Episode 443: Game Plan

So whatever is blocking forward progress is what needs to be solved in the plan. This is specifically what we are going to do. The paradox here is the smaller the business is, the fewer things that they need to do. However, typically the smaller businesses, they're actually trying to do too many things. There's so many ideas they hear from someone else. And they think, that's a good idea, maybe I should try that. And so they don't ever give any one or maybe two initiatives, things that they're trying to do to solve the problem in the business, they don't ever give it any enough time to actually take hold.

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Hey everyone. So this is part 3 of a 3-part series that I've been doing on what it means to have a roadmap. For your business. If you go back the last two Friday episodes, in episode 1, we talked about the importance of having your point A. We discussed things like really understanding your numbers, and there were a lot of different numbers that we talked about in that episode of really having a good grasp of where the business is today. Just like you're going on a trip, you've gotta understand where you're starting from, and where you're trying to go. And then the third part is, well, how are we going to get there? And the second episode, we started to talk about point B, and we call it your point B, your business blueprint. Your business blueprint is also made up of three things. It's made up of your three-year vision, your one-year objectives, and your 90-day targets. So the first two points of having a business roadmap is Where are you starting from? Point A, where is the business? And then point B, where are we trying to go? When I work with a handful, like 3 to 4 private clients, I will spend 2 months on just point A. That is roughly 6 hours plus some additional communication back and forth. So you're somewhere 6 to 8 hours of work. Of having a really good understanding of where the business is today. And what I typically see is, and certainly that would've been the case for me too, is, oh, I can tell you where the business is today in about 5 minutes. Well, with just a little bit of pushing, you come to find out, well, they don't actually have as good of a grasp of where they are today as much as they thought they were. And then in point B, if I say, hey, tell me where you're wanting to go in 3, 1, and 90. You end up getting kind of generalized, glossy, fuzzy statements. And then if I ask, is that documented anywhere? The answer 90% of the time is no. Or if it is documented, it's documented pretty poorly. Let alone, if it is documented, even if it's documented poorly, has that been communicated to the team? So let's get into today, the third part, and the third part is you your plan. Now, sometimes I'll use plan or game plan interchangeably. So if you hear me say game plan, plan, exact same thing. So the third part that makes up your business roadmap is where are we today? Point A. Where are we trying to go? Point B. And then what is our plan to be able to get there? What the plan needs to do, there's a number of things that it needs to have crafted in there, but one of the biggest is it needs to solve the constraint of the business. What is the thing that's blocking forward progress between point A and point B? If you take in any content from Alex Hormozi, they talk a lot about whenever they're in their portfolio companies or people that come go to their workshops, that's the thing that they're trying to solve for. What is the actual constraint of the business? What I think is, is if you focus on the constraint of the business, the only part And again, he has incredible content, great books. The only part of that is it's the constraint of the business, but I'm just putting two things on either side of his comments. Really good understanding of where the business is today and ultimately where is it trying to go and giving some structure to that. Now, if you again, take in some of the content, you can see some of the examples where he's worked with someone extensively. Kind of a new series that they've came out with where they're going through, I think one was a fashion, fashion, uh, consultant. One was a chiropractor where they were walking through all of the numbers. And I actually heard him on a separate podcast talk about how much effort and time goes into preparing for that 1-hour episode. And so if you see the business owner there, they have all of these numbers. They know their cost per lead. They know their customer acquisition cost. They know so many of their marketing and sales data, et cetera. And the reason is, is because his team has told that person that they have to be prepared with these numbers in order to be able to be on that quote Shark Tank type show, so to speak. Fantastic content. Go and check it out on YouTube for sure. So all of that is really around the point A. And then ultimately I'm just giving some structure into where are we trying to go with the business? So oftentimes somebody will throw out, we're at a million, we want to go to 10. Well, that's fine, but what's the timeline to get there? Are you trying to get to $10 million in the next 12 months? Are you trying to get to $10 million in the next 10 years? So having a structure of a timeline. Associated with your outcomes or goals, so to speak, I think is really important. So the plan effectively solves what is the actual constraint of the business. This is where we are today. This is all of our marketing numbers. This is our team size. This is our sales data. This is how many leads we're getting. Here's our financial results, et cetera. Here's our numbers. Awesome. Where are we trying to go? Here's where we're trying to go. What do you think's blocking forward progress? And so whatever is blocking forward progress is what needs to be solved in the plan. This is specifically what we are going to do. The paradox here is the smaller the business is, the fewer things that they need to do. However, typically the smaller businesses, and I'm going to specifically call that out, I'm gonna say a million or below, but even half a million and below, the absolutely, this is so common. The thing that I see is that they're actually trying to do too many things. There's so many ideas they hear from someone else and they think that's a good idea. Maybe I should try that. And so they don't ever give any one or maybe two initiatives, things that they're trying to do to solve the problem in the business, they don't ever give it any enough time to actually take hold. So here, this is where shiny object syndrome comes in. This is where they're chasing squirrels