Bill Canady walks through an annual planning cycle that starts with a 100-day situation assessment. Leaders map customer-product combinations into four quadrants, then move resources from low performers (Quad 4) to high performers (Quad 1) to accelerate growth.
I thought we'd take time and talk a little bit about the thinking that is required. Each year of the business plan begins with a fresh situation assessment. In the first 100 days, this was an effort to understand the business in the present, of course, with the intention of discerning trends based on the current trajectory of the business. This assessment should be made and completed by the first month's business review each year. Leadership team must evaluate the current business trajectory With a 3 or 5-year goal in mind. Management teams should be segmenting data and beginning to work on moving as many Quad 4 customers and product combinations towards Quad 1 as soon as possible. At the 3rd quarter business review, the impact of the major simplification actions should be assessed and tweaked and adjustments made accordingly. The objective of these exercises is to sharpen the execution of 80/20 by determining on a granular level just how extensively resources can be reallocated from lower to higher performer quads.
