How We Built A 10-Year Business Plan in 2 Days

Here's our formula to build a 10-year plan for our business, and we did it all in just a 2-day offsite. So here's how we did it. We rented a house in Ontario right next to the lake near Detroit and Cleveland. Pretty amazing. And this is a brand new team, so I wanted everybody to get to know each other. Secondarily, we needed to leave with focus and clarity on what we were going to be doing over the coming months and coming years after that. So we ran a process over a couple days to figure out that entire plan. So this is the outcome of our 2 days of work. So what this is, is a one page strategic plan, and we take it from the EOS framework. That seems like not much, but in actuality, it's like the old phrase says, if I'd had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter. And in the end, we spent a lot of time narrowing down specific answers to every single part of this document and left with a ton of clarity about who we are, where we're going, how we're going to get there, and all the things we're going to do in between. So the way this document works is actually pretty amazing. Imagine you're going to climb Mount Everest. You're going to get all the way to the top, 27,000 feet up in the air. Well, how are you going to plan to get there? You're going to have to figure out figure out who your team is. You're gonna have to figure out all the different stops that you're gonna make along the way. You set a 10-year goal, which is the top of Mount Everest for you. It's your big audacious goal of where you want to get. And then you set interim steps that you do along the way to get there, all the way down, in this case, to what we're going to be doing this quarter or even this week. If you know you're on track for this quarter and then you're on track for this year, then you know you're on track for the next few years from now, then you're going to be on track for that 10-year goal. So you're on a straight line to build your business to where you eventually want it to be. So the first thing we started with was what's called the core focus section of the EOS process. I I love this because it gets you to really understand the why of what you're doing. So for me, I love helping people, and it turns out the people that I've recruited to be part of the Girdley Media team like the same thing. What kind of company is Girdley Media? So this is a media company. We will have a revenue model and we will produce stuff and we'll have customers who are happy. So we described ourselves as a business education media company. We checked everything to see if this kind of made sense and then moved on. And here you can see there's lots of whiteboard session. In our case, there were no whiteboards there, but we did have these big sticky notes. So we write on them, take turns scribing, and everybody's involved. So now we know what kind of company we're building. And why we're doing it. And next, we moved on to understanding, like, what are our core values? And here are the 6 core values that we came up with: they're straight shooting, results matter, stay coachable, treat people as humans, never scummy, and always curious. And so these were another 2 hours of effort, like, deciding what really matters to us, what kind of people do we want to be. And these all ended up being a consensus amongst the team. Here's what our worksheet looked like as we went through this. The methodology was everybody wrote down examples of qualities they would want to have in our employees and in our team members. Then we saw where there was consensus and what we really agreed on, workshop those, ended up with the best 6. And there we have our core values of who we're going to be in terms of acting day to day in our company. Next, we spent a session figuring out who our customer is. So we know who we are, we know what kind of business we want to build. Now we need to narrowly define as much as possible who our customer is going to be. And the way we think about this is it's like a list that you could give to a marketing firm and say, go find me more of these people. It's demographics and psychographics. So age, place, all that kind of stuff. Then psychographics— what matters to them, what's important, and what kind of journey are they on. Next, we went through and defined what makes me and Girdley Media and this whole thing unique in the marketplace. And the idea here is to pick 3 things that in combination are unique in the marketplace. Nobody else can do them or say that they have them in total. So we came up with 3 things. Number 1, I actually have experience, like I've done real business over time, which is different than a lot of people who are creating content in the business education space. Number 2, we have a brand that is trustworthy and straight shooting. I mean, the reality is that the social media stuff, like, yeah, it's fun and it matters to me and it should, but the reality is I don't need to do this to feed my family. That's okay, but that also means I can be truthful with people, and they know I won't sell out because, well, I don't want to, and it would also hurt the other stuff I'm working on. And then lastly, I think we have a unique perspective that we're calling Enlightened Ownership philosophy to really encapsulate my entire philosophy about