Easy EOS part 2

Alright friend, you did your VTO planner page 1 (right?!). If you’re new here, we did part 1 on last week’s newsletter.

Again, don’t break yourself trying to do long-range planning. It’s largely a waste of time in SMB’s. Things change too quickly for you to try to predict what you’ll need and do more than 6-12 months in the future. Unless you’re in a business like manufacturing, you just need to focus on the next year.

The real benefit in doing page 1 is setting your values and company philosophy. That will help you make decisions when shiny objects and new opportunities appear.

When a friend approaches you and says “Man you guys should really be doing X, my friend just got into it and is KILLING it!!” You can look at your VTO. Does this serve your long-term goals? Does this fit into your values, your purpose, your niche? Does it even address our target market?

If the answer is no to all or most of those, then that’s what your answer should be too. Got it?

So here’s the real meat of the program:

Now start working on your one-year plan. Fill in your profit and revenue numbers for the year (you can do this at any time during the year and project out 12 months)

Think about how that will look if you want to get there. What will your headcount need to be? Where will you need to hire/market/build inventory?

What other goals go along with that? Here’s a good rule of thumb: if you want your business to grow FAST, YOUR role (as owner) will have to change fast. Which means you shouldn’t be doing what you’re doing now.

Most owners are still heavily involved in fulfilling the work. Your first task should be to get someone else to fulfill the work, and you focus on bringing in more work. Then your next task should be to get someone to bring in more work.

So if you’re projecting big growth, your next year will lean heavily on hiring, training, marketing and strategic partnerships. This is where you can sketch out what that looks like.

Good 1 year goals often look like this:

• all admin/bookkeeping/customer service off owner’s plate

• digital marketing bringing in XX leads per day

• sales converting XX% of leads to signed contracts

• hire and train 3 new techs

• new warehouse move complete

Once that is done, the quarterly goals (called ROCKS here) flow pretty smoothly from this. You know the one-year goals, what do you need to get done in the next 90 to stay on track?

That might be:

• hire bookkeeper

• double number of customer service reps

• interview digital marketing agencies

• get agent to start looking at new warehouses

Note that there is a person responsible for each quarterly rock. If your name is next to everyone one of those rocks, your number one goal is to get all of that off your plate.

You will NEVER grow and scale this business if you’re doing everything. Capeesh?

Then the issues list are constraints that need to be solved before you can reach your goals. Things like choosing and implementing CRM software, formalizing your hiring and training program etc.

One good way to prioritize this is to look at your 1-year goals and figure out your number one constraint to reaching it. Is it revenue? Converting leads to sales? Having the people that can fulfill the work?

THAT is your number one job, fix the constraint. Everyone in the organization should know and help fix it. Then when it’s fixed, move onto the next one.

Simple, right? I know it’s way more complicated than this in real life, but hopefully you can use this to simplify your yearly plan and feel like you know where you’re going and how to get there.

As always hit me up with questions and comments with a reply….

Kriss Berg