111. Preparing for 2024 With Russ & Andy

The reality is, once the first shots were fired, it had to really be dealt with on the fly. That doesn't mean that planning is not a good idea. It just means what you want to do is to predict as many of the potential future scenarios as you can and then make sure that you've got a way of dealing with each of those if and when they occur.

Welcome to Professional Builder Secrets, the podcast for building company owners wanting to grow safely and securely. I'm your host, Will Blunt, and today I'm joined by Andy Scarter, our head coach. Andy, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. Will. Nice to be here.

And Russ Stevens, the co founder of the apb.

Thanks, Will. Nice to be here.

Fantastic to have you both on. I can't believe it is December. Well, that's in the future, but that's when the podcast goes live and we're thinking about 2024 already. Andy, do you want to talk a little bit about planning ahead for 2024 and why it should be top of mind for builders at the.

Sure. I love this question, and I always catch it in the following terms for our builders. If a client came to you and said to you, I'd like you to build me a house on this piece of land, but I'm not giving you any drawings, would you take the job? And of course they all tell me, don't be mad, of course I wouldn't. Well, that's one house they're building. And yet a lot of builders are quite happy to go into the future with no plan for their business. And really, it is critically important that they go through a planning phase. We like to say every quarter, but certainly at this time in the year, setting themselves up for the new year so that they don't arrive on their first day back from their Christmas break and wonder what they should do, they arrive back and get straight into actioning the plan they've come up with.

Russ, anything you'd like to add to the importance of planning at this time of year?

Yeah, look, I think there's a. There's probably a lot of sayings around planning. One of my favorites is a failure to plan is a plan to fail. But I think it's really important to remember that in business, if we don't set targets and then create the strategies to reach those targets, we just end up coasting. Like Andy says, you want to come back from the Christmas break and hit that ground running you don't want to be then trying to figure out, well, how are we going to increase this, improve this business in the year ahead, you want to have a clear idea. And I think as well, when you do it in advance, plants, you know, you're committing it to your subconscious over the, the Christmas period as well, which is, you know, another important thing and an important reason why we have to write things down, because that will, that will play a part in, in, in helping us to reach the, the solutions. And yeah, it's, it's just so, so important for builders when, when they are so time poor, aren't they? I mean, these guys have got less time than anyone. So yeah, they, they can't afford to scrimp on this. They it planned and they got to execute that plan.

What happens if they don't plan, Andy? What are some of the symptoms that might, might pop up?

Well, I mean, stress is going to go through the roof because you're now living in a reactive environment. You're effectively reacting to whatever the universe happens to throw at you that day. Certainly with all of the clients that I work with, the languaging that I love them to get their heads around is let's plan how you are going to happen to 2024, not how 2024 is going to happen to you. Because the reality is, even if you put the plan together and it doesn't work out exactly the way that you thought it would, it's going to work out materially in that direction. So it's, it really puts you into a proactive situation instead of a reactive situation. And that means you're able to be prepared because you know what's coming. You don't end up in a situation of things catching you off guard because you had no idea what was coming down the pipeline for you.

There's a saying, isn't there? If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there. And we see this a lot in small business, not just in building companies, but I think small business in general. And we've just been doing a lot of live events lately and meeting with a lot of builders in a social environment. And the amount of guys that I've spoken to and said, what's the plan for the business? And when you ask them that, they look up to the right and that means that they're being creative, they're imagining what they want. And it's a clear indicator that they don't have their whole business plan documented and written out, because if they did, they'd be looking to the left and recalling that information. So that's a bit of a giveaway And I think a lot of people in business kind of think like that. They kind of know where they want to go, but they don't have it documented. And that really is just so. So it's, it's a fundamental principle in business.

Is that a tell?

Is it?

The look to the right is you're not sure, and look to the left, you're confident.

It's a little, it's a little telltale. Yeah, it's a bit harder for Andy when he's talking to people on Zoom because they might have mirror imaging on.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Is there anything about the current market which makes planning even more important, Andy?

