Strategic Planning for your Business | Main Street Business Podcast |

Foreign. Welcome, everyone, to the Main Street Business Podcast with Mark Kohler and Matt Sorenson. It's 2021. Can you believe it? 2021. It just sounds weird.

Sounds like a movie.

Yeah. It's not 2020 though. That's the good news, folks.

There's our little. That's good call. Good call. Yep. Oh, what a year over.

Yeah, that one down on the record books.

Yeah.

We're starting off 2021 fresh and I see Mark has a fresh trim, fresh cut. I like you kept it longer, though. Just kind of tidied it up a little.

I did okay. Thank you.

You know, I'm going through that stage in life where you have to kind of look.

You're trying to keep your youth, you know, and it's a weird thing getting old. All you young bucks and young gals that listen to our show, I know, I was there, you think you're never going to get old and, well, it just happens. And

I'm at the feet, I'm at the fountain of youth, doing all I can.

So I've been growing out my hair a little bit, trying to look younger. And for those that are just.

You have it. It is good that you have it. So that's a good.

Well, for those just joining us, we try to ham this up a little bit. Yes, we are live also on YouTube with a recorded visual of us. For those of you that sometimes we pull out a whiteboard. So if you want to go over to YouTube and watch that, you can, but we're on itunes, stitcher, Spotify and YouTube. We've done over 500 podcasts, over a million listens, got a great five star review, and we hope that you find this to be an important part of your podcast library. We are just humble little tax lawyers trying to save you money, protect your wealth, grow your business and give you straight answers you can actually understand. We should use that slogan on our website.

Yeah, you just nailed it. You nailed it. And if you're on YouTube, you can see my nice little product placement here. My KKO Sawyers cup that I drink from regularly.

I've got my Rockstar Restore right here.

Lemonade, non carbonated, only 10 calories.

Yeah, one day they're going to pay. They're going to pay for this sponsorship.

They're going to pay big. I'm still trying to get a hold of someone there, but.

All right, well, today's topic is, you know, it's the beginning of 2021. It's a little cliche to talk about New Year's Resolutions. So we're going to talk about strategic planning.

Yes.

Which is way more hardcore than New Year's resolutions. But it's for any of you business owners, investors. I mean, crap, you could strategic plan in your personal life, but it's something Mark and I do regularly together. We do it in our businesses and we use it as a guide through the year on things we want to do. So we want to kind of outline how to build and create a strategic plan. Mark's got chapters in his book on it, some articles as well. So that's the, that's the main event for today.

Yep. That's the soup du jour. And we hope that that sounds exciting and not blase. We encourage you to stick with us. We start with a tax tip and legal tip, which we're going to do here in just the next few moments. Maybe a little current news update as well. We've got a lot of things going on in the legislative world. If America's coming to an end in a civil war, who knows? But I just want to go to the Avengers movie and watch Civil war. I don't need to turn on CNN and watch it. So. So we'll do a little news update, tax tip, legal tip. But seriously, carrying around your strategic plan throughout the year as a business owner is absolutely critical. And especially even more so if you are married, you're in a business with another family member, a parent or child, or you have a partner, business partner,

and they've got their family, you got your family. When you're not on the same page with the direction of your company for the year, let alone five years from now, 10 years from now, what's it look like? A lot of times partners have a vision that they don't share. It doesn't mean you can't still work together and be very successful. But you've got to know what each partner's motives are and their end game. So that's a big part of the strategic plan. So this isn't just list your goals, knock them out, put a post it on your mirror in your bathroom. You know, this is going to be good.

So, yeah, stay tuned. Love it.

All right, you want to do a little news? Do you want to do a tip,

I don't know agenda? I follow zero news right now. I don't even know what's going on in the world. Bring me up to speed. What's happening?

Okay, I've done a little news.

Kim and Kanye are breaking up.

The Bachelorette is on episode four. It's really heating Up. Oh, you meant the real news.

Sorry.

Yeah, we watched tmz. That's the real news. It looks like Georgia went Democratic with both senators. Now, I'm not making that official call here, but this morning it looks like it would be an uphill battle based on CNN and Fox political coverage of the race. So that means Camilla will be. Is that how you say Camilla? Or should I say Vice President Harris?

Kamala.

Kamala. I've got to get used to this. Our vice president will be the tiebreaker in the Senate, which means Joe Biden and his administration are going to have a clean slate to do a tax reformation act as he has promised. And what that's going to mean to all of us this year, we're going to wait and see. So that's why this podcast is very, very important.

We want to keep you abreast of

any new strategies that are coming out. But that's kind of the biggest news. And then there's all this, oh, my gosh, social media news on voter fraud. And I don't know. That's a.

Just.

That's a. I don't know if that's a can of worms I want to open up on the show.

Let's not even talk about that.

I'm going to talk about that.

I'm just.

I'm just going to say this. I have faith in the hundreds of thousands of volunteers that helped administer the election this fall and over the past week, and I have to have faith in that. If I don't have faith in our voting system, then we've got anarchy here in America, and I don't need that. So that's what I'm having faith in. I know that there might be some isolated, crazy stuff going on, but enough to change things. I don't know. So I'm going to be a team player, Matt.

Okay. Yeah.

I don't think anybody cares about that on our show, but, I mean, cares what we think. Maybe they do.

That's right. But what that means for a tax and legal show is gotta stay tuned.

That's true. We're gonna. Yeah, yeah, very true. Very good point. Is that. Stay tuned. There's going to be some curveballs coming down this. This next year, unfortunately. I think we're going to see some of that, so. But I do have a tax tip, which is actually good. It's some good news.

Yeah.

Okay. Okay.

All right.

So solo 401k deadlines.

All right.

So now you can always still contribute to your solo cap until a tax return deadline.

Now put this in frame. Frame this up for everybody that may not know what a solo 401k is.

