Ep26: Mastering the Next 90 Days: Strategic Planning for Success

Good day, everyone. Matt here for another epic episode. Super keen to talk about this one today. It's something that I'm super, super passionate about and thank you so much for all the people listening in. I don't know exactly, but we've hit just on Spotify, we've hit over 500 downloads and I think we're probably close to a thousand downloads on this podcast so far. And if you haven't watched last week's episode or two weeks ago with Tabby, that episode is going off. So that is episode number 24. The challenges have you faced going from zero to a fully booked trainer in a jets facility up here in Brisbane. So let's get into today's topic. So super, super passionate about this one. I'm going to talk to you guys about planning day and what I do with myself and what I do with my clients to ensure that, that they stay focused and productive for every single well for the next three months. So you do it every quarter. And I learned this from Kerwin Ray. So I worked with Kerman ray for about 12 months in his high level coaching program. He's probably one of the, the best high performance coaches in the world in my opinion and probably a lot of people's opinion as well. But in terms of structure, structure, accountability and, and focus. So I had a really good analogy that I spoke to one of my clients about this morning and it was regarding focus. So he lives in, in Coffs harbor and I live in Brisbane, so it's a fair distance away. So I put it like this. If you're in business and the analogy is like you want to drive from Cost harbor to Brisbane and you just, you just drive and you just try and figure out the signs as you go along. Like you might have a wrong turn here, you might have a wrong turn there, but the reality is it's going to take you a very long time to actually get to Brisbane and it's going to have a lot of challenges, you're going to have a lot of bumps along the way because you don't know what you're doing or you're not focused on the end result or the end destination, or you don't have a clear path to get there. On the other hand, you put it in the gps. You have an exact route that you follow, that you stick to an exact focus pathway directly to Brisbane the quickest way possible with no roadblocks. There's obviously going to be roadblocks in business, but the analogy still still stands. So if you're not planning for the, or forecasting for the future, then how are you going to stay focused and, and how are you going to plan what to do next? So in my experience, and you know, this helps me like I did the, I did the figures the other day, I've made over like 1.1 million in fitness industry in the last four years and it's because I'm super focused on what I'm doing. I just go all in. And if you've got a specific plan, specific plan of attack on what you're working towards and you, it's very difficult to, to lose track or lose focus because you've got a specific plan that you're going with. So I'm going to go through what that process is. I'll go through the structure of it, not going to go through an exact replica of it because it does usually take about three to four hours to go through. But I'm doing this with my clients tomorrow actually as of this recording. So yeah, so I'm going to go through the structure of what we essentially go through to give you guys a bit of an insight and who knows, if you guys ever end up becoming a client of mine, we can obviously do this process together. So first up I'll, I'll briefly explain the, the preparation that you need through for planning day because there's a lot of, there's a lot of reviewing your performance. So like you've got to, you've got to take ownership of what's happened over the last three months as well. So remember this is done every quarter. So every three months you do this and the, the first step is take taking ownership of what's happened the last quarter. So for me personally I, I had a, I had a mixed bag the last quarter so I, I got some awesome results but some things lacked, lacked a little bit. So, and, and I'll, I'll share some of these. Like I want to be open and honest and share the challenges. So let me give you a couple of, couple of examples here because I did, I did my planning day myself for my two businesses on last week. So I've done this recently. So a couple of things that I kind of didn't go to plan. Like I started running ads, but it was quite challenging and had a bit of difficulty with like I actually had someone hack my ads account and they spent quite a bit of my money. So that was quite challenging. In my school community I had a drop in engagement so people weren't seeing the value in posting. In the school community, I didn't have a much of a community base with all my clients, so it's all kind of one on one side of things, so there's not much of a community there. My referral strategy failed miserably. My retargeting failed miserably in my Facebook ads. Client expectations was, well, just in terms of forecasting client results, I kind of lacked that area a little bit. And also I was doing a lot of extra work for free. As always, a lot of my lessons learned for the last quarter. So that's just a couple of examples. But what you essentially want to do is you want to review what happened over the last quarter and you want to obviously work on the positives as well. So the first thing you want to do is write down at least 20 things you accomplished in the last three months. So for example, I have my new done for you service is actually selling like crazy and I don't really need to sell it that much because it's pretty much commission only. Retention on my PC clients and retention of my mentoring clients has been really, really good over the last 90 days. 500 downloads on the podcast, hit 25 episodes on the podcast, interviewed some high performers on the podcast as well. You know, I