constantly. Here's what we're gonna do. We're going to buy leads from this vendor and they start buying leads and a month later they don't work. Oh, well, let's start actually working on our centers of influence. So they start working on that and they go visit some centers of influence for a month. They don't see anything from it, so they drop it. They begin, they say that they're gonna hire, you know, 3 salespeople even though they don't have the money to hire 3 salespeople. All 3 salespeople, you know, flake out after 90 days. We've smashed 3 Rolexes there. And so now we're doing it again. It's not from, or they start to change the team structure. You know, I think I need to have 2 salespeople and a service person. Uh, never mind, I need to have 1 salesperson, 1 hybrid, and a customer care. It just ends up becoming, we're switching too many things. We start switching compensation plans, how people are paid. Nothing has enough time to actually be solved. How we sell. We go to learn from someone, let's just say, obviously one of our podcast sponsors, someone like Coach P. They sign up for Coach B, they get really excited about the possibility of signing up with, working with Coach B. They start taking some of the WordTracks, they plug it into something like TodayApp Pro, which by the way, they just maybe switched from that. And then they start using this new WordTrack. The team gives an ounce of pushback. Well, that doesn't work as well as this other thing that we were doing. I think we should switch back to what we were doing previously. So then they switch back again. And so we're constantly starting back to zero and it's not because they think, oh, let me go and sabotage my own business. They're working their tail off. They're trying so hard, but they're never giving anything enough time to be able to work. If you go to our website, I run a web class. Well, say in 2024, you run 2 web classes and, you know, let's say the numbers of registrations is not what you want it to be. So what do you do? You just bail on that idea? Never mind, the web classes don't work. To be honest with you, everything works. Everything can work. It's just whether or not you're gonna lean into it enough and be committed to it enough. And I think that's where a plan, where you actually say, this is what we're going to do, and you give it enough time to actually take hold. And then after a predetermined period of time, and I will tell you, I think that time is minimum 90 days, but oftentimes it can take 6 months to a year before something can really actually improve. So the fewer things that you can do, the smaller you are, the better. So if you are below a million dollars, you really need to only do one maybe 2, if at the most 3 things. But realistically, you could do one thing and grow that business to a million. I fully believe that. Now, when you get to millions, you start to see operational efficiencies. I actually saw recently Club Capital were sharing some data about the advantages that a business, specifically an insurance agency, has when it gets above $1 million. Not only is it more profitable dollar-wise, but it's also more profitable percentage-wise. But the business actually, there are literal benefits to scaling. This also plays into why the first million dollars is so hard. It's harder. So whenever you see someone who has gotten their annual revenue to a million, and then all of a sudden before you, you blink and they've grown it to a million and a half or two, And they think, wow, how long did it take me to get to my first million? Wow, it took me 15 years to get to my first million. And then that just went from a million to $2 million in 2 years or 3 or something like that. The rate that a business can begin to grow once they cross over the million-dollar threshold, it truly can be exponential, especially in a business like an insurance agency where you start getting some of these operational efficiencies at play. So back to the plan. We have our point A, we have our point B, we need to have a dedicated plan to be able to get there. The dedicated plan really needs to do one thing. It needs to solve the constraint of the business. It needs to name it. It needs to say, on this date, I believe that the current constraint of this business is this. And there is a primary constraint, and then there could be maybe two, a second or a third. Secondary constraints. But what is the primary constraint? The one thing that if we could solve that and put a plan in place to solve that one thing, everything else topples over. It's almost like the one domino that we need to knock over. We kick that domino over, then we kick all of the other dominoes that are there. So again, paradoxically, when you get over a million, you can start doing more things, because you have better operational efficiency and you just have a bigger team. You have more capacity to be able to execute on more different strategies, initiatives to be able to solve the constraint or constraints of the business. You want your plan to be actionable. And I will tell you, I think you need to print it off. I think you actually need to physically print it off. I would spend the time to make it look great. I think that matters. Some people can push back on me on that, but I want our documents to look a certain way. It's important to me. I think it professionalizing it, uh, professionalizes things quite a bit. I think it also solidifies it as to, yeah, we really are doing this. So I would print it off and I would carry it with you. And so ultimately having your roadmap printed, this is where we are, this is where we're trying to go, this is what we need to solve, this is our plan to solve it. I think you absolutely have an incredibly powerful roadmap for your business. So to recap in this kind of mini series, we talked about all about a business roadmap. Business roadmap is 3 things. It's your point A, your point B, and your plan to get there. Where are we today? Where are we trying to go? What's our plan to make that happen? What I tried to do over the last 3 episodes is to give the detail and the nuance into each one of those things. I hope this served you. If you'd like more of this, register for one of my web classes that I do, right? Those are on Mondays. You go to my website, blueprintos.com, and you can register for my upcoming live web class. Feel free to ask me any questions to be able to help grow your business and transition from being the operator of the day-to-day and be able to get up above the business as a true owner of your company. All right, everyone, till next time. Lead well and go be great.

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