When Ed Laflamme was in the early days of being an entrepreneur, he didn’t know what direction go in because he didn’t have a plan. Once he established a plan, he was able to focus and go in one direction.
“If I would have stayed on course and developed a plan earlier, I would have done better faster,” Laflamme said. “It stopped me from making mistakes.”
As part of LANDSCAPES, Laflamme and Bill Arman, consultants with The Harvest Group, spoke to attendees about the steps to setting up a strategic plan.
Here are some highlights from their presentation: How to Build a Strategic Plan and Stick to It.
Planning preparation.
- Hold meetings off site, even at a client’s facilities like a restaurant. You should also think about having a facilitator lead the session instead of the owner doing it, at least the first time. “Don’t hold them in your office sitting at your throne,” Arman said.
- Do a lot of fact finding. Assign teams to find out information needed for the meeting like safety reports or other areas you want to address. Don’t do it all yourself. Go over the good and the bad lessons you’ve learned in the past year.
- Investigate trends that are happening in your area like the drought in California where removing turf is increasing. You had better put that in your plan to tackle it or take advantage of it.
Planning session fundamentals.
- Establish rules of engagement like: Be respectful, active listening, cell phones off, etc. “Have the group come up with those items,” Arman said, adding he recently facilitated a meeting with a client where everyone put cell phones in a bucket, which worked out well.
- Practice the 90-10 rule. Laflamme said you should focus 10 percent of the session on what caused the problem and 90 percent on how to solve the problem.
- Build consensus with a priority map. Arman said you should draw a bullseye with success in the middle and lines branching off that list with everything you talked about. Then, have a blind vote for five of them on a piece of paper. You do it blind so one person, like the owner, doesn’t have a more influential vote.
- At the end of every session, look at what you accomplished and the action items. “That way, everybody understands where we are now,” Laflamme said.
- Get a night of sleep before making any big decisions. Go to dinner afterwards and have more informal talks about the day. “Then after a night, everything becomes much clearer,” Laflamme said.
The “here to there” premise.
- Establish where you are with key metrics like safety, revenue, gross margin, net profit, client retention, client penetration, key employee retention, internal quality levels and accounts receivable.
- Establish where you want to be. Do people map/organizational chart based around revenue goals. For example, think about what revenue number you want to be at in three years, with what services and which people you’d need. Then do that a few more years out.
- Pick one to three key metrics to improve and figure out how you will measure or know when you have accomplished them.
Key elements of a plan.
- Determine your vision (where you see your company going,) mission (why your people come to work every day,) core values (narrow down to five that matter to you) and success behaviors. Figure out how these link to your key metrics.
- Have a specific marketing plan because marketing and sales aren’t the same thing.
- Figure out what type of clients you make the most revenue from and go after them.
- Establish areas you want to fix, and one reason why you struggle in that area. Arman had a client struggling with client retention, and the group decided they had poor retention because they over promised on jobs and then got off to a poor start when executing. Moving forward, they decided to “overkill” on with the initial execution of a job and then can work on other parts later.
Putting the plan together.
- Prioritize and determine timing with deadlines: “It’s amazing what gets done when you have a deadline,” Arman said.
- Action items should be broken down into the following:
Critical: Right now in the next 30 days (Make sure your I9s are filled out correctly.)
Urgent: Within 90 days
Important: Within year
Long range: Two to five years
Execution of the plan.
- Document everything you’ve done and give the “Playbook” as Arman calls it to key people. Have it in writing and then assign it to different teams or a champion who can take care of those action points.
- Conduct regular “touch base” meetings to report progress to team.
- Always keep in mind that you may have to adjust the plan when circumstances change. “Don’t get frustrated if it doesn’t work at first, because as we all know stuff happens,” Arman said.