got eight new clients for my mentoring, started running ads, save time, using AI a lot. My VA is crushing it and off some of my debts as well, which is pretty cool. But you know, you want to dive deep into these accomplishments as well. Like go through everything that you've worked on. Like what client results have you got, what systems have you upgraded, what programs. Also what, what, what things have you changed mentally for your own personal stuff? Like if you're, if you've been working with a mentor, like what are some of the accomplishments that you've had with him or her? Then once you've done the accomplishments, then you do the lessons learned, which is what I kind of covered just then. So what have you learned over the last three months? One of the things I learned first seven to 14 days are so important for new clients. You need to get them off to a good start. Strengths. So after you've done the lessons learned, then you go over to strength. Strength. So what, what's the strength in your business? What's the strengths for yourself? Strength for me, for example, is the podcast, my va, my ability to run ads, the profitability, my use of AI, retention, etc. And then weaknesses after that. So there's four things. Accomplishments, lessons learned, strengths and weaknesses. My weaknesses at the moment is my some of my sales conversions recently have been Quite low sometimes. Still quite new to running ads. I had a lot of fake leads through my Facebook ads as well. I currently can't handle, handle all the leads that I'm getting from my current clients. Good problem to have but I'm not sure if you guys saw that I recently empowering a appointment setter and also a sales team as well. One of my weaknesses is some of the engagement in my community is the group engagement is quite low. Posting on social media. I don't, I'm not that good on posting on social media these days. So it's one of the weaknesses. So that's, that's essentially what you need to do for the pre work for the planning day. So once you've got the pre work, that's the, that's the, that's the review part. And this is where you, you can identify the things that didn't go to plan and that you can, that you can fix going into the next quarter. So the next part after this and I'll share my screen for this one. So this is literally my planning day notes. So let me get rid of that stuff. So if you, you're not watching, I suggest watching this one if you can. But you should also still be able to understand if you're just listening in the car or whatnot. So once you've actually done your accomplishments, your lessons learned, your strengths and weaknesses, then you need to identify the top three for each one of you. So you should have three, six, 12, you should have 12 things highlighted. That is your top accomplishments, your top lessons learned, your top strength needs, top weaknesses for that last quarter. Okay. And take your time with identifying these top three, top three for each one because this is the stuff that we're going to be focusing on for the next quarter. Because you can't, you can't fix everything at once, right? So you only want to focus on 12 things. And we're going to even narrow that down even more after that. So once you, once you've done those 12 things, then we do that what we call the strategic analysis, which is we identify the objective that we wanted to achieve from those things. So for example, I'll just give you guys a couple of examples here because this part can get confusing. So you'll see in here it says how do we. Which is the objective. And then given that is the obstacle. So one of my, one of my accomplishments was my new done for you offer is selling like crazy. So my objective is how do I handle new done for you clients because they're selling like Crazy. And then the obstacle is we haven't got a scalable product with feedback on client experiences yet because it's such a new product or service. I haven't actually had that many results from it just yet. So all these people are trying to come in and do this done for you service, but I actually don't have feedback on the price just yet. So that's the obstacle that I've got. So you see how we're now identifying things that are going to be problems through this process. So then what we do from there is. And you'll, you'll do that same process with all 12 of those things. So you'll have 12 objectives and 12 obstacles. Once you've got those 12 obstacles, those obstacles are essentially the things that you're now going to focus on and fix in the business over the next three months. And this is how you become super productive and get so much progress in the business every three months. Because you're constantly reviewing and auditing the business and your performance to then forecast and focus on the next things that you need to work on. There's always stuff to work on in business. So for example, once you've done that. So then how do we. Given that, I'll give you another example. So one of my other accomplishments was my retention rate. So the objective is how do we increase our retention to 100%? I think it's currently about 95% at the moment. How do we increase our retention to 100%? The obstacle is clients don't have a clear onboarding process with expectations and targets to hit by certain times and they don't use the KPI tracker. So that's something that I've identified. People aren't really using the KPI tracker and they don't have. Well, I don't have a clear onboarding process. That's something I need to fix. So let me tell you what, we do that. But now we've, I'm just going to use those two examples. Then we break them down into tactical operating priorities or hot action items. Hot action items are one off tasks that can be done not instantly, but it just needs to happen once and then it's done. Tactical operating priorities are a bigger goal that takes multiple, multiple micro goals