- No!
The beginning of the video should be what we do
when the video's not on.
(upbeat music)
How to execute your business growth.
Look, here's the deal if you're frustrated with where you're at
in your business or every day you wake up and you're like how
do I grow my business, you know?
Or maybe you're frustrated with the people and just in general
like at the end of the day I know that businesses
hit a wall at five years.
Maybe you're in business 10 years and really it's about not
growing 'cause every time I get the call people are like,
"I'm losing passion for my business."
Would you be losing passion in your business if you're making a
ton of money, right?
And I don't think is about money but I also want to make sure
that we address the right problem because if it's the fact
that you're not growing the business than that's what we
need to talk about.
Don't say you're losing passion with the customer or the market
or why you started the business 'cause those things are
typically not true.
You know, what I know is that when somebody's connected with
their vision, the business grows.
When they are hiring incredible people that also share in that
mission that are really intelligent and capable,
the business grows.
When they have a plan of attack, the business grows.
Not having those things that's when you run into challenges and
you know I definitely understood this challenge because to me
when I started my company Spheric,
I literally just like kinda showed up every day.
I was working a hundred hours a week,
I didn't really understand how to run a business.
I hated going to meetings.
You know what I've learned since then is that meetings are the
only tool that you have as a leader.
As a manager, as the entrepreneur,
the only thing that you can use to help guide and improve and
really kind of show people the way is meetings.
Now nobody wants to spend 30, 40% of their time in meetings so
what I want to walk you guys through is a way of thinking
about overcoming that.
Because my business Spheric shifted dramatically
when I understood.
I was sitting down with my advisor Stu,
really mentor, advisor.
I mean I hired him. I put down 150 grand I said,
"Dude, I need you to come in to look at this business to let me
"know where am I missing things that are just obvious to you,"
'cause this guy was retired.
Had run Executive Vice President of the one of the largest
telecommunication companies in our country.
So having that kind of expertise,
look at the business and give me guidance was invaluable.
The first thing he shared with me and he says,
"Look, the cool part is Dan you have a vision, okay?"
So, number one is you need a vision.
He was happy that I had a vision.
Here was my challenge.
I never shared it with anybody.
Mean what's the point of having a mission for your business if
you never take the time to communicate it with anybody?
And I like, "But what I should be sharing this every day?"
He's like, "Look, there's different ways you can do that."
You can kind of have everybody, you can have meetings and
recite it in the meeting.
You can talk to somebody and say hey the work you're doing
ties back to this which connects with our mission or when
somebody comes to you with a decision to make and you can
just kind of remind them, well here's our mission as a company
which decision do you think would most align with that?
So he really taught me not only to have a vision but how to
connect that within my team.
So that is, if you want to grow your business that is a
prerequisite has to be there get on it.
Number two is you need to have a three-year plan and some people
are like, "Well, I want a 10-year plan." Look the vision is the
10-year plan.
It's what's possible.
If I wanted to grow 10X over the next five years,
10 years, 25 years whatever it is,
that's the vision.
What you need that's more granular is a three-year plan
but here's the deal I use one piece of paper to draw my
three-year plan.
I literally start this upcoming year,
three years later, split it up into three years and then what
I do is I do per quarter and I just kinda start mapping high
level strategies and say what would need to be true for those
numbers to make sense.
How many people would I need on my team to make sure that
I could actually execute this strategy?
What kind of budget would I need to make sure that come together?
Because that's gonna affect the different things that I put
together on the plan and what order I do them in.
So you need a three-year plan.
The third thing that you need is a one-year plan.
Now here's what's different with the one-year.
Picture this, you have a grid, you have four quarters on your
one year plan, Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4 and look I'm the first one to
say and admit I hate corporate jargon.
I hate that... I even hate the word quarter.
If there was like look there's three parts of your year or four
parts of your year I'll use that but for you not to have a grid
that outlines alright, we've got the first part of the year which
is three months, okay?
Call Q1, call it whatever you want,
what are the activities, the projects,
the strategies that we're gonna execute in each month?
So it's kind of saying well if the three-year is just you know
three years at a higher fidelity,
when you come down to the one year it needs to be broken off
per month and I like to plan in 90 day, three months.
Call it whatever 12 week windows because I feel like that's as
far as the ability to actually make really good,
accurate decisions in your business is gonna happen.
So are the first three.
Now, this is when it starts to get granular.
Number four is you need quarterly review meetings.
Okay? Once a quarter, again I hate the word quarter,
but what do you want to say? Once every three months?
Once a quarter you want to sit down with your team and you want
to do two things first part of those meetings and I usually say
a minimum of a day most often two days depending
on the size your business.