Just a 30 second.

If you're a business owner, I can do it.

You want to do it.

You want to.

Solo 401k is basically a 401k. If you're a small business owner, you don't have any employees other than you or maybe your spouse or a business partner, you don't have any other third party employees. You know what I mean? It's just you. And you basically set up a 401k plan for yourself which you can participate as the employee and put in employee contributions. And you can participate as the employer because you actually own the business and put in employer contributions. The cool thing about a solo K, since you own the business, you're going to do the most generous employer contributions you can. So you can be putting in $57,000 a year into a solo K, even more if you're over 50. So that's the solo K. That's a popular account client self direct of ours. Many of us are small business owners that don't have any employees, consultants, real estate agents, investors, a lot of them fall into that bucket. Use a solo K as their retirement account of choice. Now the traditional rule is you need to have your solo case set up by December 31st of that year. So let's say December 31st, 2020. If you want to make 2020 contributions

that are tax deductible, that are tax

deductible and you have a lot of

time to put the Money in in

2021, that's you've got until your tax return deadline. So if you're an S corp, you got until March 15th. If you're a sole prop, you got until April 15th, plus your extensions on top of that, you get two. So you can really save some time and not put money in. Now the hard thing is you need to figure out your employee contributions in January because if you're an S corp, you got to do a W2. You don't need to put the money in necessarily. And that's where there's a lot of nuance in this. That's why we tell clients, just get your plan set up at year end and get all your crap done right now. Because there's all this nuance that it might not work for you because not everyone sits in the same boat and has the same tax planning and has money set aside. Everybody's a little different.

So.

And I do have an article, by the way, on directira.com that's solo 401k contribution steps and procedures that walks you through this. The big tip though that I want to give is the secure act change the deadline of when you need to set up the plan for employer contributions. So if you're like, I didn't get it set up in 2020, Matt, can you guys still do a solo K and I can put in 2020 contributions? Yes, we can still set up a solo k for 2020 tax purposes. You can still contribute employer contributions. All right, you're not gonna be able to get the employee in. It's possible, yeah, it's possible. You could work it in the next week or two here. You know, you're probably doing your W2 now, getting those numbers to your account. So there's a little sliver here. But in general, the good news is if you're listening to this in January, you know, mid January, February, whatever is, you can still do a solo K up until your tax return deadline. If you're an s Corp, that's March 15th and you can make an employer contribution. So if you made 100 grand on your W2, you can put in 25% of your W2 of your compensation. So you could throw in 25 grand as a 2020 contribution. So that's the good news. And update, Solo KS do work after December 31st for 2020 contributions only for the employer side contribution.

Now what this might just to add a little amendment from a legislative standpoint, since we're all hearing the Senate freak out on the floor and fights everywhere in Congress and state legislatures around the country, my amendment to that would be think of the sep. Many of you that are small business owners may have had an accountant that advocated the sep. The self employed pension. S as in Sam, E as in Echo, P as in Paul

Little, old school. We're not a big fan of the SEP. It's kind of, I forgot to do a 401k, I better do a SEP or I just hired employees. I can do a SEP for a couple of years before I have to launch a full on employer plan. So the SEP has its place in the framework of building a retirement account fast and hard. And I like this new law that allows you to kind of do that 401k catch up in a sense. But once you set up the 401k, you're never going to go back to the SEP. It's just so much more efficient with the 400.

401k.

So you'd set up your 401k now in the next two or three months, figure out your employer contribution and then turn around and you can do your 2021 employee contribution and your match for 2021. And you can take all that money, you control the solo 401k and go invest it immediately in what you know best. And that's the power. The excitement of the Solo 401k that we've been sharing around the country is that it doesn't have to be tied up in a brokerage account. You could invest it in bitcoin. Matt, your article on bitcoin's out again.

Yeah, I updated it. Yeah. It's funny, Bitcoin went over 30,000 when I recorded my last video on it, which was three years ago. I did a whole chapter in my book the Self Directed IRA Handbook on buying cryptocurrency with a Self Directed Iraq. But I wrote an article on it too. And I talked about how bitcoin went from $0.44 to $2,500 in a few years and how crazy that was. That was three years ago. Now it's gone from 2,500 to $30,000 per Bitcoin. So I'm not saying to go out and buy it. It's highly speculative, by the way, so just don't go all in on it. But yeah, if you feel that's where you want to go, you make the decision. You kind of set aside the right amount of money to do it. You can absolutely do it with a solo 401k or self directed IRA. And my article is just out on it yesterday, so check for it in the newsletter. If you don't have the newsletter, get to mainstreetbusiness.com where you can sign up for the newsletter to make sure you'll get all these updates. We're giving in these tips here and on the crypto topic, which has been a really popular one we've seen a lot of activity on.

Yeah, good stuff, Matt.

