Podcast Transcript

[00:00:00] Sean Steele: Okay, welcome everybody this week to my little 10-Minute Tuesday style episode. This is being recorded in late April, 23. And that means if you are on an Australian Financial Year, which of course many of our listeners are not, but if you are on Australian Financial Year, you have a new financial year starting in two months, about two months. So, this is a really good time for you to be considering what your priorities are for the next couple of months to make sure they're as successful as successful as they can be. So, I'm going to talk to you about 10 planning questions that I think will really help you get in a position where you can crush the next financial year.
 

[00:01:39] Now, this is not a strategy development session, so I'm not giving you question to help you develop strategy. I'm helping you with your execution planning. So now my assumption is you've either got a strategy already, or if you want to learn more about how to do a strategy well, then you can go to the scaleupsroadmap.com,au.
 

[00:01:56] I have a course on how to develop strategy better, but this is just about. Let's assume you're going to be doing stuff already, right? So, whether you've got a good strategy and it's really well optimised, or you have no strategy and you're just kind of making it up as you go along, you're going to be doing stuff for the next 12 months. So, I want to give you some questions that are going to help to make sure that you get the best possible inputs into your planning process so that you get the best possible outputs out of it. Because as we all know, the quality of your question is determines the quality of your answers. So, you need to be, make making sure you ask good questions.
 

[00:02:26] And why in particular? Because this is one thing I always talk a bit to my clients about. You know, your entire team, whether it's two people or a hundred people, they are going to spend their next 12 months focusing on the sort of projects and the pieces of work that come out of the answers to the questions that you ask annually when you set up your business plan for the year.
 

[00:02:49] So if you're going to set up your execution plan, we want to get your head in the game. So let me give you some questions now before we do a couple of mindset things. First of all is you've got to remember that what got you to here won't necessarily get you to there. Like the reason we actually take time out every year and pause and reflect and adapt and then plan forwards is because the stuff that got you to where you are today may not be the things that you need in the future, which is why we need to.
 

[00:03:13] Second of all, you don't have to have all the answers, and that is the point of the questions I'm going to give you. This is about making sure you get good questions that ensure you get the right inputs because you, I bet, are really good at assimilating a whole bunch of inputs and then making sense of them creating some perspective and moving forward. That's what business owners tend to be really good at. But you got to get the right inputs, um, about your business performance, input from your team, input from your customers, input from the market. So I want to make sure that I've just prompted your thinking so that you get good inputs, and then hopefully we're going to get much better outputs.
 

[00:03:45] Okay? So first of all, we're going to do this almost in three stages. First, we're need to gather learnings from the past. Then we're going to focus on the now, and then we're going to focus on the future. So, question one, let's go into the past. What's happened in the last 12 months’ worth of performance? So, the question is, have we performed in the last 12? How did you do operationally? How did you do financially? Did you hit your targets that you set? Did you blast through them or did you fall short? What specifically did you miss or nail? And what do you need to learn from that Capture that learning Second. By the way, you might want to get a pen for this one, because you've got 10 things to write down.
 

[00:04:16] I am doing a blog on my LinkedIn Scale Smart. So, if you're not already following that, you can follow me on LinkedIn and you will get access to Scale Smart, which is a weekly blog that I push out through LinkedIn. Okay, question two, what's worked? Well, what activities actually brought you some success last year?
 

[00:04:35] You need to think about the things that you need to keep doing and perhaps even amplify. So, what things really worked? You want to make sure you don't lose focus on those things, and they perhaps even get amplified further. Perhaps you can build on top of them going into next year. Question three though is what didn't work? Which parts didn't work as expected? There was probably a whole bunch of things that you did that did not work out. Maybe things that actually you're still doing or your team are still doing that you need to stop immediate. Anything maybe where you fell short or it's clearly not creating value, but it's taking up time, you don't want to waste resources on things that aren't working. You need to be able to say no and to stop things, to create space for new things. Okay. And then fourth question here is, what should you have done? Like with the benefit of hindsight, what should you have done? If you could rewind time again, knowing what you know now, if you could have this 12 months again, what should you have started doing? It's a really important question. You've now got a whole bunch of hindsight, and of course everything's all very easy in hindsight. But knowing what you know now, go back 12 months, what should you have started doing earlier? Given what you know today, I want to make sure that you capture that learning before you go into the now and into the future. Okay, so that is the past stuff. How have we performed, what's worked, what's not worked, and what should we have done earlier with the benefit of hindsight? Okay, so now that's first core four questions. Next set of questions is all about now, we need to reflect on what's happening right now in your business. Get present, you know what's happening with your team, what's happening with your customers, what’s happening with your market.
 

