28 Jan 2026 · 5 min
Bill Gallagher walks through strategic planning: set a 10+ year goal, create a 3-5 year picture, pick 3-5 annual initiatives, and focus on 3-5 quarterly priorities. Sometimes you need to shut down business lines that distract from your long-term vision, like he did with a problematic catalog.
Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done. I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent, and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have talent. Talk to Doxatalant and you won't be disappointed. Go to Doxatalent.com Bill G Again, that's Doxatalent.com BillG One more time. Docsatalant.com Bill G Check it out today. Hey there. I want to talk to you about the place to look from to do great planning again and again. See, very often businesses are talking about the here and now and they're talking about the problems and the issues. I started working with a specialty contractor business some years ago. I've worked with a few in kind of these kinds of categories over the years and they had a really well developed cadence of weekly meetings that where they talk through issues and they had a whole protocol for issue discussion and they were very proud of this issue discussion because they felt like they were solving issues all the time, except they had issue after issue after issue and they were working on too many things and they weren't making a lot of progress on their big strategic goals. See, what they weren't doing was doing very thoughtful work about where they were going many years out. This is the key thing that Stephen Covey taught us. He said planning with the end in mind. This is the idea here of looking far out to the future, not at where you are now or the recent past. If all you do is tackle issues that then working in your business feels like a drag because it always feels like there's problems. Issues are problems and you never necessarily see the progress that you're making on things. We say start with the end in mind. We start very far out with a big hairy, audacious goal, 10 years or more out in the future and then a rich picture about three years out in the future. Three to five years could be some Pick a specific time and create a richer picture of where you want the business to look like at that point. Then work back. What are the five initiatives? Three to five initiatives for the year and then if that's what you want to accomplish in the year, you ought to be able to pick three to five things to focus on this quarter and a number one of all of those three to five. That's what we mean by doing planning with the end in mind, not just thinking about the issues at hand and solving those. Because sometimes you should just kick those issues to the curb. You should ignore those things, shut those business products or services down, and focus on what matters for you in the longer term. Very often we work on things that if we put our lens and our attention further out, we might actually just abdicate, resign, shut down those lines of business because they don't matter. Like me many years ago, working on iterations and speed around a major catalog that was creating more problems for us than we were solving. And when we really had to look out in the business, we realized it wasn't helping us as expensive and time consuming, we shut it down and the next year we did much better than we'd done before. Hope that's been helpful for you. Plan with the end in mind. See what you can do with that. My name is Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach and host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast. Our show comes to you every week, so like it. Subscribe, turn on your notifications so that you get them you don't miss an episode. And if you want to find that or find out about our coaching training programs, you'll go to scalingcoach.com and if you'd like to drop us an email, send A note to infocalingcoach.com My name's Bill Gallagher. We'll talk to you again next time. Keep Scaling Up Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software. Powered by Align, it's the official software for Scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app, you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our Scaling up client teams Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by Align. To try it now, go to aligntoday.com Bill G One more time aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.