to achieve. For example, one of my tops that I've got is we have added five new clients and maintains 90% retention rate. So that's a, that's a bigger goal that's going to take a little bit of time to achieve. I'm not going to be able to do that in like one week, for example, that's going to be over the quarter. Another one that I've got over the quarter, we have hired an appointment set up and sales rep to help with leads. So that's relation to how do we handle the done for you clients. Okay, now an example for the hot action item is we have created a new onboarding process for all new clients about expectations, targets and KPIs. So that is relating to that, that first one that I was talking. Sorry, the second one that I was talking about where the onboarding process needs some work. So that's the difference there team. So tops are tactical operating priorities, which takes the whole quarter or a goal over the whole quarter. Whereas hot action items are things that need to be done as a one off. So then basically once you have done your 12 objectives and obstacles, you're basically going to turn them into top tactical operating priorities and hot action items. With your hot action items, you need to pick a date that you're going to have them finished by. So for example, for the first one, we have created a new onboarding process for all new clients, their expectations, etc. I might say I'm going to get that done by the 15th of July. So what I do, I time block that task and how long it's going to take me into my calendar right now so I know that it's going to get done by that time. This is creating the roadmap. So you want to get X, X result end of the quarter. This is what you need to do week or this week, next week, this week, etc. This is how you're going to stay focused for the whole quarter and then you review your performance again. Now your tactical operating priorities, you only want to ideally have between three to five of them because they're the bigger goals. You only have so much focus. Okay. Everything else should be a hot action item. And if it's not, if you've got like six or seven tactical operating priorities, you need to narrow that down. There's too much stuff to focus on. Just pick your highest priorities and then review it at the end of the quarter and see if those things are still relevant and then you can focus on that other stuff in the next quarter. Okay, so that's essentially how I run my planning day and what I do with my clients after we've actually done this to solidify this into our subconscious mind, what we actually do is we do a mindfulness, mindfulness meditation. So we do a meditation and then we actually write a letter to Ourselves solidifying that stuff that we just talked about. So what you actually do is you, you, you visualize this stuff multiple times through the meditation and then you write it all down on paper as if it's already happened. And it's the same with the language that I'm using here. If you can see this. We have added five new clients and maintained 90 retention rate. So we have already done it. We have, we have a VA working on our Facebook and Instagram accounts. We have hired an appointment center and sales rep to help with leads. We have created a new onboarding process. We have created new incentives within the school community. It's. It's as if it's already happened. So that's essentially the planning day team. So as I said, you're reviewing your performance. So take ownership of what happened then reviewing your performance. Then you're identifying what are the high priority tasks that you need to do or high priority. What's the word I'm looking for? The high priority? Yeah, I'd say tasks. Your high priority tasks that you need to do, which is basically the objective and coming up with the obstacle. Then you turn that into task operating priorities and hot action items. And then you meditate on that and visualize that already happening and then you get to work once you've actually done the planning day. A separate process that I go through with my clients with the accountability is setting yourself weekly goals to achieve certain things or certain results. So as an example, you're going to essentially post your tactical operating priorities and hot action items and report to everyone else what you have done and what you have not done for the week. So for example, these tactical operating priorities are pretty big goals. So you can break them down into micro goals. Prime example. My first tactical operating priority is we have hired an appointment setter and sales rep to help with leads. My first week's goal for this could be we have put up an ad on seek for an appointment setup and a sales rep. Or it could be we have brainstormed the commission structure for an appointment setup and sales rep the following week. Could be we have interviewed five people for the role. The following week we have hired the appointment setup. Next week we have finalized the onboarding process and, and the appointment setter has booked in their first five appointments. For example, you can see how having the task operating priority that you're reporting every single week will help keep you focused and on track for the quarter. So you're, every single week, you're always working on those tactical operating priorities. That's how you stay focused. Okay. So hope that makes sense. Team. I know it can be confusing when you first do this process, which is why I do it with my clients, every single quarter with them. So that's essentially it. So if you have any questions on that, let me know. I hope you get some value from this episode. And hopefully we do cross paths and we do a planning day together, because I know how much of an impact it does have personally on my business, but also how much of an impact it can have on your business. So until next time, enjoy your day, and I'll see you guys next week.