[00:06:02] First of all, let's start with your customers. What are your customers telling you? And if you don't know, call some customers. Get on the phone and speak to your customers. Talk to your team. They've probably got lots of input, but talk to your customers. You cannot move too far away in your business where you forget that actually you need to probably be speaking to at least one customer a week as the CEO of your business. No matter how big your business gets, you have to retain, touch with your customers so you know what's happening and what's changing with them. So, what are they telling you? Can you see an opportunity to deepen the relationship with them, you know, solve more problems for them? You need to know what kind of problems are on your customer's whiteboard, you know, the stuff that they're going to be trying to tackle this year or that is problematic for them, and what's changing in their industries. I'm assuming this is, you know, B2B oriented. And to make sure that your solutions are addressing the biggest problems, because that's where your income comes from. So, you always have to start this process when you're thinking about right now with your customers.
 

[00:06:58] Okay, next question, question six is what's happening overseas? That's not a question that often people ask and they forget that actually your industry exists in a whole bunch of other countries. What's happening in your overseas, in your industry right now may be a really interesting indicator of things that could become a trend in your market before others realise it. You've got to expand your field of vision. Get out there and look at what's happening outside your local market so you get some global context. You can always get some really interesting ideas. And by the way, I would strongly encourage you to reach out and connect with other similar business owners in your sector in other countries, because if neither of you are doing international, you've got nothing to lose. You both stand a lot to learn from each other about what happens in your local market. Reach out and build a relationship, you'll be amazed at how open people will be to sharing what's going on in their business with you when there's clearly no competition between the pair of you. Okay, question seven, what about your team?
 

[00:07:52] What are your people telling you that you should prioritise? At least once a year, you need to be doing a deep employee engagement survey. I don't mean a, you know, one to ten, how happy am I at work? It's not enough. You need something that's comp, like probably somewhere between 20 and 80 questions at least that gives you a depth of insight as to how their perspective on every element of your business, your leadership, your product, you know, the quality, the teammates, their professional development, their salary, all of those things. You can find employee engagement. So just Google for them. You'll pro, I bet you Chat GPT can probably build you a great one. But you need to know what your people are telling you. That should be a priority for your business. Because the reality is if you cannot help your team succeed and or if you're not giving them feedback and they don't tell you they're going to leave for things that you could have addressed. If they are giving you feedback and you do nothing with it, that's another reason for them to leave. You have to get the feedback and you have to make sure that you can assimilate that. Figure out what the priorities are and go back to your team and say; Hey, I've heard you and this is what I'm going to be doing about it, and this is what we are going to be doing about it as a business, you have to get good input before you do your execution planning about what is going to help your team succeed and what do they need from you. Okay. A last question in this section. Question eight is, what's changed internally in your business? So, what's changed internally? That could be your capabilities, that could be key people maybe that you don't any longer have or you do have now.
 

[00:09:17] So maybe you've got some new capability, maybe your systems have changed and the scalability of them. Maybe you've got new constraints that you didn't have 12 months ago. Maybe you've got new factors that are influencing your business. So, what's changed internally in your business? Because in reality, that puts constraints and boundaries around what you can actually achieve next year. It's the frank and fearless reality. Yes, you can do new things that your team are not yet capable of and you can stretch your team or you can acquire other talent. But the reality is you can come up with whatever execution priorities you're like, but if your systems, your people, your capability, your resources are unable to achieve that, then you're going to have a big mismatch and everyone's going to feel like they're failing. So, question is, what has changed internally your business, what is the current state right now because it sets you up with a bit of context as to what can be possible.

