MBA1436 Sharing Your Long Term Strategic Plan With Your Team

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Hey oh. Welcome to the $100BA Show. Good business strategies in your ear every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's episode you will learn why it's important to share your long term strategic plan with your whole team. Recently in our company we shared our strategic plan with the whole team. We're talking the year ahead three years from now and ten years from now. What are goals as a company? And we're talking details. Revenue growth, profitability, the size of the business and our employees. The type of initiatives we want to launch. For the longest time we haven't shared our strategic plan with every single employee, every single teammate on the team. It was more of an upper management discussion. But recently we were encouraged to share with every single person on the team. And in today's lesson I'm going to share why. What impact, what positive impact does that have on your business? Why share these grand plans with every single person regardless of what position they're in? What are the benefits and how will it help you actually achieve those goals and actually implement the plan on a day to day basis? This could be A difficult task for many people, especially if they've been solopreneur ing for some time. They're the ones making all the decisions. And as they start building a team, they forget to include them and in the decisions that have been made, or even just sharing, hey, this is what we're going to be doing for the next year, three years, 10 years. They hold the cards really close to the chest. In today's lesson, I'm going to share why that's a mistake and what are the benefits for sharing your strategic plan with your entire team and also how to do it, how to actually roll this out and present it to your team. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Before we get into details of why you want to share your long term strategic plan with your team, the benefits of it and, and how to do it, let's talk about what a strategic plan is. It's basically a very simple document. This could be, you know, five or six pages. And for us it's simply a Google Doc. We prefer Google Doc because everybody on our company has a company email. And we can easily share this doc with anybody with a company email. And the doc is basically an overview of what our mission, our vision is, what the company's all about, what we do, who our customers are, how we actually acquire these customers, who. But then it goes into the details of what we want to accomplish in the next year, in the next three years and in the next 10 years. And it actually starts with the 10 year plan. And I like that because this actually gives you a broader perspective on what you're trying to achieve in the long term. A ten year plan really allows you to see where the company is going, what the ambitions are, and also sells your employees when they read it, hey, this company is here to stay and actually has a plan for the next 10 years that really inculcates a lot of confidence. But even just for you as a leader, you understand, hey, this is where we see ourselves in 10 years. When you have a 10 year plan or a 10 year vision, you really start to realize, wow, I gotta think big. I gotta think about how I'm really going to influence the marketplace and really help our users and the people that we serve our customers. And this plan has detailed numbers like how much revenue you're going to make every month, what are your profitability goals, what's the size of your company, how many employees, what are some of the products or features your products will have, what are some milestones, or maybe there's certain people you're trying to connect with in your business, people that you would love to have as users or clients. Who's on that wish list in 10 years? Who are your clients? So that's the 10 year plan. But you're going to do the same thing for three years as well as the next year, 20, 20. And then you break down that year that you have ahead into quarterly goals, quarter 1, 2, 3 and 4. What you are going to achieve in each quarter? What's the focus? What are the outcomes? What are the deadlines so you understand what the focus is for the next three months. This is a very, very clean and straightforward strategic plan that looks ahead as far as 10 years as well as the next three months. Nearest three months, shout out to Dan Martell, dan martell.com our business coach who shared this strategy with us, the strategic plan. We implemented it and it's thanks to him. So now that you have your strategy plan, and by the way, it took us a good two full working days to put together our strategic plan. A lot of discussion, a lot of note taking and writing down and you know, really just trying to figure out where we're heading. And this is a group exercise. Anybody who is in upper management, you know, we met with me, who's the CEO, the coo, Nicole, as well as our cto, Taylor. And we really went through the whole document point by point and made sure that we were happy with the answers that we knew without a shadow of a doubt, some clarity to where we're going in the next 10 years, three years, year, each quarter. Now, once we nailed our strategic plan, it was time to share it with the team. And this is the leap a lot of people don't take. We decided, hey, why are we just keeping this to ourselves? Let's share with every single person that works on the team so they understand what they're working towards. They also can see how they can contribute towards those goals in whatever role they're in. This is incredibly helpful and I'll share some of the things that I learned through sharing the strategic plan with the team. So how do we do this? Well, we do an all hands meeting. This is a meeting with every single employee every single month. And it's a video call because we're a remote team and there's people around the world that work for us. So we wanted to make sure that we address this strategic plan in that meeting. So we dedicated about 20 minutes into the meeting, we went through the document. We didn't go into super