And in summary, kind of a tangent. A lot of listeners really migrate to our show because we're not financial advisors. We're not going to tell you what to buy. We don't get a commission based on what you buy. Our goal is to give you the world. We want you to be able to invest in anything possibly allowed under the law. And you control your retirement account. And that's a foreign concept for millions of American mainstream America. And Wall street doesn't want you to know that. That's the title of one of my books behind here what Wall street isn't telling you. So have Fun with that. Okay, now I've got a legal tip, and this bleeds into the tax arena as well. I've just had, oh my gosh, probably five to ten consults in the last 30 days leading up to the end of the year. And now even just. I was getting my hair cut, as Matt knows, a half hour ago, and a client of mine walked in and he was talking about this very tip that I already kind of planned to talk about. So it was a little ironic. And that tip is, when you have a partner in your business, how should you be structured? Now, that may sound simple. Well, I just set up an llc. That's what I see on Google. That's what everybody says to do. I'll just set up an llc. Now, that is half right. In fact, in most of our partnerships, for our clients that we design as a law firm and an accounting firm, as tax lawyers, we're going to use the llc, but they don't know why. And, and the why is a big deal because I just met with a couple doctors a week ago. They had an LLC between them and that was it. They stopped there. They only went halfway. So they were paying tax out the wazoo with this LLC. Because LLCs do not save taxes. They define the partnership, they lay out the partnership arrangement. The agreement highly recommend that they've got a bank account, they got merchant accounts, they're billing, they're doing this, this and this. Their partnership was functionally wonderful, but their tax returns were disaster and they didn't know why. They just did what this old school accountant had recommended to him. So upset when I recommended. When you're having a profitable partnership, operationally, we're not talking about rental property, but I've had an operational partnership that's making money, well over 50,000 on each side of the equation for each partner. Then we need to set up an S corporation for each partner. We don't turn the LLC into an S corp. That's actually the worst thing you can do. So we want to have each partner as an S corporation so they can individually plan their tax lives and have the most flexibility to maximize write offs, reduce chances of an audit, not have to commingle their tax planning together. If they were to make an S election at the LLC level, oh my gosh, it's so hard to unwind, and it's a mess. And it is literally thousands of dollars to unravel in a lot of ways, but it pays off. It's just miserable for the clients. And they swear and, you know, complain about their accountant that pushed them in that direction. So this time of year, why this tip I'm sharing with you now is so important, is if you're going to make the transition from 1 LLC to 2s corps, owning the parent LLC or unravel an S corp and restructure, you want to do it at the end of the year, you want to do it at the beginning of the year. It's very difficult to knock out in June or July. Now you've got a half year situation, and it's just more complicated. So if you're in one of those situations, I've got a chapter on partnership planning and taxation in my book, Tax and Legal Playbook, written for the layperson. It's very easy. Read lots of diagrams. Lots of it comes with a set of crayons so you can color in it. Very, you know, simple, so you can play with it. We want to make sure you're reading our books as a layperson, as a basic business owner. We're not writing these books for other attorneys and CPAs. Those are much more technical that are out there. But that's my tip. Matt, anything you'd add as an amendment to that?

Any thoughts?

No, without objection that that tip is approved. Okay, without objection.

No fraud involved there.

All right, well, let's get into the strategic planning topic. And this is one. I think it's a fun topic. Okay. This is one of the fun things in your business, as you're building a business, to take a step back and chart a course. Like, figure out where the hell you're trying to go and how you're going to get there. And I know many of you that are business owners, you've started a business, you maybe had a business plan at the beginning. If you don't have a strategic plan, this can be awesome. The nice thing is if you have a partner or people you work with or management team or a board of advisors is it's great to sit down and do this with someone else in your business. And maybe it's a spouse. I don't know. Everybody's situation is a little different, but I get the pleasure of doing with Mark. And this is one of the best. This is what I look forward to the most in our business, is setting the strategic plan and reviewing it too.

And let's start at the top. And this is important. I'm going to just add to what Matt said in this way.

Why am I always adding to your comments?

That's offensive. I should not do that. I'm just gonna say here's another angle. If you're a solo entrepreneur or solopreneur, as sometimes they're called, you may say, well, I know what my plan is. I don't need to write it down. Oh, no, no, no, no. If anybody needs to write it down, I think the solopreneur has the biggest reason to do so. Because you're in the trees, and it's really, really hard to step back and look at the forest.

You're going to get beat up every

day, every week, every month, and you're going to get bounced around.

You need.

If you use kind of a boat analogy, you've got to set your course.

You've got to get out there and

use nowadays a satellite. I'm not a sailor. So any of you out there could talk more about setting your course and having your rudder going the direction you want it to go. Because when the storm hits, you need

to have a plan, and the storm's going to happen.

You just got to know that you see 20, 20, you want to. What do you do?

Right.

So.

And then you're going to, by the way, let me say on that. And we're going to hit some of these points. But this is general. You're going to amend your plan, too. Like, we amended our strategic plans, like, literally rewrote pieces of the strategic plans that we have because of COVID And we. You had to do stuff different. And so this is not like a one done thing. It's done. And you just, like, you're going to revisit this. You're going to reanalyze it. You may change it through the year.

Yeah. And you're going to share it, my friends, with your board of directors. Now, when you have a partner, you're going to get together and share and talk about it. But even in a married couple situation, I'd like you to invite two or three friends over for dinner and. And say we are. You're now on our board of directors. We would like to get your feedback on our business. If you're single, you're going to get those three to five friends on a zoom call in person, wherever, go out to eat, take a trip. Matt and I are planning literally this month where it's the 15th. Matt, we got to get on this or 10th, whatever it is today.

Six. Six.

Oh, my gosh.

Not that far behind. We're okay. Yeah.

But we're going to plan a little rendezvous for a couple days, probably in Vegas. Go shoot guns, drive fast cars, you know, just the normal stuff. But plan to share Your plan. Ooh, that sounded good.

Plan to share your plan. That should be it.

Okay, That's a good plan.

Before you start writing.

That was the best joke. That was a great joke. I just, I just nailed one right there.

What was that joke? Did I miss it? What was it?

You said plan to share your plan, and I said, that sounds like a good plan.

Now I know I missed it anyway, so it was hard to catch, was subtle.

Okay.

Now here in.

I'm going to throw out what I

think is step one in designing your strategic plan. We talked about why it's so important who you're going to share it with, and that was our sales pitch there. Okay? Yep.