Well, yeah, very much so. You know, the, the general economic world that we all live in with interest rates, you know, certainly in, in Australia and New Zealand, it looks like the US Is probably going the same way. Canada appears to have stabilized at least, and I think there is a, an injunction, if you like, from the Reserve bank in Canada that they're going to hold things for a while. The reality is in that sort of scenario where there's inflation constantly being fought, knowing where you are going, that even rhymes. Yo. Yo. That that will put you in a far better place than just, you know, we can't control whether the interest rates are going to go up again or not. We can't actually control whether the inflation numbers are going to go down. But if what we've got is a plan for each of those eventualities, if interest rates go up again, this is what we're going to do. If interest rates go down, this is what we're going to do. The beauty is there's no emotion at the time that that thing happens. We simply move into whatever the action is that we've planned for that particular situation. And that just, you know, I come out of a fairly interesting military background and the amount of rehearsal we would do prior to a significant operation that was against the backdrop of, I think Eisenhower is credited with saying about the D Day landings that they did an immense amount of planning, but the reality is once the first shots were fired, it had to really be dealt with on the fly. That doesn't mean that planning is not a good idea. It just means what you want to do is to predict as many of the potential future scenarios as you can and then make sure that you've got a way of dealing with each of those if and when they occur.

Yeah, I think that's a really good point that Andy brings up there. We shouldn't get too hung up about trying to make the plan Perfect and cover every eventuality. You know, the fact is, you know, we've, we've got an overall strategy here, an overall goal, and the plan will get adapted to make sure we reach that goal. And that's why we don't just do it once and set and forget. It's why we refer back to the plan and it's why we restrategize as well, because things change and there are components within the whole business planning strategy that allow us to take that into account.

That sounds like a good segue, Russ. To talk more about the actual process for planning, do you want to give a high level overview of what strategic planning looks like?

Yeah, Well, I think it really starts with the overall business plan, which covers a lot of components that operate at a high level. And we're talking about the big hairy, audacious goal. For instance, you've got to have a real stretch target here that the business is heading towards and that could take 15 or 20 years to weave, even reach that. But other high level components are the core values which will, will drive the business. The mission statement and, and in terms of something like the, the mission statement, I think it's important to go wide on this. I think in marketing, especially when we think about usps, we've, we've always been conditioned to go narrow. But there's a, there's an author called Jonathan McDonald, wrote a great book called Powered by Change and he outlines the importance of having this wide mission statement because it prevents a company from becoming redundant as the world evolves. Now. Yeah, we can't really foresee a situation where building companies are going to become redundant in our lifetime. However, the process that they use to build is certainly going to evolve in our lifetimes. I think we can all see that coming.

But.

So it's really important not to be too narrow and too tied into doing things a certain way because that's the kind of thing that can cause a company to fall quite rapidly. And we've only got to look back in history. We've seen this happen quite a few times. Kodak vs Fujifilm I think is a great example. Kodak spent their time trying to save a business model, whereas Fujifilm evolved and went in a different direction, became very successful. So yeah, I think that's an important thing to get at a high level. SWOT analysis will help you stay on top of things. That is where you identify your strengths, your weaknesses, your opportunities, your threats. And that will keep us very grounded, see where the danger might be coming from, what we're good at where the opportunities are, which can apply to both the weaknesses in the business and the strengths. Other high level is identifying the who is the ideal client that we're trying to serve. You know, what's our unique selling proposition, you know, what marketing messages are we using? So it's not just about setting some numbers. It really is about detailing the whole structure for the business.

And I think it's important. Will, just while we're talking, you know, that sort of practical stuff is I think people that have listened to this podcast will have heard me say that words create worlds. And I'm going to put my hand up and say that, you know, kind of we've allowed this terminology to continue. What we're doing in the business coaching world and the elite mentoring world is I'm actually taking the word strategic planning and I'm breaking them apart and I'm putting in two more words, the word thinking and the word resource in the middle. So really what I'm saying is I want, I want our builders to first of all go away and do some strategic thinking and then do some resource planning. So if you see the strategic planning as the brackets, phase one is you need to get away from the day to day and get above it, get out of the weeds and let your mind move into the where am I wanting to take this? And then from that, once you've got that picture clear, once you know that's where we want to go, then you can look at what resources do I have to get me there? How am I going to apply those to get me to the place that I want to end up at? So it's almost this we. The way we teach is a seamless process. And obviously the forms that we use and the things we use to capture the process, make it kind of a start at one end, go to the other end. But really there's two pieces to it. And the beauty of that is I would think most building business owners are always thinking about where they want the business to go, but it's too, it's to do that in a focused and controlled manner regularly so that you can then plan to use your resources efficiently.

