What's Your SIT-REP? Knowing Where You Are, Helps You Get Where You Are Going!

Hey, I'm Jim Johnson, the head coach here at Contractor Coach Pro. And me and my team over the last 10 years have coached hundreds of contractors on achieving some pretty amazing things. And one of the pinnacle things we use, one of the most important things, and the thing that actually changed my life and helped me build several multi million dollar businesses is creating a mission, an annual plan that you're going to follow and execute. Last week I talked about the importance of one. This week I want to talk about exactly kind of how to do one, how to get prepared, executing a well run mission, annual planning meeting. And so let's start off with the, the baseline. But if you're a boy Scout, you Definitely know this. The five Ps Proper preparation prevents poor performance or proper planning prevents poor performance. You can hear it a couple of different ways. You've probably heard about from all kinds of thought leaders if you pay attention to any podcasts or read books. And it's this idea of being prepared so that you can execute well at what it is that you're doing and in any situation. But I want to draw your attention to two of the words that were in there that are really key to me. Proper and prevents proper means that somebody has done this before and created a way to do it in an organized format. It's well thought out and it generates the information that you need so that you can execute an amazing mission. I learned this through a variety of different things and kind of took them together. But one of the ones that really had an impact was being with a bunch of other companies and hearing how they did it and watching the format that they followed, the company that was running it to execute a proper mission. And I want to share some of that with you today. So let's talk about the proper way to build an effective annual plan or mission. So very first thing we have to do is we have to establish our baseline. And so we have to understand where we are. Where are we at this point in time with our business? What happened in the last year? Did you achieve your overall goals or not? And so usually those are associated to a mission. After our mission control retreat and with our clients, we help them build these missions. But if you don't have one, you probably had some idea where you wanted to be, you had some stats maybe written down somewhere or maybe at least in your head and give an update. Did we accomplish what we set out to do or did we not? The next part is knowing your numbers. Like, let's talk about our numbers. Where do we stand financially? With revenue and profitability. And this conversation is with your key leaders. And you're just getting an understanding of where you stand right now. So it's just the reporting is maybe a best way to think about that is we're going to give a report on did we accomplish our mission? These are our numbers from last year. Financially, did we meet our standards? Did we achieve our KPIs, those key performance indicators, the actions that people do in order for us to achieve the standards and meet the revenue and profit that we're looking for? And how about our relationships both internally and externally? How do those look right now? And maybe what could we do to improve some of them? So that would be your employees, subcontractors, vendors, any other partners that you might have, your community as well as your customers. Your customers. Those are big relationships, and we need to understand where we're at with them right now. Are they super happy and ecstatic with what we do, or are we struggling a little bit? And then our quality of work is another area where we're going to spend some time and just give a status update where we're at with it. Is it good, Is it great, is it poor? Where are we at? And then our processes. This is a big one. We need to evaluate all of our processes. I think a lot of people think about their processes start to finish with a job, but we have so many others. So you got to evaluate that job process. But you also need to evaluate your recruiting, hiring, and onboarding process, your training process, your production process, your marketing, your sales process, and finally your collections process. So all of those are various processes in our business. We want to get an understanding of where we stand with them. Good, poor, great, amazing, needs, improvement, all of those type of things, and not have a discussion about it, but just a status of where it is and then what worked and what didn't when it comes to your business and achieving your overall vision. So we had a mission set out last year. What worked, what did? Well, can we leverage that and do more of it? What didn't work and can we tweak that? All of those are going to be really important. What this does, it gives us a broad overview of our company and understanding of where we are. So when we know where we are, we can go over here to where we want to be. So now that we've established a baseline, we know where we are, we know where we're headed. We want to talk about our culture, that culture, each strategy, all day long. If our culture is not right, we're Never going to be able to execute any of our strategies, our tactics, our planning, our missions, our vision. We got to get that culture right first. So we're going to have to review where we stand on that. Are we making progress towards our vision? Have we accomplished our annual mission? Where are we on our core values? These, these non negotiable behaviors, are those core values still? We are. Do we even have core values? Should we have core values? All of those are things that we need to consider for our business to establish a quality culture. Finally, you have a purpose, a reason why you're doing what you're doing that's bigger than making a bunch of money. A reason that gives me the interest and the want and the buy in and belief that we're doing something special if we don't have one, that's something we need to work on and create. But there's a reason we're doing what we're doing. Does that still hold true for us today? And so you want to get that culture reviewed. Those are your main components. Vision, mission, core values and purpose. Do those all hold true today? All right, so now we have done the first two phases of getting prepared to build our mission for the coming year. We've got our baseline established of what we did and how we did it last year. We've reviewed our culture to make sure that it still fits and still applies to who we are and our ultimate vision of who we're going to become. And now we have phase three. Phase three is this assessment aspect of what we do. It's where we take a look at two major areas of our business. We have our 12 pillars of our business and we have the trades that we perform in our business. So the 12 pillars, we have been coaching contractors for the last 10 years based on these 12 pillars, this framework of how our business runs, with six of those being