How to Do Strategic Planning: Part 1 of 4

How to Do Strategic Planning, Part 1 of 4 from Thriveal CPA Network on Vimeo.

Transcript:

This is strategic planning season. At the end of the year in November and December my partner and I always do strategic planning. That’s what you should be doing too. If you’re an entrepreneur, you should be doing strategic planning right now in November and December. And this is part one of four videos. I’m going to tell you exactly how we do it. Listen in and follow up on those videos.

First, why planning? Strategic planning? Why planning? Because any entrepreneur who’s a successful entrepreneur, typically you’re going to find them out in the future, deciding the future before it gets here into the present. Planning is a key concept to winning. You don’t plan and figure out your future in the moment, you will have already figured out some calendar system in the future and that’s planning. Planning is always in the future.

Now what is strategic? Strategic is choosing. Choosing is prioritizing. Being strategic is all about eliminating all the things you won’t do, basically. And that happens when you choose the things you will do and that’s the strategic part. And these videos are going to tell you exactly how to do it.

Here in part one, as with a little intro there, the first thing we do is a huge, massive brain dump. My partner and I went in a conference room, we had about 30 pieces of sticky paper and we wrote at the top, all the categories of the big ideas we had had all year or that were in our drive list. We keep a drive list. What is a drive list? It’s something we keep track of where we just, we dump all of our ideas to this drive list and we keep it categorized throughout the year. We’re always, always keeping up with it. A drive list is kind of your brain and when you’re a bigger company or you’re running a bigger company, you can’t keep everything in your mind so you have to have a place to keep it. And so a drive list is where you just dump everything. You categorize it. You probably spend, you spend an hour a week just managing and organizing your drive list because that’s your treasure chest. Everything’s in there.

At the end of the year, during strategic planning season, you pull it out and you dump it on a bunch of sticky pad paper. And so that’s the first thing you do is kind of categorizing and we’re not to the strategy yet. That’ll be in part two.