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Is there an Elephant in the Room? Facing Critical Impediments can turn your focus to finding solutions, rather than fixating on the problems

Critical Impediments

It can be challenging to commit quality time to draft a new plan for your business or refresh your existing plan. The world is constantly throwing objects in our path and we tend to give these impediments a lot of our attention. For many, the ongoing barrage of new challenges to our business (and our lives) can cause us to abandon the idea of writing a plan or revisiting and updating our current plan than has gone stale.

Here’s a quick fix to help get you and your team over this hurdle. At the beginning of your planning meeting, whether you are working alone or with your leadership team, take a few minutes to make a list of the “Critical Impediments” that are currently getting in your way or holding you back from achieving your goals.

You can run through this exercise fairly quickly. We suggest you do this before getting into the specific goal setting and action plans. Try brainstorming without limiting ideas. Use 3-4 word bullet points.

List every current critical issue, problem and challenge that you feel may impede the accomplishment of your overall goals and objectives.

This can be done at the corporate level when you sit down to draft your Business Plan Summary (Step I in the Plan Genie workbook) and also when you start work on the departmental Action Plans (Part IV in the workbook)

Critical Impediments

Issue, Problem, Challenge

 

 Priority

 

This exercise has a couple of useful purposes. Firstly, it provides context for your plans. As you publicly acknowledge and document the challenges you are facing, you, your team, and your entire organization can turn your focus on finding solutions, rather than fixating on the problems.

Secondly, as you and your team transfer these worrisome thoughts from your brains onto a document, the emotional attachments seem to dissipate. This is a very freeing exercise. We quickly start to realize there are ways to work around, through, or over these impediments.

Space station commander, Chris Hadfield, explained that his team spent 4 years planning their six month mission. They were constantly looking at “what can kill us” and planned accordingly.

Photo Credit: Thank you @ellasegal via Twenty20 for your playful Elephant photo. Your work helps us express our message effectively.

 

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The Case for Planning: Brian and Jeff discuss the benefits of planning on The Jeff Andreas Show

Frequently confronted with the argument that you don’t have time to plan, we don’t believe this for a moment.

We all have the same 24 hours in a day, every day. This is not to say you aren’t busy, it’s to say that we know if you make time for planning, it is time well spent and invested. We challenge you to implement the practice of planning.

We adhere to the principle that there is power, or “magic”, in the act of writing our plans down. The magic is the clarity the act of planning provides and the “aha” experiences you have when you write your plans, you give them life. Running your business from a plan is a shift from a passive to active stance for your business.

We named ourselves Plan Genie because we know we all have those “3 wishes” for our business and while we can’t grant wishes, we can help teach and support you to make your own wishes come true in your business.

Planning is a catalyst for learning, growth and clarity in every aspect of your life. Why don’t more businesses plan? It’s a mystery.

To use the analogy of a grocery list. While a business plan is more complicated than a weekly shopping list, it is in essence the same principle and not that much more difficult to get into the habit of. How much more effectively do you use your time when you go to the store with a list. When you have a current written plan you start to see what’s both working and not working in your business. You get grounded and inspired.

Now, while we have so much uncertainty is a good time to get back to the basics of planning.

https://soundcloud.com/user-965676831/jeff-andreas-show-brian-gardiner-apr-21

 

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A Life Well Lived is a Life Well Planned

Today, April 16th is National  Advance Care Planning Day  . It just so happens that this year, the Advance Care Planning Day falls within the time of a pandemic and so the topic of death and illness has been brought to the forefront of our thoughts. While we spend great amounts of time trying to avoid the elephant in the room, we will all face our own end of life one day. While none of us know the “when” we can know the “how”, we can build our own best end of life plans: stating our wishes, documenting them and sharing them with our loved ones and ensuring our family physician has a copy of our “plan” in our medical file.

After you have done this personal work, communicated it to your family and have had the hard conversations with who you wish to appoint to help speak on your behalf one day, you can then revisit your business plan and see how ready you are for an exit of your business. Take time to address the What if’s.

As with a business plan, your advanced care plan can be updated and changed as time goes on and is encouraged to be revisited as your life changes.

Here are some resources to get started:

Willow End of Life Planning Services

Advanced Care Planning Workbook

Plan Well

Canadian Resource Guide

 

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COVID-19: Disruptive Innovation on Steroids

There has been a lot written about “disruptive innovation” in the last few years. New and creative approaches to established industries are changing the landscape. Examples include Uber disrupting the taxi industry; AirBnB is disrupting the hotel industry. The underlying message is about reminding business leaders to take innovation more seriously and avoid complacency.