What's your step one? It's called your 10 year plan and ideal scene. You don't plan this year. You plan. You write down where you want to be in 10 years and work backwards so that you can get a clear picture of what this year should look like with the end in mind. Matt, you're the one that taught me about this. You tell me what you, your experience

call like setting your vision. You know, what's your 10 year vision? Like, where do you want to be in 10 years? What do you want the company to look like? Or your investments, whatever you're strategic planning here for. Because you can strategic plan for your business, your investment, assets, whatever it is, but what do you want it to look like? What are you doing in the business? How involved are you? If you are involved, what are the things that you're doing in the business? Who else is involved in the business with you? Do you have a team of people? Like, is it, is family involved or not? So you want to like, set where you like, what's your ideal scene at this, What Mark said of how you want to look in 10 years and be aggressive, like, set what you really want. Like, this is the cool thing about owning a business is like, you can do it, you know, like, I mean, but don't be conservative and be like, well, you know, if I grow 5% a year for the next 10 years, I'll be at this. No, like, what do you really want? And maybe it is. Maybe you're like, you know what? I like making what I'm making, I don't want to change it much. Okay. You know, but set your ideal scene. But set it for what you truly want and are going for. Go for it.

Yeah. And the examples might be how much money is in the bank, how many rental properties do I have, how much revenue is the business bringing in, how many Number of employees. Be as specific as you can and write down numbers that are measurable so that you can say, okay, that makes sense. And I like what Matt just said, that maybe you're not looking to blow it up and be the next franchise business in America. I know a restaurant owner down in our Cedar City town where our home office is. Matt and I lived there for each about 10 years as we were building the business, we've expanded the business to different locations and moved out of there. But we have, gosh, 30 employees that we love and a great team base there. And there's a little restaurant owner there every day.

He comes out and he's serving people at their tables. You know the one I'm talking about, Matt, right?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he's like, we've asked him before, why don't you open up another location? He's killing it. He's like, don't want the stress. He goes, I make good money. I know what I'm putting on. People's table looks great, they're happy. I can talk to him. I go home at the end of the day, I'm making enough money. He's been hit up to franchise so many times, but that's his goal. Now to me, what's your ten year plan? How are you going to position this to at least sell that location? Who are you going to bring up underneath you?

Yeah, or our family gets involved. The next generation perhaps. Or maybe a partner would take over. You bring in a kind of a junior partner that takes over over time. And so, but so set your vision of where you want to go. And 10 years is the we're going to work backwards from 10. 10 is enough. Where you can really transform a business. You can do a lot of things in 10 years if you're just thinking one year at a time, you don't push yourself. I think, I think we're a little more measured when we think one year. But 10 years is like you can really dream and what you want to do. And now we can work backwards to how can we turn that dream of your business into reality? And that's what the strategic plan is. How do I actually execute on this vision that I have for my business or my investments or my personal finances or whatever it is you may be planning about.

Yeah. And what's nice is it can be a little mechanical to give us a starting point, but we're also going to be realistic. Let me give an example. You may say, I want to have 10 rental properties that are cash flowing

I'm not going to have them paid

off, but I want to have 10 rentals. That cash flow in 10 years, okay, fairly realistic. We have lots of clients that go

that, that's probably a part of my plan. Rental properties are part of my plan.

I don't know the exact number that I want. I may say X million dollars worth of real estate. It doesn't have to be 10 properties, it could be four properties. But I want a certain value of real estate because I might go commercial or something. So you say you're going to have 10 rentals in 10 years.

Then you wouldn't, as Matt said, you're going to bring it back.

You'll say, okay, well in five years maybe I shouldn't have five rentals in three years, I better have three.

My goal in 2021 is to have one rental. Okay, now that may seem a little mechanical and I think it's a good starting point. Now the example is how to client is that some clients call me up and they were sharing their 10 year plan with me and we'll talk about where to write it down and how to use it. Of course, a lot more to talk about. And they rolled it out and they said, we're going to have 30 rentals in 10 years.

I was like, all right, well cool.

And I was like, well, what do you got now?

Zero.

Okay, okay, what's your, how's your income look?

Okay.

I come to find out the living month to month, I'm like, okay, how much debt do you have? 20 or 30 grand in consumer debt, young kids, no college savings. And if they said we don't plan to pay for our kids college, fine. But they said they wanted to. I'm like, okay, that's going to play into this ten year plan. I, um, so all of a sudden I said 30 rentals. I'm not going to take that away from you. Let's keep that 30 rentals out there. And they said, well we better have three rentals by the end of this year because 30 divided by 10, we better have three rentals. I go, no, you're not going to buy rentals for two years. And they're like, mark, what the heck? This is our ten year plan. We got to work backwards. We better have three rentals this year and six rentals by the end of next year if we're going to get there. I go, no, no, no. Sometimes we have to take two steps back and get our debt under control, get our emergency savings under control, build our business so it's Creating enough income to support expansion and growth and acquisitions. Then we can go buy in the third year and maybe in that third year we'll buy five rentals. But right now you're not built to expand. You're not in acquisition mode. We're in circle to wagons mode, building a foundation. They still may get to 30 rentals. But don't be so mechanical that you just go out and Harry carry. Divide by 10. And that's your plan. No, no, no, no. You got to take an assessment of your current financial condition. We don't go on a marathon without packing water, making sure we're in shape, we have the right shoes. We, we are. We're ready to go on this hike or this run, this race. We just don't run out the door. Okay, I'm going, you know. No, no, no, no. Let's slow down and pack. Pack or bag. Let's get ready. So it's a, it's a trek.

Yeah, yeah. So one thing I was going to note too is I actually have separate strategic plans for different things. So I have a strategic plan for my rental properties and personal finances. Okay. Which I think is separate from my businesses then.

I never shared that.

Mark and I. What's that?

Matt's never shared that with me.

Oh, yes I do.

Very private to Matt Sworns. Oh, is he grabbing it? Do we have a YouTube moment here?

