Planning equals results. You need to plan to level up, just like you need to press the button on the elevator to go up. But before you plan, you need to have a good idea of where you’re going.
Take Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, for example. When Amazon launched in 1995 in the garage of a rented home as a website that only sold books, Bezos had a vision for the company’s explosive growth and ecommerce domination. He then raised funding to start moving up the ladder.
Strategically his ideas didn’t just fall in his lap – he planned, he reviewed and he made calculated decisions to take action and overcome risks. But all along the journey, he had a goal and a plan for how to get there.
The best way to build your plan is to break it down into bite-sized quarterly action points and to highlight situational opportunities and roadblocks to allow the business to be flexible and concentrate on what matters most.
By strategically moving through a consistent process of planning the key goals, actions and business performance indicators, while highlighting the potential opportunities and roadblocks, you can create a laser-vision focus to build growth and certainty in your business.
So, where is the best place to start? Here are the first questions and steps we work through when preparing a 90-day one-page strategy plan:
- What is the business looking to achieve in the next 12 months? Break this down into what matters most for the next 90 days.
- Work out what actions you need to focus on first in each area of the business and make sure it is crystal clear exactly what needs to be done.
- Brainstorm potential opportunities and roadblocks.
- Set revenue targets, broken down into specific revenue sources.
- Decide the important key performance and results measures that should and can be tracked, and start tracking these.
As a year is too long and a month is too short when it comes to planning, it’s a good idea to work in quarters (90 days) to allow the business to focus on what it’s going to achieve this quarter.
“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.”
– Tony Robbins