doing business differently. You want to have impact, but you also don't want to kill yourself. There's this place in the middle through systems and better thinking I think you can live, and that's something we're going to be defining in the coming months and years to really make that the cause that I want to see in the world. Next is pretty simple. If we're going to be a business education company, you should understand what exactly your business does. What is our proven process? And our In our case, this is what we ended up with. You go through and you identify, hey, we create content, we potentially get advertisers for it, we revisit how it did, and then we do it again. And that's the core process of what we do. The next thing that the EOS system wants you to do is give your customers a guarantee. And the idea here is just like Domino's promises you a pizza in 30 minutes or it's free, you take your customer's greatest fear and then you allay that by giving them a guarantee. In our case, we decided, look, if, you know, most of the stuff's gonna be free, but if you do decide to spend some money on something we put out, it'll either be worth it or we'll give you your money back. And then day 1 was over. So we went and did something fun that evening. We had an activity, and because it's a very competitive group of people, we actually had a pizza-making contest. The trick is that you end up with ingredients you may not actually want. So we went to the grocery store and we bought like some wacky ingredients. We had anchovies, pomegranate seeds, just like weird stuff that you don't often find on pizza. Oh, and I ended up with Spam. Spam and barbecue sauce. So you end up with those things and you have to make a pizza out of it, and then we ranked each other's pizzas to see who would win. All right, so day 1 is over. We start day 2 and we have a review of what we did yesterday. The thing to do at the beginning of day 2 is to go through and after everybody has slept on it, review what we did the day before. And because we're doing that, everybody has a chance to reflect, hey, is there anything we wrote yesterday that we didn't really care for or that we would change today after sleeping on it? And I think this is a great opportunity to understand how people make decisions. In our case, I love doing this the next day to check in because we actually had one of the team members say, hey, I didn't like something we wrote yesterday. We had a chance to go revisit that as the very first issue that we processed during the second day of the meeting. Okay, at this point, we went and did our very first thing in terms of goal setting. We picked our 10-year goal, and the goal of what I want to get to eventually is a billion impressions a year for the things that we're producing, and then figure out how we're going to get there. And the first step we did to figure out how to get there was this 3-year plan. So we actually went through and wrote all that out, and we defined each individual thing both from a number standpoint but also from a qualitative standpoint. What kind of office would we have? What size team would we have? What kind of environment would we have? What kind of people would be on the team? We tried to quantify and write all that stuff down, and it ends up as a bulleted list that you'll see here on the screen showing up in the VTO. This is the type of company that we want to be in terms of the specifics. We also created the ability to measure our success at that point. What should revenue be? What should the KPIs be? And we wrote all that down as well. And so we sat down and we envisioned all that, and we did the same methodology as we did previous stuff. Everybody writes down their suggestions, and then we got together and compared notes, hashed all that out, and then came to consensus about what it should actually look like when we write it down as our answer and our North Star for how we're going to build our business. So in this case, we wrote it all down in the VTO, and after we had the 3-year goal, we moved on to the next step, which is the back of the sheet. Today's sponsor is Moby Capital. Whether you need cash to solve a problem in your business or just need financing to grow as fast as you would like, Moby Capital is a great option. What's unique about their product is they offer financing in an unsecured manner. Moby Cap lends against your future revenue expectations, so there's no need to do things like pledge a house or do additional personal guarantees to make it work. And the best thing about Moby Cap, they're located just down the road from me here in Austin, Texas, and they can turn around loans in as often as just a few hours. If you're interested in learning more about Moby Capital, go to mobycap.com. And tell them that you heard about it on Girdley World. Thanks to them for helping with the video today. Now back to the show. All right, so we know what our 3-year plan is. Now we do our 1-year plan, and you can see how this is working. We had 10 years, 3 years, and now we're doing 1 year. And in our case, it's almost the end of the year. So instead of doing plans for this quarter and for the rest of the year, which would be about a quarter and a half, we just decided to do goals that would get us through the rest of the year. The story is different if you're using