Yeah, and there's other components, I think, in this overall strategic plan. You're going to have your three to five year plan, obviously that sits underneath your big hairy, audacious goal, but you've got a three to five year plan where you've got your numbers, you've got things like your staff, the org chart, et cetera. So you've got a very clear idea what the business needs or can look like in three to five years and then you've got exactly the same, but one year and then you've got your 90 day. And when you do that you get a very, very clear picture of what needs to be put in place. Yeah. Within the next 90 days, within the next year, within the next three years to actually support that plan. So that means you're always thinking ahead, you're always looking at those, those positions and the systems that you're going to have to be putting in place as well. And of course on a, a quarterly strategic basis, this is where your rocks, which are your, your new strategies, you know, your new tactics that you're going to have to be developing. This is where they come from.

Yeah.

Who should be in the room when you're doing this strategic thinking, Andy?

Well, I mean the reality for a lot of our builders is the first time they do it, it's going to be them and themselves and their shadow and that, that should tell them that it's, it's important that they change that as quickly as they can because it's going to highlight the fact that if they are wearing all the hats and doing all the thinking and all the tactical execution, they are severely limited in how much they can do. There's only X amount of energy and hours that they have access to. So it's important that if, if, let's say this is the first time they're doing it, they, they don't have any team members that they can make part of the process. That's the first red flag. Who am I going to be employing to help me as quickly as possible so that I'm not doing this alone. But for those people that are a bit further down the road and have a team around them, it should really be them and their senior leadership team. So the guys that are customer facing, interacting with customers on a daily basis, who can, I love the terminology that's used in a lot of the really good books on the subject. Who can share the brutal truth robustly that there can be debate around. Let's not. And again, I think everybody that knows me knows don't do this exercise if it's just going to be a, for the sake of it exercise. This needs to be authentic, this needs to be real. Russ spoke about the SWOT analysis. Don't sugarcoat your weaknesses. You've got to be able to really look at yourself honestly and, and realize these are the things that are holding me back. And obviously that's where you want to put your effort. So who should be in the room is obviously the leader, the owner of the business, and then any other senior team leaders that will bring additional information into the thinking process. And it's got to be an environment where there's no rank, it's freedom. Anybody can say anything they want. They're not going to be in any way sanctioned because of what they say. So that you get all of that onto the table and then once that exercise has been finished, then together. And if you think about it, it's going to be those same people that will be responsible for the execution of tactics. So it makes sense to include them in coming up with those tactics so that you get engagement right from the get go.

I think it can be good as well to have someone quite objective challenging you on your business plan. When you mentioned about SWOT analysis and don't sug good coat your weaknesses, it always reminds me of a SWOT analysis that me and sky were doing and under the. The watchful eye of the coach and we were struggling with the weaknesses. I think maybe we came up with one, maybe we didn't come up with any. But yeah, we, we were active and we just couldn't think. And we said, yeah, we're struggling here on the weaknesses. We can't really see any weaknesses in the business. And he just said, well, well, now you're being arrogant and walked off. And it challenged us to. To think, okay, yeah, what are. There must be some is in there. So, yeah, like Andy says, really good. Not to. Not to sugarcoat, not to. Not to kid yourself and to have someone that's going to really challenge you on everything that you put into your business plan.

And I think that's a. Russ has raised a great point there in terms of would I necessarily have our coaching team in the first phase of the process? Probably not. I'd want the client and their team to. To kind of wrestle through, to get to a place that there was at least agreement on this is the situation and then have the coach come in and test it, prod and see where the gaps are and see if we can, you know, kind of bring that objectivity to it and then help them to prioritize out of. You see, this is. Whenever Russ and I talk about things like a bhag, like a mission statement, like core values, there is the sense in the building industry that those are soft things that don't bring with them a lot of value. But the reality of what we're talking about is the sole purpose or the sole outcome of your Strategic plan should get you to, should be to get you to your intended goal. If you don't have that ultimate goal, then what are you planning to achieve? You don't know. You simply in this hamster wheel of let's work more. Why? Why are we working more? To make more money. Okay. Why? What are you going to do with that money? I'm going to spend it. On what? And it, it literally becomes that exercise. And I think a coach can only really do that if there's been some input put into the preparation of it. And then obviously they can help to focus it and sharpen it. But certainly if clients have a business coach, they must be part of this process. If they don't have one, I can make a few suggestions as to where they could find one.

