Step 4 - Power Up Your Progress with the Action Plan!

Hello everyone. Today we're going to talk about step 4 of the 100-day plan to take command of your business. Just to recap, we have covered step 1, get a goal, step 2, develop a strategy, and step 3, build the structure. This is step 4, right, where we're going to turn it to action plans. In the first 100 days, the 4th and final step is drafting and implementing an action plan which defines the imperatives and tactics necessary to execute the strategy, step 2, within the 80/20 segmented structure outlined in step Like the 3 steps that preceded it, step 4 aims for progress and not perfection towards delivering the goal, which was step 1. Every day of the first 100 days is dedicated to making sound, informed decisions and acting based on them. However imperfect, actions inject the company with their strategy into the real world where not only can it begin the needed turnaround, but it can also be tested against reality to continuously improve. This step is the first time ownership transfers from the team that has been focusing on creating it to the wider team that will have to do it. Now, everyone should have been involved in Creating it, but the team that's catching it is going to move to ownership. This step is critically important. Ownership is what makes the difference between success and failure. When I look back over my career, I'm reminded of a time when we got to this point, took everyone offsite to go and create the action plan. It was a 3-day event at a local community college and took hundreds of people's worth of their time. It was a complete failure. We were focused on the wrong things. We were focused on filling out the forms perfectly. The color just had to be absolute perfect of the Excel charts, and all the actions were hyperlinked to the Bola chart. It was truly A work of art, except no one actually believed in the goals. They just wanted to get the job at hand completed and moved on. They could get back to their day job. You must avoid this at all costs. You're the leader. Your job is to set that goal, define the mission. You don't do this alone, but you do make the final decision whether you realize it or not. Team's looking at you and is expecting you to tell them where we're going, where we're going to go and capture that hill. Your team must figure out how to achieve that mission. They must figure out the plan. You'll be right there with them, but now they have the lead. They're the ones sitting in the driver's seat. Thinking, this is the mountain that we've got to go take. Here's our roadmap to get us there. And this time, you've been moved from the leader of it to more of a participant, more of an informed observer and a guide to keep it on pace to make sure the actions are sufficient to achieve the goal. You don't abdicate being the leader, but you do want them to step forward and take that ownership. Your goal or your job at this is to make sure that what they're achieving or what they're looking for is sufficient to achieve the overall goal that you've lined out for So what should this plan look like? Let's get down to the brass tacks of it here. You're going to start with what I call a TTI, a target to improve. And it's really about how far and how fast you're going to go. It's a from-to. I will go from X to Y by this date. So I will go from $100 to $200 by December 31st of this year. If this plan is 10,000 lines long, you've probably overshot it and it's too much. No one's going to be able to figure that out. Either that or you've got every minute planned for If it's 10 lines, not enough effort's gone into it. It's a surface level. It probably just has something on almost every month and then pow, magic happens. Think of this as a SMART goal, something that's specific and measurable, actionable. There's a way to track it. There should be a name associated with this, the person who's actually going to go do this, right? There should be a date and the expected outcome. So if you say you're going to go from $100 to $200 and you're going to get there by the end of this year, December 31st of this year, how will you measure that? There should be steps each and every month to make sure that that's going to happen. You want to make sure it's aligned with the overall objective that you set when your team got together. So if you'll remember back to our other videos, we talked about what's your 3 or 5-year goal. How big is that? This is one of the steps that's going to get there. And because of the amount of effort and everything that it takes to go in there, you can only have a few of these actions, right? You can only have a few of these steps in there. You may remember we talked before, you need 1, 2, or 3, for sure no more than 3 goals that you're going to align your company around. Otherwise, it's just too much. The team can't handle it. So you assign it to someone or the team Assign it to someone to go achieve this specific TTI, target to improve. You put a date with it and you put a way of measuring it. Now, a couple things you want to make sure. So first of all, if your team's like any of mine, we like certain people because they always seem to get it done. But if you're not careful, those people are going to be across everyone's plan. Well, they're only human. There's only one of them. You need to make sure they actually have the time and the bandwidth to go do it. That's one of your jobs. One of your team's jobs is as you are writing these things down, make sure the resource is actually available. You're going to take those actions and they're going to translate into something measurable. Typically, it's around some quantitative measurement such as earnings or sales or so many sales calls or such a percentage of a new product is developed and you're going to get so much developed and so much is going to come out by a certain period of time. We put those into what I call a bowler. So if you remember going bowling as a kid, there was a way they tracked the score sheet. Well, this looks no different than that. It's just a simple Excel chart that lays it out by month and tells you what did we do last year? What are we going to do this year? What do