foundational and then the other six of those being operational. So we're going to do an assessment on leadership culture, which we've already talked about. Process, which we've talked about a little bit. But we're going to actually do an assessment on those two things in a little bit more depth here. What's good about it, what needs some improvement? Next we have team performance and then finance and finally accountability. Those are the major six pillars of the foundation of your business. Now on the operational side, the six pillars, there are technology, marketing, sales, production, training, and then finally recruiting, hiring and onboarding. And so we're going to assess there what we have done well and what may need to be improved and opportunities for improvement. Now the second major thing that we're going to look at on the, hey, what's good and what needs to be improved are the trades that we're performing. So as a contractor, you may perform more than one trade. I know several companies that do roofing, siding, gutters, windows, a whole array of trades and we need to assess each one of those. One of the big things whenever we coach people is, hey, let's perfect one before we do a whole bunch. It makes us the best at one, a master of one, instead of a jack of all trades and others. But we need to assess where we are in those, what's good with them and what needs to be improved. If we can do that, we can do some pretty amazing things when building our mission because then we now have an understanding of some of the key parts of our business. Alright, so we've got the first three phases handled. We've set our baseline so we have an understanding of what we did last year and how we may have done there. Our culture review to make sure that our culture is where it needs to be and we believe in it. And we've assessed our business both from the 12 pillars of our business and the trades that we perform. And now we get to do the part that I really enjoy the most. It's phase four of getting prepared for your mission, which is identifying the critical issues that your business faces. And so as a format to kind of think about, given X, how do we do Y, Given this particular situation or thing I want to do or problem that we're facing, how do we do this? So for example, given the fact that there are less workers available and seems to be a lack of loyalty and people wanting to work hard out there, how do we find the best possible talent? That could be a really good, strong critical issue that you might need to face. It could look something along the lines of given that we want to do $10 million next year, how do we create enough lead opportunities and jobs to do so? So you're going to create these critical issues and put those together, bring them to the table, talk about them together, and they're going to start to give you some idea of the next big thing that we're going to do to prepare for building a mission. Alright, so we've got the first four phases of being prepared to build a mission put together. We have reviewed what happened last year and just really in a reporting type manner, this is exactly what happened. And reviewing that so we all understand exactly where we've been. Then we have our culture review this idea of making sure that we are all aligned and believe in the same things. And that belief is enough to push us to what we believe is worthwhile to chase. Then we have our assessment where we're going to assess our business. Then we're going to create the critical issues that are facing our business. Given the fact that I want to do some pretty awesome things and I want to solve some pretty big problems, that leads us to phase five of this, which is coming up with some of the possible solutions we've created these critical issues. We're aware of the assessment of where we stand in our business from our 12 pillars and our trades. We also understand where we are in our culture. We look through that lens all the time and we're very aware of our vision and mission, what we're headed, what we did last year and where we're headed towards. So with that information, we can start to bring up some possible solutions. This is done through collaboration. This whole thing is done through collaboration. It's a really good idea to go off site, spend a day and kind of go through these things. We are actually going to guide contractors through this prep process. Most of you haven't done it before, you haven't gotten to this level of depth. And sometimes the first time we need a little hand holding. And that's why we're doing this thing for free. We want to help you guys really accomplish some pretty amazing things. And this prep time, we're calling it pregame prep, we're going to do it virtually on December 1st for about two or three hours in the morning. We're going to give you the guidance of what to do, how to use your workbook, how to perform this particular meeting, and then you're going to have that meeting to get ready to come to the event and go off site for two days and actually build out the mission. So with all of the information from those first five phases of proper planning, preventing poor performance, we are able to establish our major objectives for the coming year. These major things that we've got to do, whether it's creating more leads, training more people, hiring better people, there's these big objectives that are going to have a big weight on your deciding what to do with your mission, what you're going to call that mission, what the goal of the mission is, these two to three just really big things are probably going to take about a year to get done. And then we're going to take all those, we're going to break them down into pieces so that we can actually get them accomplished. This is one of the most intense and important exercises I've ever done in my life. I cannot wait to share it with everybody else. And come on, it's free. It doesn't cost you anything other than getting here. And we'll take care of the rest. But we want you to have an amazing mission prepared for, for next year. If I get enough comments on this, maybe I'll shoot one on what actually happens at the event and how that mission gets put together, what it looks like in the end, and share that as well. We look forward to seeing you at Mission Control retreat here@contractorcoachpro.com and we'll see you on December 1st for that virtual pregame prep. Get ready, do what we just talked about here, but have the tools and assets to do it with and the guidance from our coaches to execute it. And then we're on December 7th and 8th, we're going to get intense for two days, finish out that mission. And what's really cool is all those critical issues that you come up with, you're going to get to bring those up in front of everybody else. They're going to get to help you with those critical issues so you can come up with some better possible solutions maybe, and maybe tweak those annual priorities or annual objectives before you get started on building that mission. We'll see you there.