EOS in a more concrete or defined business that already understands what it is. But for a startup, you often break rules in the EOS system a little bit, and this this is one we decided to break. Rather than to do two sets of goals, we just did goals of saying we need to do this stuff through the rest of the year. So here's how we did it. The EOS rules say we can have 3 to 7 goals that need to be written as SMART goals, which is an acronym that'll show up on the screen here that defines what a great goal is. Because those rules are there, we knew that we just had to pick the most important things that we were going to track as a leadership team between now and the end of 2023. So we wrote out all the goals— revenue plan, individual things that we need to do— and then we assigned an owner for each one of those things. And you could see how I did a great job because I ended up with no goals personally, but that's fine. That's what the team members that are working alongside me, Ty and Will, who are on the Girdley Media team, that is their job. And what's powerful about this is it creates an enormous razor for us. And a razor is an idea that helps you make decisions really easily. Whenever something new or a shiny object comes up, we can look at it and say, is this in line with one of the goals that we currently have? And if it's not, then we know that that needs to be something we say no to. And the coolest thing is, 2 days after this meeting, we had a meeting and an idea came up, and I asked, is this in line with one of our goals, which are often called rocks? And in the case of that particular issue, It was not. So we decided not to do it and we didn't add it to our plate because we had already decided that that particular area of focus was not part of our priorities. It keeps you from doing shiny objects and it makes sure you focus on what truly is going to move the ball forward for your business. So here are all the goals. We have them listed on the screen. It's also a little scary because I've always kind of kept stuff to myself and this is the first time that like everybody knows what's going on. So we'll see how it goes. So we've moved on through about a day and a half. We've got through and filled out the whole sheet. Here's what's happened along the way. And I haven't told you this. We would run into issues that would be super important, things that needed to be processed or dug into deeply. And you have two choices at those particular moments when that happens. You come up with an individual problem and you can either rat hole your meeting, meaning you go down really deep into that particular thing and get everybody tired focusing on going from 50,000 feet down to 5,000 feet or even lower and slow down the meeting and things don't progress. Or you put those in a parking lot where you're gonna deal with them later. And that is exactly what we did. And I'm not gonna cover the IDS format and how that works inside of EOS, which is a super powerful problem solving format, but just know that's exactly That's exactly what we did. Everybody got to do it in real time. We identified the issue, we discussed it, and then we solved it. And then after that, we have a full-on VTO. Any changes that came out of IDSing may have adjusted the VTO. We're ready to go. And there's a one-page plan that is a gospel for us that we can use to plan and run our business from here to the end of the year. And then we do the last thing. Once the whole meeting is done, we sit down and we rate the meeting and we say, what's better for next time? Everybody rates the meeting on a scale of 1 to 10. And if it's not a 10, you have to explain what would have made it better. And to me, this element of constant improvement is so important. Important because you want an organization that's going to be constantly learning, humble, and growing. And the way to do that is through little habits like this one that I love to do at the end of each meeting. And you can take all that stuff and feed it back into getting better. And that's how we ended up creating a 10-year plan in just 2 days. And I think it's beautiful. We took the time to write a very concise and detailed vision of where we want to take the company. And for me, as somebody who really wants to create an organization here that will scale my impact on the world and help make people's lives better, like, this is so exciting because now I know there's going to be a machine that grows with me in terms of sharing the messages that I have and helping everybody at scale. So I'm so excited with Proceeding Forward, and I'm so thankful for my team members and everybody involved in creating this to help it happen. Thanks for watching this video here on YouTube. I'm having a ton of fun creating these videos. I feel myself getting better every single time, and it's an honor to get to do them and have the platform to be able to speak to folks and help at scale. If you enjoyed this, do me a favor, write a comment below, thumbs up, engage with it, send it to a friend, watch it 5 times, I don't care. This is all stuff that I wish I knew 25 5 years ago, and now that I know it, I just want to share it with other people so they don't have to do the same things I did. So thanks for being here, see you next week, and really, uh, am grateful to anybody that made it this far.