Yeah, this, I have a one page summary. Don't zoom in on this one page summary. That this is my 2021. You can see all the notes on there. I'm updating for 2021 and it's all the things in there that I want to do from a personal finances standpoint that includes my rental properties and strategies. So. But then we have a strategic plan in the law firm, for example, we have a strategic plan in directed IRA and so you can have strategic plans in different areas. So for some of you that have like an operational business or services you do and you have rental properties, as we've been bringing up, those are probably going to be two different strategic plans. I like those being two different things because you could never have too many strategic plans.

Yeah, yeah, I like it.

Now my next point was going to be exactly what I love. Matt showed. I'm going to lift up mine. Here is my 2020 strategic plan. I've actually got it in a calendar planner format. I want to make a comment on that. I know some of you have already purchased my 2021 calendar and are saying, where the heck is it? It's January 6th I'll come to that in a moment. But here's my 2020 calendar that we got out to. We sold a thousand of these last year. I came out with mine the same year Dave Ramsey came out with his. And mine's better, but anyway. And I love what he does, so it's just chiding him. But I carry this around and I've got written on several pages our business plan, strategic plan, just like Matt said

for different companies, Mine personally, marketing plan, some to do items. I like incorporating it with my calendar. And I carry this everywhere I go. Now, let me say this. I know you digital people out there going, hold it. You guys are way too old school. I'm doing it all on my phone now. Hey, I do everything on my phone too. I use every app I can. I use my phone for everything. But when I create a note or a voice memo or something on my phone, it gets lost, it gets buried. I don't look at it again. I really don't. I'm challenging all of you to go a little old school. It's a little thing called pen and paper. Pencil to paper, write it down, put it by your nightstand at night, take it on a plane. And when you open it, every time you open it, it's staring you in the face. And I can look at my calendar for March and go, oh, okay, here's what's going on in March. Big picture. Tax deadlines, education, events. I'm going to a message for the month and my plan is right here. Now, I'm still using my phone, but I think there's a huge value. I love that Matt right there just ripped off the wall his one year. His, his personal plan right there. It's in front of him. You can't do that with a phone all the time.

Sorry, excuse me. In the writing, like this has, this is what I've used. It's the Moleskine. Mark has his calendar now, but this is what I started with in 2017. The reason I like, like this is all I have in here. I've got some other key things, personal stuff, but it's got 17, 18, 19, 20, 20. I've got four years of strategic plans here, which is awesome because I look back and see the stuff that we've done. And that's what you want to start doing. If you have strategic planned already, start there, assess where you're at based on what you set your 10 year vision before. What do we need? Do we need to reset it at all and then assess what you said you were going to do last year? Were you successful or not? How serious were you? Like, do you need to like, you know, kind of check in with yourself and be like, I kind of sucked at doing this? The nice thing of what Mark and I meet, it's pretty amazing. We bat like. I mean, it's about 90%, if not better of the things we actually get through that we, that we throw out and. But that's. It's motivating. It's fun to look back and be like, man, despite 2020 or whatever year it was being a tough year, I actually got a lot done. I did the things I knew I could do that could improve my business.

Yeah. And there's a kind of a personal improvement concept here that when you go to a.

Many of you listening to our show, maybe gone to a personal counselor or a development conference or gone through some corporate training, a lot of times you're taught to journal, have a gratitude journal, carry something around where you write down at the end of the day, the week, the month, what are you grateful for? How are things going? There's a power in putting it on paper because like Matt, if he wrote down his 2017 strategic plan in his phone, after nine Google updates and itunes and a new phone, it's gone. You'll never find it.

You guys know this and this is like, this is sacred to me, this book right here. You know, I've got like a. If. If lost, you know, return to me and you're gonna get like a bunch of money. Like. And I literally, I mean, I remember we're gonna do this show today, but like, it's in my bag every day. This is the one. One of the physical things I take with me everywhere because I want to look at it. It's, you know, it's kind of like people just your goals, you know, like, do you have a goals? Are they written down? Are they with you? Like, how important are they to you?

Yeah.

Make it different than the convenient tech stuff on your dang phone.

Yep.

A couple other thoughts on this. And again, what you may say, well, what are you writing in your strategic plan? We'll come to that. We'll come to that. But let's see where we've come so far. You're going to Write down this 10 year ideal scene. What's it going to look like? Personal life? Am I still with this person or not? What's in my bank account? What's my business look like? Am I. Have I ran a marathon or done a triathlon? Have I climbed Mount Everest? Whatever your bucket list, I think putting your bucket list items are on there.

That's great.

I've actually written down my bucket list items in here. One of them, Matt knocked out for me, but I still have to go do it. He had an opportunity a year or so ago to go to England and see a soccer game with the Premier League.

Oh, yeah. That was like four years ago. That's been a while. That's been that long.

Yeah.

Oh, my gosh.

It seems like just a couple years

ago, but that's on my bucket list is I want to go to England and go to a soccer game at night in the rain and eat fish and chips. Oh, that's one of my bucket list.

Yeah.

That was pretty cool.

But let me say this.

Let me finish.

But when you. But when you carry this plan around with you and you take it and you're going to update it and you're going to change it and you're going to carry it with you everywhere you go. And my point, I was just going to say is when Matt City takes it everywhere, when we go golfing as a partnership, he'll ask me, you got your plan with you, I got mine. And we'll literally be, you know, driving down the golf course and we. We're not great golfers.

We're.

We're okay. You know, it's the corporate sport, but we're more worried about the result of our planning session than our score. We're just having a good time talking.

Yeah.

Take it with you everywhere.

Yep.