But, and let's not forget the accountability component afterwards as well, because creating the business plan is only the first step. It's really important that once you've created this plan that you are constantly revisiting it and there's a level of accountability. So in terms of your, like Angie says, when you bring your leadership team into creating the plan in the first place, you're going to create rocks that individuals are going to be working, working on. That needs to be top of mind. So each week in your leadership meeting, there should be an update, a progress report on how each individual is progressing those, those rocks so that they don't slip to the bottom of the pile when. And we get to the end of, of the quarter and find out that they've maybe only been 70 or 80% achieved, you know, we want them ticked off completely. Which kind of reminds me of something we used to do with APB pre Covid when we could, you know, when we were, well, like we are now meeting up in person. We had boardrooms and we had builders fly into a boardroom meeting every quarter and we put the rocks up on the, on the whiteboard and they had to put a nice big green tick if they achieved them or a big red cross if they didn't. And no one, after committing to what's going to be achieved in their, their business in the next 90 days, no one really wants to stand up there and, and explain why they didn't do something. So there was always a bit of ferocious activity going on in the week before and you could tell it just wasn't always possible to, you know, to get where what were quite some large rocks done, you know, in a week or so. But you could tell, well, that's, that's when they actually got kicked off because they're suddenly thinking, crikey, I've got, yeah, I've got to stand there and explain why I'm putting the red cross. But if I can do as much as I possibly can. But at the end of the day, it's either done or it not. So yeah, we were quite brutal. It was still a red cross.

Yeah.

Ross, can you explain for anyone out there that doesn't understand the concept of rocks, what the, what the thinking behind that is?

Yeah, well, as you go through this process and if we say focus on the, the quarterly strategic plan which is a component of the yearly plan, you know, it's, it's the pathway to get you to the yearly plan, which is, you know, a component which puts you on the path to your three to five year plan which, you know, know gets you to your, your BHAG. But if we focus on that 90 day plan, you've got your numbers first of all, which are vitally important because, you know, almost everything. Yeah. If you're looking at growing a building company, it will all come down to the numbers in the end. Not just revenue or gross profit, but, you know, in terms of marketing qualified leads that you're generating, for instance. So you've got your numbers and you can see where you've been and you can pretty much see where the gaps are or the biggest gaps. And if you're looking to ramp up your marketing, for instance, it's not a case of, well, yeah, we generated 50 marketing qualified leads last quarter. We want to generate 150 this quarter. That's not going to magically happen just because you've written it down. Despite what some of these books out there might have you believe it actually takes action as well, unfortunately. So you got to be thinking about what actions are we going to take that are going to create this transformation and ramp up our lead generation. And this is where a strategy will come into play. So now you can support that increase in numbers with a strategy and those strategies are effectively the rocks because someone is going to have to create this strategy and, and drive it. So yeah, when we talk about rocks, that's exactly what we're referring to. These, they're big chunks of work which will be broken down then into tasks, typically one hour blocks or 50 minute blocks, whatever you prefer to work in. But a rock is quite a large amount of work that will take multiple sessions of working on the business to achieve, if that makes sense.

And I think just to, in case anybody hasn't heard where it comes from. This comes out of a thing called the pickle jar concept. And the pickle jar concept I think came out of a Stephen Covey book originally. But it basically says that if we look at the amount of time that any business person has to allocate to their business and we break the things they have to do down into rocks, pebbles and sand, with the sand being the day to day kind of grindy things that don't really move the needle. The rocks being the really important things that will move the needle and the pebbles being the support things around the rocks. What happens with most people unfortunately is they first put in the sand, they put in the day to day answering their emails and those kind of things. Then they put in the pebbles and then when they come to try and put the rocks in, there's no more room in the pickle jar. The pickle jar is full. And what that means is the things that are most important are not getting done. So we, we put this focus on rocks on the basis of we want you to fill your pickle jar up in reverse order, put the rocks in first so that you know they're in, you know the most important things are going to get attention and get done. In order to do them, you're going to have to put the pebbles in. As Russ said, you got to break those rocks down into smaller components that can be done on a weekly basis to make them them happen and then dump your sand in. And the interesting part is the sand will always find a way to trickle down between the rocks and the pebbles and eventually what you find is, wow, most of what I needed to get in here is now in and what's not in is unimportant. It can wait. But the focus on the most important things has been kept and they've been, as Russ said, allocated to particular people to get done. And that gets measured the then on an ongoing basis.

