to say, okay, who is responsible for what? What is the absolute clear accountability that I know what my role is to make that happen? My team members know exactly what their role is, and more importantly, Everybody else knows what everybody else is responsible for. And that level of accountability and clarity, clear accountability, is absolutely key to being able to make your plan actually work. So the last part I would share with you is, do you have some sort of way to have clear transparency, a tracking system of some sort, a scoreboard in place in the business so that you can actually see how you're doing relative to what you said that you wanted to do. And that leads me to my last point. If, let's say, that I had set out my clear outcomes for what it was I wanted to accomplish, and let's say that I had loosey-goosey maybe put together a plan to make that happen. And then number 3, I kind of sort of assigned some accountability to some of the people.

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The question really then begs, if I have a scoreboard in place, what is the structure, the process, and the routine that's going to keep me from really moving the goalpost? So often when I've shared that with people, I've seen so many heads nod whenever I share that, that they too have been guilty of, you know what, I said we were going to do this. We're not going to do that. So I'm just going to move the goalpost. We thought we were going to sell this many widgets. We're not going to do that. We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll make the number this. And so what ends up doing, it's like, what's the purpose of even having goals? Your team says, here we go again, Bradley setting these goals out again, only to change them halfway through the year, only to change it again 3 months later, only to change it again. And yes, there are times like COVID-2020 that happens, of course. I mean, there's factors and dynamics that change, but more often than not, we don't— we're not dealing with a global pandemic. And so I do this whole process. I try to set out clear outcomes. I try to have a scoreboard in place. I try to assign accountability. I try to be— have a crystal clear plan to make it happen, only for me to be wishy-washy throughout the year, for me to have no structure, no process, no routine that actually holds myself accountable. Because the reality is I don't want to be held accountable. I don't want to be held accountable because I'm an entrepreneur. I started my business because I didn't want to be told what to do. Does any of this relate? To you. And so oftentimes we can reject or push against structure, process, and routine, or anything that looks like structure, process, and routine, because we don't want that for ourselves. And so therefore, we won't lead the business. We won't do the things for the business that the business needs. Embedding the structure, the process, and the routine, the right planning process to ultimately be able to execute on the vision that we have because we don't want it. And so because we don't want it, then we're just not going to do it. But the reality is everything we want is on the other side of structure and process and routine. So let me recap some of the things that whether you decide to attend our annual or not can help you in building a business plan. For 2024 that actually works. Number 1, be explicitly clear. There's no way that anybody else, even if they're not in your business, could not be able to see, yep, okay, I know exactly what they're trying to accomplish. I know exactly what success looks like. Number 2, have a very clear plan to make that happen. Okay, I actually had to stop away, step away from this for a little bit. So I don't know exactly where I stopped, team. So I'm going to go back to one part and kind of rerecord and then we'll go from there. All right. So to recap, what are some of the things that you can use to be able to put together your 2024 annual business plan that actually is going to work? Number one, Super clear outcomes. What is— what does success look like? Number 2, what is our specific plan to make that happen? Number 3, who is accountable for what? Number 4, how are we going to know how we're doing relative to what it is that we say that we need to be doing? What are— what's our transparency? What's the school board we're going to have in place to be able to track all of those things. And last thing I would share with you, at the end of the day, having community and having accountability absolutely matters. Even though we don't want to be told what to do, having a kind of a structure around us really does matter. Having people that you can play off of the ideas that you have to say, hey, is this really what I should be working on right now? Or is this not what I should be working on? Do I have sideways energy? Somebody that will tell it to you straight and be able to give you feedback, I think, absolutely matters. And putting yourself in a community of like-minded individuals matters. If you would like help in walking through this process in specific details and having, honestly, just having some of the space carved out for you, I shared with you that you could be able to have a way to be able to join us. We're going to be walking you through step by step by step so that you have— you walk away after what we call the annual. Obviously, we're going to be doing our 2024 planning process. We're going to spend 2 days next week, December 12th and December 13th, over Zoom, over a couple hours each of those days. Our outcome, our very— my very specific outcome is that you have absolute crystal clear 75% of your annual plan done for 2024. We've got some incredible speakers that are going to be coming in and giving you some of those things, some details and some specifics along the way. So really excited about that. But we're going to also not only give you kind of like what to do, we're going to carve out some of the space, we're going to transfer over some mindset stuff. We're also going to give you hopefully transfer over some skills. And we're going to give you some really specific tools that you can use, not just taking this stuff theoretically, but actually doing it. Uh, one of my maxims is ideas are everywhere, implementation is everything. Well, let's go implement. Hopefully what I shared with you today is something that if you want to do it yourself, DIY, together your annual business plan, that can give you some structure in and of itself. But if you'd like some help, go to above the business.co, above the business.co. You'll learn more about the annual business planning workshop, December the 12th and 13th. Love to have you be able to get a ticket and join us over Zoom. Carve out both of those days. Now, people will say, yeah, there's going to be a replay. Well, yeah, if you join us, there's going to be a replay, but it is never the same, uh, as whenever you join live because we carve out some time, sometimes 5 minutes, sometimes 10 minutes, for you to be able to specifically work on things. This would be the, I believe, 4th year I've done this, maybe Yeah, I think it's the 4th year we've done the annual with my clients that I've worked with. And I think this is the best one that we are ever have done up to this point. And I'm really excited about some of the new, some of the new stuff, but also just the way that we've got some of the— I don't call it old stuff, but some of the frameworks we've used before, but we're going to be able to share it with you in a kind of a new refreshed ways. So love to have you join us, abovethebusiness.co. Appreciate all of you. Till next time, lead well.