We didn’t see it coming, but our business and personal lives have been hit by one of the biggest disruptors in recent history. And it happened quickly, in a matter of a couple of months. Very few, if any businesses or personal lives have escaped. (Uber and AiBnB are being impacted, … a lot of Uber drivers are now doing food delivery via Uber eats… while AirBnB is in disarray ) Whether you have seen a significant loss of revenue, or a major spike, or something close to normal, the way we operate our business has been irreversibly disrupted.

COVID19 has been a disruptive force. And it has created an exceptional opportunity to innovate. As the C19 storm eases, it’s time to renew our plans for the next cycle of our business.

The opportunities are everywhere for new ideas:

Our markets,

How will our market change? How will we adapt? What new products or services, or pricing will we offer?

Our Operations – What have we learned, so far, about how we deliver our products and services to our customers?

Our people – how do we redeploy our people more effectively in the months and years ahead?

Our systems – what lessons have we learned about our embedded way of doing things?

Planning ahead is an essential task for all business leaders. Planning requires more than generating ideas. It is important to cull, prioritize and to write them down in a coherent, easy to understand document that can be shared with your leadership team, your employees, your bank, your partners, and occasionally with your customers.

Taking your thoughts from your head and documenting them is the catalyst that cannot be overlooked and why a written plan is so powerful – there is magic in writing things down and speaking them aloud. Ideas die in the dark.

Now is an excellent time to get your team all rowing towards your next destination.

Any comments? Better still, love to have your questions about planning. What do you need help with?

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Use the Power of Positive Thinking in Your Business Plan

Business Plan Summary: Today’s tip is on Goal Setting

Once you’ve drafted your company Purpose and Unique Business Proposition, it’s time to turn our attention to goal setting.

There is something magical about goal setting. Most of us have experienced this at various times in our lives. We’ve set a personal or business goal, shared it with people around us, and we find that most, or all, of the things we wanted to achieve have actually shown up in our lives six months or a year later.

A resource speaker in my CEO peer group, Mary Lore, taught us about the power of our thoughts. In summary, her message was this:

  • When you change your thought, it leads you to:
  1. Change your behaviour, which creates
  2. Different results

Expressed another way, it’s about the power of positive thinking (vs. negative thinking = self limiting goals).

How to Get Started?

Thinking about goals is the starting point, but it is when we write our goals down that things start to happen. When we write our goals down, we are required to convert a vague notion bouncing around in our brain to a more tangible, concrete and specific result we aspire to achieve.

In this action, we make a conscious thought change that starts to automatically change our behaviour.

As the leader of your enterprise, goal setting starts with you. Once you get clear about your 3 year (we call your Destination) and one year goals. It’s important to get these same thoughts firmly imbedded in the minds of the leadership team, and in due course, throughout the company. This leads to changing behaviours throughout the company, and, before long, better results.

Goal setting sounds like an easy task and in many ways it is. In it’s simplest form, it is a list of outcomes, or results for our business at a future date. In business, we have so many ideas and options to consider, it can be a challenge to create a short list that is clear, concise, specific (quantifiable) and realistic.

One of the nice things about plans is that we are free to make changes as we move along into the future. So, go ahead and make a list.

Try this approach: Write a date down a point three* years in the future, then describe 5 to 10 results that would make you happy, your definition of success at that time in the future. Be liberal in your thinking. At this stage quantity is more important than quality. Please include your financial goals, both income and balance sheet outcomes.

Our next step is to cull the list down to a more manageable 3-5 solid outcomes and start to distinguish between a goal vs an action step, which we label Strategies in our Business Plan Summary.

  • Why three years?

For most companies, three years is about as far into the future for our goals to remain somewhat tangible. Beyond that horizon, our vision tends to become a little too blurry to be useful. It is also enough time to do the work, execute on the major strategies to achieve significant change. Every business is different and you may prefer a longer or shorter time horizon.