It's great when you see that actually being demonstrated, isn't it? Someone they got the, the big glass jar and, and they're doing it, you know, by pouring the sand in first and then they do it in reverse and it really helps you get it. And you'll probably know the answer to this, Andy. I've seen one where they've actually put a fourth component in on the top. Water. Does that, what does that come relate to? Does that relate to something that's not relevant at all?

Well, that's the rest of your life. Yeah, of course I go the other way. I'm saying put the water in first, then if you want to add water, fill up with water, then put the rocks in, then the pebbles, then the sand. Strangely enough, it'll still work. If you do it that way, some.

Of the water might come out though.

Well, maybe, but then be careful. Make sure that you put the right amount of water in or get a.

Bigger tank or get.

There you go, get a bigger pickle jar.

Well, that's, that's the team that comes back to the team and Andy.

Absolutely.

Yeah, yeah, no, great, great demonstration, Andy. It's a shame we couldn't actually do it in person, but I think you did it justice.

I was expecting him to say, well, here's one I prepared earlier.

Go and get a pickle jar, we'll wait for you.

Yeah, there we go.

Andy, you mentioned, I mean, there's been a bit of discussion about the bhag, the big hairy audacious goal. And the way you were explaining it before was almost like a personal goal in a way for the building company owner. How, how much of that is a personal journey for them compared to what it is for the business?

Well, I think you're going to probably end up with, with two of them, as in the, the owner is going to need to take the business to a particular point in order to achieve what he or she wants out of the business. So, you know, at the end of the day, I think all of us are working towards a better future life for our families and the people that we care about, which is going to translate into a variety of different things depending on your particular situation. But you know, I'm, I'm probably the, the client we have, who, I think I can say this without correction on, on an, on an average basis, puts through the biggest amount of revenue in a year. So our biggest revenue producing client said to me at the end of the first day of a strategic retreat a couple of years ago, nobody's ever asked me why I'm doing this. I've never stopped to think about, about why I'm doing this. I just, I was a carpenter and then I started building and then my business started growing and never taken the time to sit down and think about it. And it's, it's really important being a builder. It's not an industry for a sissy. You've, you've got to have some fortitude to make it in this industry and that means you've got to have a reason that is more than just money. There has to be something that you are striving for that makes it all worthwhile. So my personal Belief is that there needs to be a personal goal first. The long term picture that the builder has of what he wants for his life and his family, that's going to allow him to determine what sort of vehicle, in this case his business, he's going to have to have to get him there. And then obviously what that means is within the BHAG concept, we generally going to build the BHAG for the business. So the BHAG would be to improve the construction industry in Australia to the point that no builder ever goes bankrupt. That's pretty B, that's pretty h, pretty A, and it's definitely a G. All right. But in order for that to happen now, there's a whole bunch of sub components that are going to have to come into play. And really what we're doing is by the bhag, the way it's defined in good to great is that it's probably a 15 to 30 year goal to start with. So it's not short term. It's probably, it's definitely going to change the way you do business. It's potentially going to change the industry that you're in. And you should get slightly dry mouthed with fear when you read it. Okay. In other words, it's, it's got to be, it's, it's out there, it's not it. Now what we find often happens with the builders that we work with is when they first do this planning and we say to them, let's get a BHAG in place. It's pretty short term, it's not very big, it's hairless and it's definitely not audacious, but it's better than nothing. So it's start with what you can conceive. Keeping in mind, a lot of builders come to us just wanting to survive. You know that that doesn't give you a long term view of your life. But what we find is as they work with us, year one, it's survival. Year two, they can start to think three to five years down the line because they know now I can survive. And then once they've got through that, well, not only can I survive, I could actually prosper. Then they can start to think about, well, if I was prosperous, what would these two things look like? And then the cascade, if you like to come down another level, go to something else. Russ said that BHAG will determine your mission statement because your mission statement is effectively the synthesis of how you want the business to operate to get you to that end goal. And if you bring those three Things into play with your core values that drive everybody's decision making process. That's what turns a good company into a great company.

