When it comes to quarterly planning, many business owners lack a strategy to tackle the task. As a result, they make ineffective plans to achieve unrealistic goals, if they even plan at all. Here’s what you should include in your 90-day plan and how to make planning a priority.
Foremost, any plans regarding your business should align with the mission and vision that you’ve set.
Creating a vision that leads everything and everyone in the business is critical. This vision is central to every function and every goal. Vision doesn’t change. It doesn’t vary and is not flexible.
Once you are clear on your vision and mission, then you can break them down to create practical plans with achievable strategies.
Following the vision, then you decide the ‘One Year Overarching Business Goal’. Think of what you need to achieve this year to bring you closer to your vision.
Then break it down even further and decide this quarter’s key business goals. These are the things you want to focus on intentionally this quarter. You’ll have a million different goals, but narrow it down to only the most important.
Lastly, you have to include the expected results. Envisioning the expected results allows you to set your Reticular Activating System, or RAS for short. Similar to the principles of the law of attraction, doing so will condition your brain to look for and work towards that expected results.
How to Make Business Planning a Priority this Quarter
Whether you own a business or work for someone who does, you have probably experienced the “never enough time” phenomenon. If you want your business to be a long term success, it takes this kind of intentional disciplined planning. Success rarely happens by mistake, so be sure that you are always planning for success, not just this week, but for the next decade.
Here are three tips to ensure there are no excuses when it comes to planning.
A Proven Process to Creating Successful Quarterly Plans
- Decide Your Goals – As mentioned previously, you may have a list of goals for the quarter but narrow that list down to 3 or 4 key goals. Creating a narrow focus will be easier to track and measure.
- Prioritize the strategies in each goal to narrow to a list of 2-4 strategies – Think of this as the action part of your quarterly plans. What needs to be done to achieve each of these goals?
- For each strategy, determine the weekly task required to achieve it – The action may not be the same every week, but you should plan to do something weekly, until the strategies are complete.
Regular and short-term planning allows a business to pivot and respond more effectively to external and internal changes. If we develop a healthy and productive planning process for our business, we can then jump into action based on data, facts and historical information to decide our next move forward. Using these business planning tips and process means that planning becomes an organic part of your business, instead of a special event.
At ActionCOACH, the largest business coaching organizations in the world, certified business coaches establish regular planning cycles with their clients. Because planning is critical for success and often sheds light on opportunities, we use a systematic approach in which planning becomes a normal course of business.
Our clients are required to attend GrowthCLUB to develop planning habits. GrowthCLUB is a quarterly workshop which helps clients and their management team plan and prepare their 90-day plan. The purpose of the workshop is to assess where a business is on their long-term plan and specifically what they did to achieve their goals in the last 90 days.
Join the club! Reserve a table for your business at our next GrowthCLUB! Register ASAP to make sure you’re able to reserve your spot and complete the pre-work.
