How To Do Strategic Planning: Part 4 of 4

How to Do Strategic Planning, Part 4 of 4 from Thriveal CPA Network on Vimeo.

Transcript:

Okay, we’ve done all the heavy lifting in the first three videos in Strategic Planning Season. And as we’ve been mentioning, November, December is strategic planning season, this is the season. The holiday season? No. This is the season where entrepreneurs plan their future. And go back to video one, to find out what planning and what strategic means. Why did we put those words, strategic planning together, they’re real important.

So, what have we been doing up to this point? We’ve really been just dumping all the things out, prioritizing, listing core initiatives. Really just getting more and more granular as to what we’re going to accomplish next year. Now boots on the ground happens in phase four. This is when now we take our core initiatives, go see what that means in video three, we get our core initiatives and we put them into what we call eight to 10 calendar containers. And calendar containers, a lot of our the people who follow us and we teach entrepreneurs, there’s a process we go through called strategic calendar work blocking.

This methodology about owning your future and how to operate and create some sense of strategy, moving forward in your business has to do with owning the future of your calendar. And so now we define all the initiatives and the things we want to do in eight to 10 calendar containers. Now these calendar containers are going to be, these are the eight to 10 hats that my partner and I are going to decide to wear in our business, right? I mean, that is so strategic, right? To limit everything to eight to 10 types of work. Now, those calendar containers are pretty big. They’re big rhythms. So what you’re going to find, you’re going to find those on a calendar that recur week after week.

So you probably know if you watch a lot of my videos that I have a huge content blog. That’s one of my calendar containers. Well, my partner and I have a strategy and planning calendar container. That’s a required part of our strategic calendar work blocking. And then we make other calendar containers that relate to other things we’re going to do. Like there’s a big team care calendar container, because we spend a lot of time with our team, leading our leadership team. And so there’s a big block for that.

And what we do is we roll our eight to 10 calendar containers throughout our whole calendar. So we’ll go to January, the first week of January, we’ll lay out all of those calendar containers and they fill up the whole week, right? Eight to six, Monday through Friday, we filled the whole week up and then we just hit the recurring button. We recur it every week and it zips all the way through our calendar, all the way through 12/31. Now we have these big buckets that we go stick stuff in, right? We have this team care bucket that might have four hours on a Wednesday. And we’ll go put different meetings in there, meeting with a team member, a weekly team meeting, weekly leadership team meeting. So the container holds all the things we’re going to do. And of course I have a huge content calendar container. And so I’ll go fill it up. The content I’m working on, these videos are in a calendar container that I’m making.

So the calendar container now becomes our future. It is a depiction of our future as seen on a calendar. So now when us and our team roll into our future, we’re rolling into these containers and we’re operating in the way that we’ve already planned by going through a very methodical, strategic planning type phased system. So our calendar now depicts, this is what we should be doing to actually fulfill our strategy.

And so that’s video four of four videos on strategic planning. So I hope you will try to fall into strategic planning this year. Just give it a shot. I think last year it took my partner and I four days to complete all of our strategic planning. This year, it’s going to take us five to six days. So it’s expanding because we have a lot of things we want to do. And it’s taking a lot of time to call through them and say no to a lot of them. So it’s just taking a lot more time. And also as we grow, strategic planning will take more and more time.

So I hope these videos are helpful, so you guys know what we’re doing during this really important strategic planning season. So let us know if you like these videos and, you know what? Reach out to us. You can hit us. You can go to blumercpas.com or you can go to thriveal.com and you can find out more about how we help entrepreneurs do things like strategic planning and how we help them be successful. Thanks for watching. We’ll see you.