Yeah, it's interesting. This is something we, we measure with almost every new lead coming into the APB database is the goal. Yeah. What is the vision for the company? And they are generally surprisingly low. And like Andy says, I mean it's okay, it's not ideal, but it's okay because at least it's something. But and I think it really, it clearly shows, you know, just how battle scarred maybe builders are in this industry that they do have reasonably low goals. They, they just want to get, you know, profitable to have a bit left over, you know, to, to be doing, you know, just slightly better than, than maybe they would have hoped to have been doing when they started the business out. But those goals, I mean you would have probably seen it firsthand, Andy. Those goals, those expectations, once they, once they, they believe in what can be achieved or they've seen what can be achieved, those ambitions skyrocket very, very quickly.

Yeah. And I mean there's nothing more satisfying and, and you know, encouraging from a coaching perspective to be able to look back at what somebody's bhag was three years ago and then see what it is this time around and just look at how that has grown in terms of potential, you know. So yeah, it's a, it's a, it's why we say that this, the strategic thinking process needs to be outside of the day to day grind. You know, uninterrupted thought really. Just if you like dreaming to some extent, just, just imagine if that, that's kind of how that conversation needs to start. Yeah.

And it's something that has got to be on the tip of your tongue every time you're asked that question. You've got to know exactly what it is you're, you're driving towards. And again, too many people, they can't always articulate it or they, they have to think about, you know, something that maybe they thought they wanted, you know, a few years back. But yeah, you got to know exactly what you want and you've got to know exactly what it's going to take financially to, to get you in that position and, and know that number. I did a, like a boardroom environment kind of coaching, stroke consultant, advisory board. It was kind of set up as, and it was all different businesses. It wasn't construction, although there, there was a large commercial builder in that group. Group. But they went around the table kind of off the cuff saying how much do you need or how much do you want to be able to retire? And I was astounded at the low figures that were coming out around this table. All business owners running reasonably successful businesses, but the ambition, the financial target was so low. But not only was it low, it was also unrealistic because as the conversation then progressed into what do you want to be able to do that? Or how much do you want to be able to spend? You know, how much do you need? That didn't correlate with the net worth target that come out. And that showed me really that a lot of people are maybe not, not aware of just how much wealth you need to accumulate to give yourself a sustainable ongoing income. Yeah, I'm not a big fan of some of these like, like policies that will pay out X over a period of time because that just destroys all your wealth. I much prefer to see a sustainable strategy where, you know, you're investing in property and living off the rent, for instance, or you're investing in equities and living off the equities because then that wealth can be passed down to the next generation. But, yeah, maybe that's not something the governments around the world particularly want to see. They'd much rather we spent everything. But yeah, to me, there's a very big lack of financial education amongst business owners in understanding exactly how much wealth they need to accumulate to give them themselves this sustainable income going forward. So it's really important, I think, that you spend a bit of time understanding that, learning about that and getting clear on what your number is, because it's probably a lot bigger than you realized, which means you need to not start working on it a bit earlier, but you might need to stretch those goals a bit more as well.

Yeah, it's a good point. It's kind of like starting with the end in mind, isn't it, Russ? Like a lot of people probably just pluck a number out of the air rather than doing it strategically, like that.

100% a ratio I always like to look at is the rule of 25, which is the 4% rule, which.

The.

Reality is it might be slightly under that, to be honest. But if you look at your income, how much you could comfortably retire on, which is probably double what you're spending now, Times that by 25, and obviously Factor in an allowance for tax as well. So, you know, do that exercise and then look at what that number is. That's pretty much what you need to be heading for. I think the, the actual number to be sustainable is about 3.7, 9%. But for simplicity, yeah, we're talking about 4%. But it will give you an indication of kind of what you need to get at to have that sustainable income going forward.

And there you see why we love him so much. 3.7. And he could tell you 961285 if.

