Create a physical plan. The power of a written plan is just priceless. In other words, if there’s a plan, even though everybody agrees on the plan and it’s only been shared verbally, it is not as powerful as putting any of this vision or power of goals in writing.
It makes for some mysterious reasons putting things on paper in a very simple way — it has to be a very simple document and it has to be a living document that people can relate to and have access to — all of a sudden it’s real. All of a sudden it’s a live objective, as opposed to a PowerPoint document that sits on people’s desks.
In our case, it always tells (us) the health of our clients’ businesses. We do believe that if our clients do well, we will do well.
We do bimonthly projections. Our business is so ever-changing for the better or for the worse that we have to keep a close eye on our projections. So we’re always projecting, we’re always figuring out what if. What if we were to do this project, what if this project was canceled, what if instead of getting this project we get this other one? There’s always looking at the business and the workload at least two weeks in advance.
At the end of the day, it has to be a simple plan. I do believe in simplicity, especially if the company is not a large corporation, but even for large corporations, the plan has to be simple because otherwise it will not be properly executed.
I have found that the most complicated the process — the most complicated the plan for us or for our client — the (fewer) chances it will be executed properly. And without proper execution even the best plans can fail.
Share the plan. As you grow and as more people are involved, it’s harder and harder to share the vision or share the goals with the rest of the team. You have to share it, hopefully there’s buy-in, hopefully there’s commitment from the team at all levels of execution.
The fact is it most likely won’t happen at all levels. But people have to be informed, people have to understand why things are done in a certain fashion, and people have to understand what the goals are — that’s where things in many ways become magical. All of a sudden everybody is working in the same direction; everybody is pulling for the same things. People understand your mission and the big picture, not just what they’re suppose to do at a particular time on a particular day, but they understand how they fit within the bigger goals of the organization.
You share the plan with everybody. It might not be the full plan, you might not share all of the reasons or all the thinking that went into it, but yes, you share.
Personally, I take time to share that with all the managers and with every new employee that we hire. Everybody else gets a summary and the actual plan.
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