EP #30
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Trey Sheneman: [00:00:00] I want you to imagine NASA in the middle of the Apollo launch, they had the blueprints for the rocket. They had built the rocket, they had the best engineers in the world. Everyone was waiting on bated breath in the middle of that launch room. For someone to say T minus 10 seconds and start the countdown, right?
Imagine somebody doesn't say that. What happens? That is exactly what a strategic plan does in your business. It ensures that things happen on time because without it, the mission never makes it to the moon, and it certainly doesn't make it back, and your business stays where it is. We're gonna talk about strategic plans on today's episode of 10 Minute Masterclass.[00:01:00]
Welcome to 10 Minute Masterclass. I'm your host, Trey Sheneman, and it's our goal each week on 10 Minute Masterclass. To teach you timeless business principles that help you to affect today's business problems. Now, how do we do that? We do that by talking through the core four drivers of growth, marketing, sales, operations, and leadership.
And in today's episode, we're jumping down into the marketing bucket and we're picking up where we left off in the prior six episodes inside of the marketing category of 10 minute Masterclass. And we are gonna complete the storytelling around our unique method at our company, Herald called The Compass Method.
Now, if you go back and listen to, we'll put the episode numbers in the show notes here, 'cause I do not remember where they were. Off the top of my head, we've done an episode on building a competitive set analysis on writing better offers, on how to do good messaging, on how to hire the right people, on how to find the right customers, and on how to synthesize all of that information down together so you understand where you're weak and where you're strong.
In today's episode, we're gonna talk about the [00:02:00] final step of the compass method, which is building a strategic plan. See, this is where all of that data, all of those insights, all of those aha moments. Get turned into an action plan the way we do. Building a strategic 90 day plan here at Harold is not a 12 month plan.
It's not a five year plan, because plans that are a year or longer in the making aren't really plans. They're kind of, they're kind of visions. They're pictures in your mind that you're trying to to complete. They're not really missional that you can give to a team for them to activate on right now, because a year is a vision.
A quarter is a mission, and missions are what helps win the war. So that's why we try and pair everything down to a 90 day plan. It's short enough to create urgency, but it's long enough to create momentum. And the key reason why it's able to do both of those things is because 90 day plans bring focus.
Focus is the active word in a 90 day plan. It's sort of like. A seasonal menu at a restaurant. If the menu's the same all of the time, it ends up getting a little bit boring. [00:03:00] But if you change the menu every couple of days, you're gonna confuse your kitchen. But a but a seasonal menu, a menu that changes a handful of times each year, that's the sweet spot that keeps the, the chefs engaged, that keeps the crowds coming back.
And so that time horizon, to me, is exactly what a, a company can use in order to actually drive the mission forward. See, a few years ago. I did a full day strategy session with a brand, and they brought their quarterly strategic plan to the meeting with me, and they sat it down on the table and it made a very audible noise when it hit the table because I think it was 50 or 60 pages long.
And I looked at them and I said, what? What is this? Oh, this is all of our strategic ideas for the quarter. And I started thumbing through the book. They weren't lying. It was literally just a big book of ideas for the quarter. And I remember looking at him going like, by the end of the day today, you guys are in for a little bit of a rude awakening on how paired down we're about to make the next 90 day plan.
So we did just that. We spent the day and at the end of the day, they ended up with a plan where every [00:04:00] objective had a measurable outcome, a clear owner, and a set of tasks that. Absolutely could be done in the next 90 days. And if they did them, the objective would be met. When you start thinking about ideas and you start building plans that are actually doable, that's actually when you're gonna start doing them.
That that's the magic in it, is when you put time constraints and the right sort of resource constraints on a plan and. That gives you a better shot of actually seeing them happen. And guess what happened for that company? That company was running a membership program and the next 90 days, that quarter of membership growth was 40% higher than the quarter before it.
So they certainly stuck with that thinking going forward. It's not just the small companies or kind of the mid, the mid companies that I see this working into. I was recently reading an article about Spotify, which, you know, maybe some of you guys are even listening to this on Spotify, they actually have 90 day plans inside of their company too, and I love this.
They call them bets and. Fast moving industries like music streaming. If you're planning in 12 month cycles, you're already behind. So Apple Music, Amazon music, people [00:05:00] like that. They're breathing down Spotify's next. So they've kind of conditioned their team to think about these plays that they want to take every quarter as bets.
So instead of getting stuck in like. The analysis stage, Spotify puts these teams on these 90 day missions around these bets. So they either win the bet or they learn from the bet. And the good news is, is in that situation, when you win from the bet, obviously you win. But when you learn from the bet, you don't necessarily lose, you get to recalibrate what your bet's gonna be for the next 90 days.