Yeah. I know whenever Mark and I are going to physically be in the same place, I have it with me because it'll come up. So. Okay, let's. I like to break it down into categories. Marcus, thrown out. You're throwing out a lot of stuff of like, you know, some personal stuff, personal goals, finances. And I. The way I do it, I. Strategic plan in each column. So if it's, let's say, personal things or personal relationships or family and kids, that's one thing. And I've literally outlined that in terms of, like, what's my expectation with my kids? What's the relationship I want? How much time am I going to spend with them? How do I do that? You know, if you're a busy person, you got to calendar this stuff and, like, schedule and, you know, you got to plan. But then personal finance is invested. I'm doing the same thing. What do I want personal, My vision for that, what I want to be financially, how am I going to get there? You know, and then you Kind of go through some budgetary things. And then the same thing for the businesses is think. And you could do it with rental properties separate. But so try to stay in a calm and help you keep organized as you build a strategic plan. You can set the big picture vision, like Mark talked about, of everything in your life and what you want happening in 10 years, but then start to break down kind of this, as Mark says in his article and books, is kind of like the nuts and bolts really. And the how to you're going to get there. Now, this is where the planning and the writing down and thinking backwards of, okay, what do I need to be in five, where I need to be in three years? What can I do now in a year while being three, five and then 10.

And if anything, the goal is the ideal scene.

Now it's time to get into tasks. And when Matt said we hit about 90% or baseball, that'd be. We hit 900 out of 10 things.

We divide them up.

We say, okay, Matt, you're going to do this, I'm going to do this, or we are going to do this. And we create tasks. So the year, the strategic plan for the year is not so much goals as it is tasks because. And then. And it's going to be numerically trackable.

I want to be able to say, and like, we're going to have so

many followers on YouTube by the end of the year.

What are we going to do to get there?

What are the things we're going to do?

And then we have that, that number that can be measured. That's the word I was looking for. Because if you don't have measurable tasks, it's like, I'm going to be a better person. What the hell does that mean? You know, you say, I'm going to do seven good tasks a week. I'm going to do a good deed. And for you scouters out there, I'm going to do a good deed daily. And when I do it, I'm going

to put a little tick Mark, and

I'm going to write it in my strategic plan. Okay, now you have something measurable to be a better person. You just don't say it.

So.

Yeah, yeah. So now this is where you are kind of getting your to do list. All right? And sometimes this can be daunting because you got to have some. You got to be realistic about it. But again, you want to be aggressive on where you want to be. So now you need to start prioritizing too. That's the next thing is I think sometimes there's, like, a lot of ideas that you want to do in your business, and the strategic plan is really the time. This is why I like writing it out. Because if you can break it down into pieces, you know, you can get that thing done. I think a lot of times, if you think, oh, I need to do this all in a year or in wherever, you know, the time period you're setting, start calendaring it. Okay, what am I going to do? First quarter? Maybe there's five or six things that are critical in your business. You want part of your strategic plan this year? All right, do not do all five right now. Start with one. Can you get that done in a month or two? Okay, Move on to the next one. And maybe it's quarterly. That's how we do it in some of our stuff, at least in the directed IRA strategic plan. And so that way, you know, we got to get this done. You know what's coming next. You don't have any downtime. You move on to the next one. Now you can kind of bite at a time. You can kind of chip away at this.

Okay, And Matt said something interesting there. He really said two things, in my opinion. He said, one, prioritize, so what's your list and what's most important? And then he added a timeline to it.

And you want to create deadlines for yourself and say, okay, I've got, let's say, four things. Let's just say four. And you go, I've got to get these four things done in my business that will really launch my business for the long term, success I want. Okay, I'm going to do one first quarter, one second quarter, third quarter. And you put them in order of priority. And you say, I can't go on to number two until I get number one finished. And I want it done by April 1st. I've got three months to get it done. Then the last dynamic piece of that is you've created a task list based on your ideal scene. You prioritized it. You created a timeline. You're going to write it down and

you're going to share it.

Because when you write it down, all of a sudden you're like, oh, this is a little too ambitious. I can't do that. Well, okay, then tone it down a little.

It's your plan.

Don't set yourself up for failure either. You want to stretch yourself, and then you're going to share it with your board and go, this is what I'm going to do.

First quarter.

And everybody, we're going to meet at Ruth, Chris, for dinner for a steak and lobster meal. And I'm going to reward myself because I beat it. And I'm going to invite all of you on April 2nd, and I'm going to report to you how I'm doing now. You're going to be held accountable. And it's scary.

Yeah, yeah. And that's why having a partner or someone else, spouse, board of advisors involved, they're there for accountability. You want their ideas, too, and you want their input. Of course. But they're probably one of the most important things they're doing is their accountability because, you know, those are the people that are important in our business or in our life that we want to, you know, we want to live up to what we say we're going to do. We want to do it. So. Okay, do you want to break down categories on how you do it? I know you've. In terms of, like, you know, systems.

Yeah. Let me make a couple comments.

First of all, some people think, well, you guys are just tax and legal guys. No, we are truly at the core, business consultants.

We get on the phone with clients all the time and we find out

they're in debt, their marriage is on the rocks, their kids are in rehab, their business is failing. Do you think we're going to talk about their LLC and S Corp in that phone call? No, we're going to share with them what we've seen other successful clients do. We're a business therapist. We're going to listen to you. And we have a fiduciary duty to tell you what's best for you.

And I have. I had a phone call from a client this morning that said, mark, I'm begging to get on your calendar. Please, please, please. And I go, we've got six great tax attorneys.

Please.

And they go.

And they said, mark, they just don't peer into my soul like you do. And I'm like, and. And so I'm going to try to squeeze them in. I'm trying to be very judicious with my time. But. But the point here is this, is this process of sharing it. And these categories are very individualistic to you. They're going to vary. And it's more than just tax legal. But that may be on those where Matt and I a lot of times fit into people's strategic plan is they say, this year I'm going to get my tax return reviewed and get a second opinion. Yeah, that's something on my list. Number two, I'm going to make sure I did my company minutes and that my LLC and S Corp is in good standing with the state and I have a book. So if I get into a lawsuit or an audit, I'm legit because all I've got is a piece of paper from LegalZoom three years ago. Okay. That's not an entity. So that's what are your legal lists. So you might have. I'm going to get better contracts for my relationships with my vendors and my customers. Others might be financial like Matt said. I'm going to get a better point of sale system in place for I can run people's cards. I want to save money on my merchant fees. I want to do. And Matt will be some that you might come to your mind that are system.

