Crush Your Loftiest Business Goals With a Few Hours of Planning

Written by Joel Brda | 3/30/16 11:30 PM

Whether you’re running a small business or a $100 million-dollar company, mapping out quarterly and year-long business objectives (and a detailed plan of attack) is the only surefire way to stay the course. Yet it’s amazing how few SMBs actually take the time to craft strategic plans, goals and action items for their company.

Over the past few months, we’ve conducted 2016 business planning for a few B2B and B2C companies and of course our own company. We started with a One Page Strategic Plan (OPSP) — provided in “Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't” — for a high-level look at our clients quarterly and 1-3-year goals. The complete set of planning tools also contains guidelines for SWOT, a Vision Summary, Personal Goals, etc., which serves as an invaluable framework for businesses of all sizes.

If you're impatient, short on time or have never sat down and created business goals, putting pen to paper on your goals might feel daunting. But doing something is better than nothing. That's why we recommend leveraging an abbreviated version of the OPSP for your quarterly or yearly business planning. In just a few hours, you can start executing on items that have been lingering in the back of your mind for months or even years.

Here's how to get started:

Start Accomplishing Your Business Goals Today

If you only have a couple hours and need to get started fast, below are the most critical sections to complete. Filling out these metric targets will force you to think strategically about your business needs and goals, solidify your top 3-5 one-year priorities, and break them down into actionable monthly and quarterly goals that you can rally your team around. Start by setting long-term targets for the following 3 areas:

3-5 Year Targets

Target Date (within 3-5 years)
Revenue
Profit

Although planning for years down the road might seem premature, it’s important to think at least 3 years out. This will set the framework for your 1-year and quarterly goals below:

1-Year Goals

1-Year Targets
Revenue
Profit
Gross Margin
Cash
Average A/R Days
Average Invoice Days
Revenue Per Employee

Revenue and profit are obviously important here. Without cash, revenue and profit don't mean much to SMBs. The number of days it takes you to get paid and how fast you invoice are critical pieces to your cash flow. Revenue per employee is also an important benchmark. Healthy, mature and streamlined companies shoot for $200k - $300k per employee.

Next, you need to narrow your focus to the objectives that will get you to your 1-year goals:

1-Year Key Initiatives

Initiative
Initiative
Initiative
Initiative
Initiative

The following section should take a bit of strategic thinking. Pick the 5 most important goals your company needs to accomplish in the next year to thrive and hit your revenue/profit goals. Hold a mind mapping session either by yourself or with your trusted management team if you have one. Throw out everything that comes to mind. Discuss each objective, refine the most relevant ones into specific goals and vote on the top 5. You should end up with a list that will take your company to the next level when accomplished.

Quarter Goals

Quarter
Revenue
Profit
Gross Margin
Cash
Average A/R Days
Average Invoice Days
Revenue Per Employee

Quarter Rocks

ROCK 1 (primary
ROCK 2
ROCK 3
ROCK 4
ROCK 5

Your rocks should reflect your 1-year initiatives, just on a smaller scale. These are the important goals (ROCKS) for you to accomplish next quarter that will help you achieve your 1-year goals. These must be very specific, actionable and measureable. You’ll want to assign a person to each rock and define a date and KPI. The KPI doesn’t have to be a number, but you must be able to easily determine whether each rock was hit. If this is your first time creating quarterly goals beyond sales targets, strike a balance between obtainable and challenging that is right for your business.

BONUS

Theme, Scoreboard, Celebration & Reward

This section can be optional — but at a cost. Uniting yourself and your team around the goals is a critical piece of the puzzle. Designating a theme, creating a physical scoreboard and planning a celebration and reward makes your goals tangible beyond a piece of paper.

This element elevates your goals from written text to a theme your team can see and get excited about. And when you accomplish your goals, everyone will celebrate the achievement together, ready and eager to take on the next quarter.

Be creative here; your reward doesn’t need to be expensive. Many times, the most successful company celebrations or events don't cost much but rather focus on the people and team work versus extraneous details.

What are you waiting for? Take what will be the most important couple hours of your year, create your abbreviated OPSP and take solitude in knowing you have a plan, you have goals and you’re running your business the way it should be!

If you need assistance or motivation, we are happy to be your sounding board.

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