So I love that language. So all of that context. It's time for you to distill down your 90 day plan. So how do you do that? Well, I think the best way to think about building a 90 day plan is to think about this three question filter that I use around a good plan. The first question is, does this objective that I'm gonna put into my 90 day plan, is it going to drive revenue, retention, or reach?
If it's not gonna drive one of those three things, it's probably just busy work. The second question is, can we measure if its impact was realized inside of [00:06:00] the next 90 days? If not, it's probably still too big or too vague. The third question is, does it also then build momentum for the next quarter?
Meaning like, it's not just a one and done thing, but it's something that we can actually then build from and keep going because if it is a one and done thing, it might just be a distraction and then we don't wanna do it. See, I want you to picture like your lining up a row of dominoes. Have you ever seen those fun videos on YouTube where like somebody does this chain reaction and you know, the basketball lands in a bucket and sends a ping bong ball into the air.
You know what I'm saying? Most of those chain reaction videos always start with a really long line of dominoes. So I want you to have that picture in your head. The first domino is actually pretty straightforward to knock over. Well, the first domino in your strategic plan is your low hanging fruit. It's the, it's like some sort of a simple high impact win that you can identify.
But here's the thing, if you line up those simple. Wins those impactable wins in the right order. That first domino ends up not just being a win, it ends up setting off a chain reaction [00:07:00] of wins in the upcoming quarters. Because when teams start to win together, they start to hit objectives and those objectives move the needle.
They pick up momentum, which is the name of the game with building a really great strategic 90 day plan. So once you've answered those three questions and you kind of got the ideas around what's gonna be in your 90 day plan, and again, you should be connected. These ideas to the research that you've done through the other six steps that we talked about in the Compass method, then you actually have to structure out your plan and here's how you're gonna do it.
Step one, you're gonna pick maybe three big objectives. Four, definitely not five. I don't think two is enough. Three feels like the sweet spot to me. If you can't pick, if three haven't really bubbled up, then you, you're not. As clear as you need to be on your priorities. Once you have your three, you're gonna break each objective into key results.
Now, again, in the show notes, we'll add this, this note, but I've done an entire episode around how to build objectives and key results. So I'm not gonna belabor this point. And a great book to read on this resource, uh, or great resource, excuse me, on this to read, is, uh, measure what Matters by John dor. So you're gonna get [00:08:00] objectives and key results.
You're gonna assign a owner, one owner per key result. If it's everybody's job, it's nobody's job. So it has to be somebody's job. Once you have the owner. The owner's gonna set milestones. Every 30 days, we're gonna check, are we on track to the milestones? Are we ahead or are we behind? And you're gonna review those milestones weekly.
'cause if you're not talking about the plan every week, it's just gonna collect dust. So this strategic 90 day plan ends up being a force multiplier in your business. When done well, I once advised a company that refused to narrow their focus. They wanted to launch three products, redesign their website, and open two new markets.
All in the same quarter. I remember when, uh, the CEO finished saying what he was saying about that. I was kind of sitting there going like, and, uh, exactly how big is your team again? And, you know, he reminded me that it was only four full-time people. And then I proceeded to go to the whiteboard and, uh, you know, draw out for him exactly what I thought the resource investment was gonna take to do all of those [00:09:00] things, to launch three products, redesigned their website and open two new markets.
And I stuck a dollar figure kind of in a, in a thought bubble at the end. And he thought the dollar figure was. Like margin or profit that I was trying to say. And I was like, no, no, no, this is cost on these people in order to do these things. And so we were able to recalibrate pretty quickly there in the moment.
And he said, okay, well maybe we'll drop one. And uh, I only convinced him to drop one and 90 days later I ended up checking in back with that CEO. And by the end of the quarter, they had missed all of their goals, but one morale was really low on the team. They missed their deadlines. And the CEO was what?
He was disappointed, he was frustrated. And so I come back for the next quarterly meeting that I'm doing with them and I'm like, can we talk about building a more comprehensive approach at a plan that the team can actually do? Because when the team loses, they also lose momentum. But when they win, even if they win small, they gain momentum.
Momentum is a powerful force inside of our business, and that's the main thing your strategic plan is gonna do for us. So again, [00:10:00] you're gonna ask the three questions. If you're gonna build a strategic plan that has those five parts, and you're gonna know that ultimately the strategic plan is like going back and being in that launch room with NASA.
Waiting on somebody to do that countdown and knowing when you hit the button and say yes to the plan, everything is gonna go the way that it's supposed to go. So as always, on 10 Minute Masterclass, I hope you got something practical out of this that you're can apply in your business this week. And if you haven't thought about it yet, I'd love to have you subscribe to our newsletter.
You can do so by going to. 10 minute MC. The way we spell that is one zero MIN mc the letters mc.com. We'll put the link in the show notes and hop on our newsletter. Each week we send out some sort of an impactful resource relevant to that week's topic that you can use in your business to apply this week.
Until next time, I'll catch you on the flip side.