detail but we went through it enough for them to understand the highlights. But then after the meeting, we said, we're going to share this document with everybody. We shared in the Google Doc and we said, hey, if you have any questions, please let us know. We want you to take your time and read this in detail. But we went over the highlights at the meeting itself. We didn't get a big reaction or a lot of feedback. I think people were just kind of absorbing what they heard. But afterwards, I got a lot of private messages and on meetings or on calls, I got a lot of great positive feedback from the team saying, hey, I really found that useful. I now understand why we're doing what we're doing. I understand our why. As a company, one of the things I was really surprised by was how inspiring it was. A lot of people felt inspired, wow, this is where we're going in 10 years. This is what we're going to do. This is what the company is going to look like. This is incredible. I want to be a part of it. It also instills a lot of confidence in your team. Like, hey, this team, this management team has it together. You could be doing this. And if you don't share it, they don't know it. They don't know what you do behind the scenes. But when you share, they're like, oh, wow, this team actually has a plan for us and that management really has our backs and is sharing what they've decided with us so that we're in the know. So it gives them confidence in management, in you. But most of all, what this does, by sharing your strategic plan with your team, it gives them the blueprint of how to win. They understand what winning looks like. This is what winning looks like at my company. In this company, if you want to feel like you're winning, these are the things that we have to accomplish. Imagine you're playing a sport, but you didn't know how to score. You didn't know what would get you points on the scoreboard. That would be incredibly frustrating. And that's how things are in a lot of companies. People just show up to work, they do the tasks they're told, but they're not really sure if they're doing well or not. With a strategic plan, they could say, hey, you know what? I'm doing things towards the plan, towards the goals we have in the near future and in the long term future. Now, even though we shared this strategic plan, this is not the end. It's going to take more iteration, more time, more discussion. We're going to have to refer back to it in our next all hands meeting. We're going to have to talk about it in our retreats. People need reminders and we all need to be reminded of what the prize is, what we're trying to work towards. So this has got to be something that it's not just shared once and just forgotten about. It has to be referred back to. It's got to be like the scoreboard. Hey, let's look at the score. How are we doing? Have we hit our goals for the quarter? For the second quarter, for the third quarter, for the fourth, for the year? How far are we ahead when it comes to our three year goals? This has got to be something that is opened over and over again and referred to constantly because it'll remind people, hey, this is what we're working towards, let's not forget. So this is just the beginning for us. We're going to continue to refer to this document and something that we're always going to be reminding our team of. The next thing is this is a working document. Yes, you want to make sure that you know the majority of it is intact and followed, but you may need to make some adjustments as you grow. You might be ahead of time, you might be a little bit behind and things need to be carried over from one quarter to the next. This needs to be clear to the team that this may change. So you gotta keep on looking at it because hey, this is a plan. But we may need to adjust course as we move closer to the destination.

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Sxm to wrap up today's lesson, one thing I want to pass on to you. If you are resisting sharing your long term strategic plan with all the details, with all the numbers, with all the financial metrics, with the whole team, if you're resisting this, you're feeling, oh, I'm not sure if this is the right move. You're uncomfortable with it. Ask yourself this question. What harm does it do? What are you really worried about? What negative impact will it have on your business? You might be surprised that you can't really articulate it because there's really nothing to worry about. And even if there are, weigh them against all the positive things I mentioned in today's episode. You'll find that the positivity will outweigh the negativity or the negative reasons, or the things that you're worried about, things that probably you don't know for sure are even real. These people that you hired, your team members, they are in it with you. They are building this dream with you. Give them a roadmap. Give them something to allow them to understand where they're going so they can do a better job for you, so they can help you achieve those goals. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now on whatever you use to listen to podcasts, whether it's Apple Podcasts, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, Overcast, we're on them all. By hitting subscribe, you're telling the app, hey, when the next episode's available, let me know and I'll be ready right on your device. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Planning is one of those things you need to make time for. Nicole, our COO and my co founder, she made time in the calendar for us to create or strategic plan to make it happen. If it wasn't in the calendar, I would have been busy with something else. I would have found something else to do. So if you don't make time for it, it just doesn't happen. Make time for planning. Planning is so important because hard work is important. But if you're working on the wrong things, you're really spinning your wheels and wasting your time, your money, your energy. Planning allows you to find out what you really want and go for it. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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