we hope hope to do, right? What's our goal? And then the actual outcome of it. So generally it's 3 lines, sometimes 4, and it goes across 12 months. There's a jump-off point, or JOP, right? That's where we finished up last year at. And then there's an end expect. Now if you've never done this before, a real simple thing that people do is they typically take their goal and divide it by 12 and peanut butter it across every month. Well, it's a rare business that every month they expect the same outcome. So you should expect these numbers each month for your goal to be higher and lower. Maybe you get most of your sales in Q1, or perhaps they're in Well, whatever they are, make sure your plan is aligned with it. Also, don't forget to take holidays in and weekends and vacation days and these types of things. It's so funny, I'll get down to December and they'll say, well, we're missing this month. And I'll ask why. And they'll say, well, we, we take the week off of Christmas. And I'll ask, don't we take the week off of Christmas every year, or at least a Christmas holiday? And of course the answer is yes. But yet we gave them just as they expected that there was the same amount of workdays in the month of December as there is in the month of May. And that's just not true for a lot of companies. Other companies it is true. And your team is putting it out so that the expected outcome actually aligns with what you're going to be doing. Now you're going to be reviewing these bowlers each and every month. I call that an MBR, or a monthly business review. And the way that that works is your team gets together— a lot of times today this is on a Teams meeting or a Zoom meeting, some type of video meeting. Lots of folks are remote. They come in, you go through what happened last month, so what happened 30 days ago, what's happening right now, what do we expect to happen in the next 30 days. Then what were the learnings, the aha moments, and the opportunities and things like that? And what didn't work out so well? Some little simple sheet like that that you can quickly go over. You'll review the finances, then you'll get down to the Target to Improve, the TTI. So you'll get down to that and you'll look at that number. Now, if it's green, people are going to love talking about it. That means you hit the number for the month, whatever you're measuring. If it's red, no surprise, people want to go over it pretty quickly. But the reality is you need to focus on the red. If someone hit their number, it's great. Tell them congratulations, move on. But the red you want to dive into. You want to make sure that you understand why that happened. And we call that getting down to root cause. And we'll talk about in another video what root cause is, but suffice for this is what really happened, right? What caused us to miss? And most importantly, what are our countermeasures? What are we going to do to go out and get ourselves back on track? So root cause and countermeasures. We'll talk in a future video about what that is. It's part of the lean process, one of the tools that we use in Profitable Growth Operating System, or PGOS, right? So more to come on that. But like I say, folks love to talk about the green. Make sure they're explaining the red, right? Make sure that they understand what happened there and they're doing it. Another thing, if you really set your goals and you're pushing people, count on having reds. If everything is green, you're sandbagging. You're not putting the effort in that needs to be. Team's not stretching. Make sure that you're having reds by having stretchable goals. Now don't make these goals so stretchy no one believes in them. But you want to make sure that that goal is something that, one, gets you to your overall goal for the company, and two, is pushing the team to have to come together. If it doesn't come together, if you are having these reds, we put together what we call a PIP, a Performance Improvement Plan, P-I-P, right? And along with that monthly business review, which generally takes about an hour per segment or an hour per business, sometimes people want to go longer. People get exhausted and can't really deal with going too much longer than about an hour or 90 minutes. If you do have a PIP, in other words, an area that's not working as well as you you want. You probably want to carve that out and have its own meeting so you can deep dive into it. You really want to make sure that you keep these meetings tight and focused, otherwise it can go all day long and people just get wore out and it doesn't work. Believe me, I've tried both ways. Keep your folks focused and keep them focused on what's really important. The key here is progress, not perfection. The idea is, is that we've got to start. We got to defeat the white page, defeat the blank page. We'll start with the numbers that we have. We'll lay these numbers out. We'll put them into a bowler. Those numbers will be a target to improve. That target is based on we're going. And that boulder will be, if we achieve these, we know we're on track, we're on the plan to get ourselves to it. And you stack these up and you do them each and every month and you talk about them each and every month. You know, should you do them more often or less often? What I find is if you do them more often, not enough has happened to make it worthwhile. If you go, say, every 60 days or every 90 days, you get too disconnected from— on every 90 days, you want to have what I call a QBR, or quarterly business review. And what that is, is really going back and reaffirming the goal. So we lay these things out months in advance before we do it. Things change. The quarterly business review allows us to take 3 months, look at it. Was it working? Is it working? If it's not, why? Has something changed so dramatically we need to lay out our year? Don't get so hung into your numbers that you can't adjust it to fit the reality of the situation. So progress, not perfection. The key here is to take and put something down and get started. So I think you'll enjoy that. It's great getting everyone together. It makes them feel like they're part of a team. So thank you everyone. Hope you have a great day.