Additional Resources:

Mary Lore has excellent resources to further pursue this work of changing your thoughts. Link to her website: https://managingthought.com/

Chuck Reaves, TEC Speaker, shared a great message and reminder of an old message that still has impact. Have a listen to interview from the past which highlights where we find ourselves at the moment, approx 6 minute recording.
Link here on power of viral communication: What we think Impacts What we Experience: https://www.chuckreaves.info/ed%20foreman.m4a

 

 

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Planning Never Stops

Are you feeling like you’ve been hit by a COVID 19 hurricane? Your business ship took a blow and you’ve been scrambling to get things back under control. Immediate, urgent, short term plans have been devised and executed. Time lines are hourly, daily, weekly. There has been no time to think beyond the current week.

Planning never stops, it just speeds up and slows down.

As you start getting things back under control, your crew will be more anxious than ever to know where the company is heading, and how they can help.

How do you communicate the new direction and focus when you’re not clear yourself. The business leader’s primary function is to set the next destination and chart the course. Wandering aimlessly in a turbulent sea is not an option.

How can I make a plan when the future is so unclear and changing so quickly?

Yes, the landscape has changed dramatically in the last few weeks and continues to change quickly. But planning is always done in a fluid business landscape. Each time we refresh our business plan, we do so in the context of an ever changing world. We set our goals and determine our best course of action, taking into account the impediments we are facing and the resources we have available.

Most plans are stale after 90 days, and need to be rewritten. When the pace of change speeds up, this review cycle needs to be adjusted accordingly.

If our normal practice is to set goals for 1-3 years into the future, we may need to be focused on 3 to 12 months in the current situation.

 Where do I start?

Start with the big picture, your business plan summary. The structure in the Plan Genie business planning workbook contains five core pieces of information:

  1. Your unique business proposition – a succinct description about what makes your business special and unique.
  2. Your purpose – why your business is needed, as seen from the customer’s point of view.
  3. Your long term goals. Your destination 3 years from now (or 1 year).
  4. Short term goals, one year out (3 months).
  5. Strategy/Action steps – A list of the major steps we need to take to reach our goals.

Write it down!

Write your plan down in a structured, easy to understand format. Your business plan summary is the foundation for communicating the future direction for your business – where you intend to take business and how you will get there.

As you go through the process of writing your plan, you will gain clarity and confidence to tackle the challenges ahead. others are looking for this – your leadership team, your bank, your suppliers and distribution partners, and your customers.

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We’re Planning Machines

 It’s in our DNA. The human brain is a planning machine. We create hundreds of plans each day, some large, some small. We plan our route to work or school, what to make for dinner, a week-end fishing trip, our next hair appointment. We are always planning.

We contemplate a desired outcome (goal), determine how to achieve it (strategy) and take action (execute). We rarely, if ever write these plans down, totally unnecessary for the multiple small, simple, plans we action every day.

As our plans become larger, more complex we occasionally write them down.

Here’s an example we can all relate to: our weekly trip to the supermarket.

It starts with a goal:  we need food, replenish the pantry, to feed our family.

A senior executive (Mom, Dad) jumps in the car and heads to the supermarket with a vague plan bouncing around in his brain. He grabs a shopping cart and starts to execute on his plan.

Up and down the aisles he goes, somewhat randomly tossing items in the cart, making moment by moment decisions. (he’s an entrepreneur and takes pride in his ability to make decisions on the fly)  – a little of this, some of that, maybe one of these. Look, on sale, I’ll buy three!

Oh, that’s new!  I’ll give it a try.

Whoops, forgot the butter, back to the dairy section.

Now he rolls into the check out and begins to stress over the unrelenting rising price of groceries.

Back home, as the goods are unpacked, the accusing voice “where’s the coffee!”, followed by hasty return to the store.

Let’s compare this plan, to a similar one, only this time we write our plan down.

We start with a review of our current situation, then make a list. Check the pantry, the fridge, contemplate the meal requirements for the next week. Next, we organize the list by category, meat and poultry in one column, then fruit/vegetables, dairy, other. This will save time in execution at the supermarket.

Now, let’s ramp this planning process up a bit. Put the list on the fridge door so the whole team can get involved. The plan is updated and refreshed on a regular basis throughout the week.

After s few months of experience with this, we decide to make a further refinement, what if we had an overarching purpose (our why) to guide our decisions.  Something like, “ maximum nutrition that will promote, strong, healthy energetic lifestyle for our family”. Over time, chips and cheesies disappear from the list, replaced by fresh fruit and healthy nuts.

Now, we’re ready to execute. With list in hand, off we go to the supermarket. We save time, money, and get better quality results.

