It’s common to create a plan for a full year, but it takes a long time to create and by the time you’re halfway through the year, so much has changed that the plan often needs re-building. Introducing a quarterly planning cycle can improve the agility of your business to react to change.
Your quarterly planning cycle will allow enough time to achieve significant large goals, yet short enough to stay focused. When starting work on a goal, all that’s guaranteed is that it will take time and, probably, money; it’s usually only when a goal is completed that the benefit is seen. Hence, it’s extremely important to complete goals, not just start them!
Everyone knows how hard it is to break bad habits – just ask a smoker! But good habits can be just as hard to break… so we encourage you to create a new good habit – invest a full day every quarter to work ON your business and plan the next 90 days of significant goals and break them into weekly actions. This makes it easy to complete and track progress.
It’s important to choose the right mix of goals to put in your quarterly planning cycle, to ensure that your business will drive forward in the ways you want it to.
Why is it important to have a quarterly planning cycle or 90 day plan?
So where to start?
Start with the end in mind, the big dream, your long term goal the ultimate achievement. Once you know what this is we can start to work backwards and reverse engineer everything you will need to do to get you there. Then in each quarterly planning cycle you set your short to medium goals and actions that will move you toward the long-term goal.
What should be in it?
In a nutshell, goals that can be measured, the resources you may need and the action points to achieve them
How does it help?
You have clarity on what you need to do, any resource you may need to do it and an action plan of how to do it.
Prioritise Your Goals
Assess the impact, consider the impact of each goal on your business or personal life. Prioritise goals that will have the most significant impact on your long-term success.
Review feasibility, evaluate the feasibility of each goal, taking into account the resources, skills, and time required to achieve it. Prioritise goals that are feasible and realistic to achieve within your current circumstances.
Consider the potential reward, evaluate the potential reward or benefit of each goal. Prioritise goals that offer the highest potential reward or benefit for your business or personal life.
Rank your goals based on their level of urgency, impact, feasibility, and potential reward. Use this ranking to determine which goals to tackle first.
Create a plan of action, once you have identified your priority goals, create a plan of action for achieving them. Break each goal down into actionable steps and develop a timeline for completing them.
Review and adjust, regularly review your progress towards your priority goals and adjust your plan as necessary. This will help ensure that you stay on track and make the most of your time and resources.
Remember, prioritising goals requires a clear understanding of your overall objectives and the resources and constraints you are working with. By taking the time to prioritise your goals, you can focus your efforts on the most important and impactful areas, leading to greater success in achieving your long-term vision.
Focus on Profit
Focusing on profit is hardly a secret, but it’s very easy to get distracted. You’ll see lots of topics such as vision, culture, rules of the game, and lots of other great things that every great business needs. But many of these things are important in the medium and long-term, not the shorter term; The focus all of the time needs to be on increasing profit.
Every quarter, even if you have one goal focused on the long-term aspects, it’s very important to have even more goals focused on profit growth. And ideally, profit growth that you’ll see before the end of the quarter.
There are many topics that can focus on profit growth. Here’s a shortlist of ideas:
- Sell more products and services to your existing customers
- Find more new customers (target a specific number)
- Increase prices, increase margin, or both
- Systemise to increase productivity and therefore £/hour
- Change the mix of products to increase the average sale value
- Increase the range of products
- Add services such as delivery, maintenance, training, etc.
If you need more ideas, just ask; we have lists of them in different categories.
Choose leveraged goals
The principle of leverage is all about getting out a multiple of what you put in. Good marketing is leveraged: invest £1,000 and get £5,000 of sales as a result. Creating systems is also leveraged. By investing a few hours in a clear system, you can save many hours of skilled labour and reduce time and money wasted on errors. Working on time management topics can also be leveraged: invest an hour in better organising your time and save several hours every week forevermore. And planning is definitely leveraged: invest a day in planning and achieve a lot more of the right outcomes than you ever achieved without the right plan! We refer to this principle as leverage.
As you choose the goals to work on during the next quarter, pause to ask yourself, “is this leveraged? “. If you can see that you clearly get out a lot more than you need to put in, it’s probably a good leveraged activity.
The opposite of a leveraged goal is one that involves doing some work and getting a result that achieves only an equivalent of the input – or even less. Many of the activities involved in working IN the business lack leverage. Spend an hour on bookkeeping, and you have little business growth to show for it. But spend an hour finding a good bookkeeper to outsource the work to, and you’ll save valuable hours every week forever. Your time is valuable and needs to be focused on leveraged activities. Working in this way will ensure greater progress than on goals that merely keep up with demand. Leverage leads to growth.
Make it a habit
Set a date for your quarterly planning cycle for a rolling year ahead. Ensure that every one necessary is available on the day to attend and to focus on the planning. Keep it in perspective – we’re recommending that out of approximately 200 working days per year, you invest just 4 in the planning of the other 200! This is important – make it non-negotiable.