Yeah that are system based. Well maybe moving more stuff online. Having options for my customers to do things online or purchase online or pay online or schedule online.

Update website.

What's that?

Updating the website.

Updating your website, right. I mean marketing your services better on the website. You know, thinking of how other marketing things you're going to be doing. You know, I mean Mark to mention like YouTube, you know like that a lot of the marketing things can be quantified, you know in terms of like response. Like a social media is easy because you can really track that your website you get analytics on. You can track that. But a lot of marketing things you can at least track and did I do it? You know, I don't know how it went but I know I did this. You know, I spoke at 10 things or I went to five networking events or whatever it may be. Sometimes you don't know that how it's affecting the business yet. But you can at least quantify did I go and do those things I thought would make a difference? And yeah, I did. I attended four networking events.

I'm looking around my conferences, whatever. Corey, can you grab my eight Steps over there? So I have what's called the eight Steps Workbook and I have a whole section eight steps to build or grow or start a business. In my eight Steps workbook I have a whole section on strategic planning and a two hour three hours worth of video in it. And sorry to do a shameless plug here. You can get it for 99 bucks on my website or on Amazon. But it's a workbook. It's not just a book. There's 60 little videos with QR codes in it. And I give you a word document of a typical strategic plan broken into eight areas. So if some of you are like well I don't even know where to start.

For 99 bucks.

This is like Dave Ramsey's FPU Financial Peace University. I tried to model it for a business financial piece, you know, like, how

do I grow my business?

And I tried to pick up where Dave Ramsey left off when it came to business. But some of these other ideas would be, and I talk about this in the book is I've got to fire

that employee or I'm going to hire two new employees or I'm going to implement better standard operating procedures called SOPs. I want to get my employees more effective in the duties they're responsible for. And that could be first quarter. That's all I'm going to do. I'm going to spend time with my employees. I'm going to make sure they're all trained, that we're all on the same page. We're going to get better uniforms, better shirts, better rah rah rah systems. We're going to do a daily huddle, we're going to have a goal chart on the wall and we're going to ring a bell and I'm going to include bonuses for this or that.

Gosh.

I had another system thing too. Oh, Another one was maybe like Matt said, networking, you may say, I'm going to start my own network group. I'm going to choose 10 business owners in my local area and I'm going to host a networking group once a month and just do breakfast anyway. But these are all these little tasks that are going to help you in the long run too.

I don't know.

Yeah, one thing I was gonna mention on employees, this was cool. I was listening to Daniel Ek, who's the one of the founders of Spotify, and he talked about what he does with his employees is he calls it a two year mission. You know, interesting for those, you know, the Mormon Church to have a two year mission. But he says every employee has a two year mission here and every two years it changes. So when you're working, I don't care what job you have, you have a two year mission of what you're supposed to be accomplishing. And the reason I like that is it really fits into like an individual strategic plan for an employee. It's got a defined time period. It's not like I need you to do this next month. It's enough time where they can really do something. They can make a big deal in your business. And he's always Sundays some people's two year mission is more of the same. You know, it's like, you did great at that. You could just keep doing more of that. But a lot of it, he says, actually shifts quite a bit into things that they're doing. And a lot of employees, you can look at their two year missions they've had, and they're very, very different over their career. They've been there. So think about as you're looking at employees in helping them create or be part of the strategic plan, so they know at least, what, what am I driving? What's the company's objective and where do I fit in this? What, what do you want from me out of it? And, and your team loves this. They, they love knowing, where the hell are we going? Communicate this. How can I help? They want to help. They want to be part of the success of it.

Yeah.

Oh, I love that, Matt.

And Matt and I first learned more about this at Lululemon, who is a company very dedicated to the experience that their employees have.

And when you have an employee review

and you ask them, what are your goals?

Can you imagine that? And a business owner asking their employee, what are your goals? How can our company help you achieve your goals? Well, like, I can guarantee we don't even do that as much as we should with our employees at all. And that's a huge thing because now you're getting the employee bought into a company, a program that's personally helping them. Dagan, I was gonna say something else on this too. I like that. Meeting with your employees. Oh, what I was gonna say. Keep talking, Matt.

Okay, well, I was gonna say the next thing to keep in mind on this is you wanna quantify this and try to manage by statistics.

Okay?

We wanna look at numbers. We can quantify this and know the progress we're making or not. And some businesses are. People call it a KPI, a key performance indicator on what's happening in your business and identify those, but tie them to your strategic plan. So, for example, a statistic might be website traffic. Okay, how many people are on my website? Because then you can think back of like, well, how do I get more people on my website? Maybe that's more social media, maybe that's more events. Maybe that's getting links and making relationships with other parties and places that get people to your website. Okay. The next thing you could say is like, okay, how many people contacted me or got services from the website? All right, that's the next statistics. Okay, but then you could even be like, all right, how many customers did I have? Do you have a newsletter? Do you have a way for Customers to know what's going on in your business. How many people are on it? Are they reading it? You know, a lot of these things are quantifiable, but even I think your services. One thing we do at directed IRA is when we get positive feedback, we ask customers to give us a five star review. Go look at directed IRAs five star reviews. You might fall off your chair on how great they are. But you know, we do a good job. But you can see like that that quantifies to the experience our customers are getting. We know if we get a lot of those, we know we're doing a good job. I know that from in management and my team that we're not going to get a five star view every other day if we're not kicking butt. And we do.

Oh, I love it, Matt.