Okay. And now I'm only going to give you two questions for the future. So now let's talk about the future. Last two questions. What disruptive forces are happening or coming your way?
 

[00:10:17] Perhaps there are some new trends, some new disruptive factors that you could, maybe there's some things that you can see that are emerging already in your industry that you need to get closer to and understand better, so that you can either take advantage of them and you can harness them or you can think of ways to protect them by optimising, playing with bits of your business model, because some of these trends could be super positive and be big tailwinds for you. Some of them could be headwinds for you, but if you put your head in the sand and you don't look out and forwards, and you can see some things starting to happen, but you're like, I'll just wait till that thing is like, you know, a major thing, it's probably going to be too late.
 

[00:10:55] You're going to be getting impacted because somebody else is going to be focused on that thing and you could be left miles behind. So, you do need to look out and go what disruptive forces are happening or coming that I can see right now, or that I think are going to be coming right now. By the way, you may get a bit of that insight from your little overseas market scan as well.
 

[00:11:12] Okay. And then finally, as I said, this is not a strategy development session, but you do need to be thinking about where do we want to be three years from now? Because you need to make sure that this business plan, when you step back and you look at the 12 months of priorities that you've just set up, you need to think about is that going to be moving me towards the space that I want to own, that I can be uniquely great at in the next three years? As I said, this is not a strategy planning session, so we're not figuring out the really, you know, core planks of strategy and how to get there and optimising our business model that we do in Scale Ups Roadmap. This is an execution planning session. What am I going to prioritise for my team for the next 12 months?
 

[00:11:48] But you still need to be looking into the future to make sure that your execution priorities this year are leading you towards owning some white space in the medium term in your industry. You've got to look at this set of priorities and go, if we achieve this. So, that's the 10 questions. And obviously the next question is, okay, what are you going to do about, what are the execution priorities?
 

[00:12:08] So final questions are, what do we want to achieve over the next 12 months? And I would encourage you to break those down into objective. And key results. So, objective might be a broader goal. Like, you know, we want to build a world-class sales and marketing infrastructure and some key results, which are key deliverables that are align with that objective.
 

[00:12:26] Okay. We need to implement a new CRM, new marketing automation system, get a digital marketing manager, whatever it is. And then the second question there is, who's going to be accountable once you've drafted all of your objectives and key results for the year, and you've got your little business plan. Who's going to be accountable for driving and reporting? Who's going to be the driving force and the reporting force behind each of those deliverables? If you have nobody accountable for driving them, you will get no momentum. It can't all be on your shoulders. You need to have people accountable. They don't have to do all the work. They need to be the one accountable for rallying the resources, managing it like a project, like a piece of work, getting other people involved, and making sure that it gets done in the timeline that you set out. That's where the transparency and accountability and leadership starts to lift. So, my question, just to kind of go back one step there, is when you step back and look at this plan, what you need to be thinking about is, is this going to make me a better business or just a bigger one?
 

[00:13:24] If it is just full of incremental, slight incremental improvements, it's probably leading you towards being a bigger business that is not going to necessarily make you a better business. So, I really want you to reflect on that when you look back at this plan. Now, the way to make sure that you end up with a better business is to start with a strategy, but that's what Scale Ups Roadmap is about. If you want to look at Scale Ups Roadmap, I'd love to have you join me in a self-paced program or a cohort-based program. Just go to scaleupsroadmap.com.au and you can find out, just drop your email there and we'll tell you all about it. It's not ready for launch yet, but it is coming soon. So, I hope that it is helpful for you in your setting up your planning for success this year. I would also love to hear about your favourite questions. So, you know, jump onto the scale smart edition on the blog and pop it in there. Or send me an email at seansteel.com.au. I don't care how you find me on LinkedIn. Send me a dm. I would love to hear what your favourite questions are when you are doing your annual planning exercise. Pretty much everybody does it in some way or shape or form, but I'd love to hear what your favourite planning questions are. Go and get planning. Hope you enjoyed today, and I'll see you again next week.