Better still, the family executive, Mom and Dad, can delegate the execution of the plan to their senior team members, son or daughter, and spend the day in the garden, go for a walk on the beach.

If this shopping project works better when we invest a few minutes to document our plan, and implement an ongoing planning process,  imagine the impact on your business if we develop the skills and habit of “running our business from a written plan”.

Research shows the probability of success goes up by 30-50%.

Your written plan is the foundation that builds team alignment, accountability, and clarity of direction.

It’s time to get started. Improved results will soon follow.

 

 

 

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The Planning Process

There is a process to planning, and it is a continuous process, as your plan will be constantly changing in response to your changing business situation. Fixing regular review dates, in your corporate calendar, is critical to the success of this planning process. If you commit to this discipline, you will find, after a couple of quarters, these regularly scheduled review meetings will

  • Create a planning habit in the company
  • Demonstrate your commitment to the plan, (which, is the #1 reason most plans fail) and
  • Build in accountability for the execution. (You will see how this accountability works later in the workbook in the Action Plans section.)

Good planning is a collaborative process. This workbook is designed to allow the company leaders to set the overall direction for the business and also engage appropriate level of employee participation. Your plan gains momentum when employees are involved in creating the action plans – and are held accountable for it’s execution. It’s interesting to watch the behaviour at the reporting out at the first quarterly review meeting, and then observe the changes as the team gets into motion in the following months. As employees gain a clearer understanding of where you are, where you are going and how you intend to get there, they will align their efforts with yours to accelerate your growth.

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What exactly is a business plan?

A Business Plan has two parts.

The first part is the narrative plan: A description of what you expect your business to achieve and how you will accomplish these goals. It starts with an outline of where you are today, and includes a description of your destination, and how you will get there. In plain terms, the narrative plan is a road map for the journey ahead.

The second piece of the business plan is the financial projections. These typically include:

  • An annual budget which shows your revenue and profit projections
  • Forecasted Balance Sheet , future expected asset growth
  • Cash flow projections
  • A Capital Budget that reflects the capital investments needed for the business to perform on its plan

Many companies create an annual budget, a forecast of revenue and expenses, and call this their business plan. It’s important to recognize that the narrative business plan leads this process. Without the narrative plan, you have no foundation to make financial projections. (Other than repeating last year’s numbers and fudging in an arbitrary growth factor.)

There are several other reasons for writing a narrative business plan. Firstly, to inspire your employees to deliver on a specific set of performance metrics, or goals. We all like to know how we are doing, from the CEO to the sales team, the service reps or the admin group. The business plan provides the reference point to measure progress.

Secondly, to improve and strengthen teamwork and cohesive- ness – people enjoy working with teammates to reach a goal, to achieve something worthwhile, doing it together, celebrat- ing their successes, learning from their mistakes.

Finally, and most importantly, writing your narrative business plan will help you to better understand your business – you need to truly understand your business if you want others to understand it and be engaged with you in achieving extraordi- nary results.

A well managed business plan will put you back in control of your business. With clarity and control comes peace of mind, not only for the owner and leadership team, but for all employees; that feeling, throughout the whole organization, of knowing where you are, where you’re going, how you are

going to get there, and how each individual can contribute on a personal level.

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Clarity Creates Confidence

Lewis Carol in “Alice in Wonderland” said it best:

One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. “Which road do I take?” she asked.

“Where do you want to go?” was his response. “I don’t know,” Alice answered.

“Then,” said the cat, “it doesn’t matter.”

In business, if we aren’t clear where we want to go, we run the risk of following the wrong path, leading to poor, sometimes disastrous results. If your employees do not know where you want go, they also may go down the wrong path.

Clarity Creates Confidence … a simple and powerful idea. These three words capture why your business plan is so important. Put another way, lack of clarity creates confusion and uncertainty. Without a clearly written plan you are asking your employees to work in a constant state of confusion and uncertainty, which adds to frustration both for them and your leadership team.

Clarity Creates Confidence … is easy to say and easy to understand, but not so easy to accomplish. In every busi- ness the pursuit of clarity starts with the first draft of your business plan, and improves with each new update and revision. This is why we built Plan Genie in a format that allows you to continuously update and clarify all aspects of your business. It can seem overwhelming to keep all pieces of your plan current, but if you take it in bite sized pieces, and engage your employees on sections that are relevant to them, the task is easily manage- able and can be fun.

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