So good. Well, let me finish with one other example too. I got to bring up the calendar. Don't let me forget. But I remembered what I was going to say about the employee thing. A lot of times one of the first big steps for a small business owner is hiring their first employee or their first assistant. And I'm going to refer to two people here by first name only. Not the type of industry they're in or where they're at in the country, but these are the real first names. I've talked to them both recently that are going through this process. So it's Holly and Sydney. And Holly as a business owner has never had kind of a full time personal assistant and Sydney has never been a full time assistant. But she's really trying to work her way into this industry in this business. And both long term want to work together. That's good. They want to be there. But I was really proud of them because they sat down on the email and the business owner said, here's what I expect, here's what I want from this relationship. And then turned around and said, what do you want from this relationship, Sidney And Sydney was so happy to go, here's what I want from this relationship. And they made sure they talked about that and they said, okay, now we know how we're going to work together on a day to day basis. So they were able to framework compensation, calendaring schedules and tasks based on this broader concept of when you go hire your first personal assistant, just don't hire one for the hell of it. Just say, but write down what do I want out of this, what are the tasks I need this person to do and how can I make it rewarding for them? So they're Getting as much out of this relationship as I am. And so that was something I've been

involved with quite a bit with these two folks.

And I think they're on the right direction and they're planning it out and it's being very, very positive.

So, yeah,

last point I had, this goes so fast, but last point that I had was looking at the strategic plan and coming back to it. Assessing where you are. Maybe sometimes there's something you're going to say, you know what? I just don't even need to do that anymore. Something's changed in my business or what I'm doing this, that doesn't matter. Yeah, that's okay. And sometimes you're like, crap, I got to start doing this. For example, I'll just say, like in the law firm, you know, our strategic plan shifted drastically because of COVID Not only from an operational standpoint, what we can do online and capability and stuff in the cloud and employees at home and all that. I mean, like every business owner, we had to go through that in all of our businesses. But one thing from a marketing standpoint is, like, we didn't want to be experts on stimulus and government assistance. Unemployment, first of all, business on unemployment, on this thing called PPP no one had heard about or, you know, but we did because we knew that would be a big deal for our customers and clients. And so we went after it. We became experts on it. We got up to speed on it. It became a good marketing tool for us. Let us help our existing clients. It helped us bring in new clients. And that was a big shift in our strategic plan that year that we would never plan to do.

Oh, this time last year, we never saw that coming.

There was coronavirus in China. This time last year, no one thought

about hitting the U.S. yeah, it's crazy.

Now, on that final note, my calendar.

Here's a sneak peek. This is the 2021 calendar in the final draft format.

Ooh, I like it.

It's.

I like the font.

Little shiny. See that? For those.

Am I getting a free one or do I have to buy it?

Oh, you'll have to buy it.

But I get a discount.

At least I'll give you a discount. No, but this is 25 bucks or less. But there's a lot into this. If you can see online, there's tables of what? Different tax dates and dollar amounts and deadlines as well as state strategies. And what are they, how they vary from state to state. And some people have been emailing quite a bit going, I bought this Frickin in December or November. When do I get it? Well, please, we're within the next 10 days. I'm trying to get it out the door, but here's why there's been a delay. A lot of times the irs, in

fact, every year they don't announce a

lot of deadlines and dollar amounts and dates until the first of the year. And also with this Covid legislation that just passed with the appropriations bill, there's a number of deadlines that have been affected.

And so every day I'm about ready to go to the printer.

Texas changed the deadline or Washington state changed the deadline. I was up until one in the morning just going through different state rules on deadlines and different things. So I've done my best to make sure that when you comb through this on a monthly basis, you see what the deadlines are and they're accurate to the greatest extent possible. But there's a section on writing your 10 year plan and then there's a halfway through the year, I force you to do a six year review. I mean a six month review. So this little yellow page is, okay, how did I make it halfway through the year? What do I need to change and modify? And what I love about this is I carry it on a plane. That is kind of my personal time to get on a plane. I feel like I am 30,000ft above the world, which I am at that moment.

And I look down and go, I

am on top of the world.

I am on top of the world. How's it going? And it is kind of symbolic for

me that I am above the fray. I am above the trees in my business. And I pull out my planner and I look at the month and the year and my checklist. What did Matt and I say we were going to do? What am I going to do? It's got all. Anyway, so if any of you wanted this calendar, you can get to markjkoler.com there's a link for that as soon as I'm shipping them. There's going to be a bigger

push to let everybody know about it. But if you order it, be patient, it's going to be well worth the wait. You're going to have accurate data for the whole year. It's not just a calendar. It's got deadlines from state to state throughout the country.

So you'll love it.

Well, Matt, you want to take us out?

Yeah. Thanks everybody for being with us on the Main street business podcast. And if you're still listening, I think you liked it. Maybe not maybe there was no other option available. This is the only podcast you downloaded for a long flight and there's nothing else to listen to. You would have been looking up in the nothing. But with the exception of that situation, please share with your friends, give us a five star view or like based on whatever you're listening to. And we're going to be back next week, of course, on the Main Street Business podcast. Probably doing open form.

Yep.

Okay, well maybe hit some of your stimulus questions. Mark and I are doing a webinar with Entrepreneur later this week. Also the directed IRA podcast. We're going to be going over cryptocurrency, all the hot stuff on crypto and bitcoin that you can purchase with your retirement account. So lots of stuff going on. Again, best way to stay updated on all this is get to mainstreetbusiness.com, sign up for our newsletter. You'll get updates on all this stuff that's going on and education. Mark and I are trying to get

out there and you can submit your questions for our show nstreetbusiness.com you can either record a voice memo or type up a question and we're going to burn through as quick as we can in the show and so type in a question there at main street business.com thanks everyone.

Thanks everyone.

See you next weekend.