You want to spend the first part of the meeting reviewing the
previous quarter.
The previous three month window and saying what did we plan and
what do we get done?
How good were we at executing our assessments?
That is the first part because you want that data,
you want that information to inform planning the next part.
Okay, so then in the second part of the day if you do the first
part of the morning and then in the afternoon what you want to
do is start to say okay, we know these things to be true.
How we plan the next quarter to hit our goals?
So you have the one-year plan,
you've got the next quarter in front of you.
You start planning the strategies.
Look, it should not take any more time than that.
But most companies don't give themselves the opportunity to
sit down and review it.
Right, they just keep going and going and they get struggling
and then they're frustrated and they're like
why can't I get any progress made.
It's like well you haven't planned.
You haven't given yourself the gift of stopping and pausing.
Really not only just looking at what you've done but
appreciating and rewarding yourself in building that
confidence of achievement because I know you're not going
every day to work and not making progress but I also know that
you're not taking the time to stop and reflect and that to me
is what those quarterly meetings.
So we have three that are quarterly and then the last one
for the year for me it's a yearly planning meeting.
So you have three quarterlies, you know,
the end of Q1, Q2 and Q3 and at the end of the year you do the
same framework, the same strategy but
you plan the whole year.
What did we do for the year, what did we do for next year and
that at a high level is super important.
So that's number four.
Five is weekly team meetings.
Now, I'm deliberately saying team meetings because the other
day I was working with a private client and I said, look you know
they're having some struggles in the business.
I said invite me to your team meeting.
I just want to get on there.
I'm not going to say anything, I just want to listen to the
conversation, the communication how people report.
You can learn so much about a business by just listening to
how they communicate.
And at the end of the meeting, I called the CEO back after and
I said, "You do realize that meeting was a client review
"meeting. It wasn't actually a team meeting."
And they were like, "What do you mean?"
And I was like, "Well, you talked about all the projects
"that you guys were working on.
"All the clients and how they're doing and how you're gonna get
"wins for them but you didn't talk about the business.
"About the marketing, the sales, the operations,
"legal anything about improving the way the
"business does what it does."
And they're like, "Oh."
I mean little distinction, just a small little tweak to realize
that they didn't even have the weekly team meeting.
So I gave them the format and the agenda and the following
week they had a weekly team meeting.
The team was like blown away.
It was almost like a light bulb went off.
Of course we would talk about sales and make sure that in our
planning we have those projects built in.
Right, of course, you'd want to get updates on
how the financials doing.
How is the hiring and the recruiting process going so that
we can keep up to demand.
That to me is a nonnegotiable every week as the leader you
need to be creating these meetings.
And then finally number six you need a daily stand up.
You need one moment in your day where the team comes together.
You can do it on the phone, I've used uber conference or other
conference technologies.
You can do it on video chat using GoToMeeting or Skype or
Zoom or whatever technology platform you want or that's why
I call it a stand up, in person nobody sits down and it's a
really simple format.
What are the top three initiatives that you did
yesterday, what are your top three objectives for today and
are you stuck and it's a reporting meeting.
Nobody's collaborating nobody's discussing anything.
They do it, It should take six minutes and at the end of it as
the CEO and manager you circle back
with anybody that's stuck.
That is the high level framework for running and
executing a growing business.
One, you need to make sure you have a vision.
Where're we going, what's the journey,
what's the destination?
Number two, you need a three-year plan.
You need to at least say here's we're at,
here's we're going and here's a high level things that we need
to be true for that outcome to occur.
Third, you need a one-year strategy plan
that's like a grid.
Right, where you do it on a monthly basis and split up in
the four chunks call them quarter,
call them whatever you want but that's how it comes together.
Then you need to make sure that you're doing quarterly reviews
on your team and yourself's ability to execute.
Even if you're two people in your company,
you should do this.
And then you need your weekly team meetings looking at the
different departments in your business and how you're
improving those and hen finally a daily stand up.
Some people call them huddles, call 'em what you want,
it doesn't matter.
You just need to connect because the team that connects more
often grows faster.
It's just of the way it works.
There's more opportunity to not let somebody go off on a tangent
or work on something that's not valuable.
You need companies and teammates communicating frequently.
That is the strategy for you.
I'd invite you to leave a comment below.
I want to hear from you what strategy
are you gonna implement?
Are you gonna start with the planning?
You gonna start with the quarterly reviews?
What thing resonated with you?
Leave a comment below and as per usual,
I want to challenge you to live a bigger life and
grow your freaking business.
I'll see you next Monday.
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