You, if you pushed him as a rough guess.

Yeah. So back to strategic planning for a moment. What's the vehicle Cool that they are document builders are documenting this plan in. Is it on a napkin? Is it in a spreadsheet? What, where are they putting this so that they can refer back to it quarterly?

I mean our clients, we have a planning sheet. We've deliberately distilled it down to one page so that it's not overwhelming from that perspective. But on that one page, in fact, both of the elements that I spoke about earlier come together. There is a strategic thinking portion of that page that prompts them. What is your bhag? What is your capacity? What is your SWOT analysis? What are your core values? What's your mission statement? That even if they don't have an answer to all of those questions, if every time they do it, they can answer one more than they could the time before they're making progress. So there's that side of it. And then as we've discussed from different perspectives today, no matter what you plan, there's a price ticket attached to that plan. And the balance of that one page planning document helps them to calculate whether or not it's financially viable and feasible. And this is a little bit of a, you're going to, you're going to do some thinking and come up with some numbers and then they don't quite gel. So you go back and think about it a bit more and tweak it and, and you, it's, it's kind of top line, bottom line, top line, bottom line until you get it to a place to go going, okay, that works. I can now go with that process. And that's partly why we work on a three year, one year, 90 day basis because you might not be able to get as far as you want to in one year, but you certainly will be able to get further than you expected in three years. So it just gives you that little bit of, you know, I guess, wiggle room, place to go. But that's how we do it at the apb. If you're asking in a more general basis, where should this be done? Listen, if it's a good napkin, it's better that it's on a good napkin than it's not done at all. So you know, literally writing it down. There's such power in committing something to print and then making sure that you, you, it's not something you print and put in the bottom drawer and forget about. Really what you want is, you want what you've come up with to be the matrix through which all of your decisions are made. Does this situation achieve the rock that I've got set up for the next 90 days or does this decision get me closer to where I want to be by the end of the year? If the answer is yes, we do it. If the answer is no, we don't do it. We don't even waste our time. We just keep going on the path that we've planned. And you can't do that unless it's written down somewhere. You just literally will never remember it.

I think a napkin is a great marketing hook, isn't it? You know, wrote this business plan out for this multi billion dollar business and it was all on a napkin. Now we've got it framed and it kind of gives you the illusion that it's that simple. And it's like, well, maybe the initial idea was written on a napkin but the reality was they evolved into a structured business plan that yeah, gave them the, the plan forward. But yeah, like Andy says, it's you know, know you just got to start. Yeah. If you haven't got anything at all. Yeah. Write down what's burning in your mind now. Get that down on a, on a napkin or the back of an envelope or whatever. But be prepared to progress from there with a, a much more structured process.

Yeah. And I mean our, in our situation at the apb obviously we have three, three levels if you like, of, of solution from our basic level. So we run specific training with a downloadable one page strategic plan that literally somebody can watch the video and we walk them through stage by stage, step by step. At the end of a 90 minute period, as long as they've done the thinking beforehand, they will have a document on their computer that they can print or they can just simply keep, you know, for reference purposes. But it's done their next 90 day one year and, and three year horizons will be laid out for them.

And of course the, the next thing that you need to do once you've established this plan and established who is going to be working on the rocks is to make sure that everyone has time blocked out in their calendar to work on the business. And this takes priority over absolutely everything else. There is nothing more important than Working on your business. And we've only got to look back at, at, yeah, we look at our most successful builders that have been working with us over the past five or six years and these guys were all flat out busy, they had no time. So what did they do? They, they set their alarms for three o' clock in the morning so that they could get up and work on their business, you know, up past three, four o' clock in order to put into place the, the changes that would then enable them to, to do what they're doing now, which is working 30 hours a week in their business with a, with a business that grows. So yeah, it's probably a good time to mention, you know, 168 hours a week. We've all got the, the same amount of time. It's how we choose to spend those hours that are important. And I know there's a lot of talk about work life balance. You know, we have to have this, you know, realistic balance. But the reality is you've got to make sacrifices in order to, to get to the next level and, and if that means sacrificing a bit of sleep, Andy might not agree with that. I know he's, you got to have the rest periods but certainly, yeah, recreation, entertainment, etc, we've got to be prepared to make these sacrifices, you know, to put us on the path to a better future that we, that we all want and nothing wrong with that. Yeah, it may not be work life balance in some people's eyes, but as long as we got a plan plan and we're not, yeah, we're not going to end up doing that permanently which happens to a lot of guys in this industry. It's not necessarily that they're working for a better future. They're working for the, the same month next month as they, as they did this month and they're working long hours flat out to do it. So yeah, working on your business, it's, it's very, very different.

