The Business Planning Season for working on, discussing, talking through, arguing about and spreadsheeting over and over again various strategic business plans, tactical department plans and the ever-important sales and marketing activity plans.
Ultimately, every sales account plan, every marketing strategy and activity plan, every hiring plan, financial plan and product development plan will roll up to be your company's 2016 business plan. Perfect in its creation and, somewhat by definition of what it is-a plan after all-flawed in its forecasted end points. My own rule of thumb is that if the plan was met perfectly an entire 12-14 months later from its creation, then the management team probably didn't stretch themselves far enough.
Another good concept to carry into this business and sales planning season are the quotes from Eisenhower and Patton who both noted that the planning process itself is much more important than the actual plan that results
What we do know in "The Rhythm of Business" is that these three months represent the most exciting time of the year...
Just an exciting, crazy time of year followed by the reward of taking a couple of days off for "the holidays", and then, as a friend of mine, Ray Bixler, CEO of SkillSurvey, a superbly-run company, often says, it's Wash-Rinse & Repeat for the next year.
Given that, in addition to our "Day Jobs", most of us over the next three months will spend countless hours in planning meetings in hotels with no windows and eating buffet food and warmed over pizzas, I thought that it might be helpful to share in this blog five of my most favorite rules for planning sessions that just might help you through this season. There are actually "My Favorite 10 Rules", but I thought that for impact (and for content for my blog next week), I would try split these up into Five Rules this week and Five Rules next.
As a firm, we're involved in a couple of hundred planning sessions every year, so over a period of 25 years, we've accumulated a fair amount of Planning Session Best Practices both through solid results and a few... "well, let's never try that again" moments.
The answer btw to the question of "What are our detailed objectives in this planning process" should not and cannot be... "we need to deliver a plan to the board in December". That's simply a guidepost. The much more critical issue is to get absolute agreement among all of the members of the Planning Team as to why you're doing this as managers, and how you'll use the process and its outputs during 2016
These comments will then serve as the backbone to create the draft agenda that needs to be circulated.
The agenda should be divided into rough time blocks such as "first half of the morning, and "after lunch" and should never be forced into artificial times such as " 3:00 start discussion on long term vision". Having said that, the agenda must include...
4. Facilitation
Bottom line, if you're on the planning team, contribute as a manager rather than trying to be "the guy standing by the easel holding the marking pens"
At the end of every meeting day make sure that you allow a full hour, no matter how late it is or how exhausted everyone says that they are and go through all of the key points of the day's discussions.
Typically, the meeting notes are going to be taken during the meeting in real time on the overhead projector so that everyone can coalesce around the key agreements and "next steps". Within 24 hours following the meeting, those same notes need to be circulated in draft form to all of the members of the planning team
So, that's it for a start.
Hope this is helpful, as we enter into the season. Any questions, or want to know more, just schedule a call with us.
If you want a more detailed read of what it takes to create a full business plan for either your emerging or well-established business, you can click on to the download noted to the right and get a free copy of our 100 page "Writing the Winning Business Plan". We had fun writing and editing this, and hope that you will have fun reading it. Let us know what you think!
Jack's Rules:
Have specific business or sales planning questions that you want to bounce off me or other Derby Coaches, just email me, and we'll set a time to talk at the end of a day.
Derby Management...for 25 years
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Box 171322, Boston, MA 02117
617-292-7101
Jack's Cell: 617-504-4222