Yeah. And I mean even if that plan is if your rock is to be able to get half an hour's extra sales sleep by next quarter, you know what I mean? It's, it's, you can, you can take it as simply as that. This quarter I'm getting up at 3:30 because I need to do the work to hire somebody to help me and then I've still got to build all day and do quotes at night. But my goal is by next quarter I only need to get up at 4 o' clock because I've hired a site foreman. For example, and get that rock done this quarter so that you get half an hour extra sleep next quarter. Quarter. What's the next half an hour? Well, now I need to bring somebody in to help me on the marketing side so that I'm getting better leads. Okay, that's the next. And literally that might sound very simple and basic but it's, it's sequencing what needs to be done in the correct order so that you get to the place that you want to get to. And Russ pointed it out, we don't want people to be getting up at 3:30 in the morning for the rest of their lives. But if they need to do that for six months to get over the hyper hump, to get the people on board to help them so that they can work towards a 30 hour week, absolutely do it for those six months. Get it done. What do they say? If you're going through a bad patch, keep going, don't stop. So literally just work through that, get to the other side and then obviously things will start to improve. But let's not get. See here we go back to your first question. Why should people plan that improvement is never going to happen by accident. Okay. If you think about just the simple law of the universe. If you leave something thing, it deteriorates. Think about your lawn. If you just leave it within a week, it needs to be maintained. There's, there's nothing that naturally improves you. You've got to focus on it, you've got to work on it and, and then it'll, it'll get better.

Yeah. And you may not have to get up at 3:30. You know, you, yeah, there, there's plenty of instances as, as well where it just means you got to change what you're doing. We use a process of delete, automate, delegate. Just going through that process could free up enough time for you to do this without having to set your alarm clock for the early hours of the morning. But you know, if, if, if you got to do it, then yeah, it has to be done. Otherwise nothing changes.

And certainly not having that sand that you couldn't get in the pickle jar. That's going to help, help because you might be getting up at 3:30 to do that, which isn't moving the needle at all. Don't sleep much better for you. Watch Tiger Kings. Even better than getting up and doing something that's really going to waste your time.

Well, Russ, Andy, we could probably talk all day about planning. You've got so much great advice, but I think we need to wrap things up. Andy, you mentioned an action plan for APB members. Is that the quarterly strategic planning action plan?

Correct? Yeah.

Perfect. We'll include a link to that in the show notes.

It's.

Where would we suggest non members go to, you know, take that first step to plan for 2024?

Just become a member. Simple. It's very good. And I mean, on that, I know I always. Well, I sort of joke around that side of things. One of the most frustrating things for us as coaches is people that leave it too long and come to us too late. And I, I really just want to make it very clear, particularly around this stuff, there's no requirement on anybody to come into business coaching, coaching or our elite mentoring program. We run business planning workshops for all members. They're available to every member. And every business planning workshop includes a strategic planning exercise as part of the deal. So that that reason alone, I think would be a really good idea for, for people to get on board. And then we recommend that they do at least one a year so that they just keep that focus, they keep that. That movement in the right direction.

Perfect. Well, Ross, is there any final thoughts you wanted to leave with the listeners out there about planning?

Yeah, look, we're not advising builders to do anything that we don't do ourselves here. Quarterly strategic planning is an incredibly important component of what we do at APB to ensure that we are growing the association of Professional Builders business year on year.

Perfect. Well, let's leave it there. A ton to soak in for everyone listening today and lots to go and start doing for 2024. But Russ, Andy, thanks so much for coming on Professional Builder Secrets today.

Thank you so much.

Will also a big thank you to all our listeners out there, wherever you are in the world. If you like the show, please subscribe to Professional Builders Secrets on your platform of choice. And if you're feeling generous, leave us a review. But until next time, have a great day.