Podcast EP 124 | Five Things That Lead to a Bad Strategic Plan

What makes a bad strate­gic plan?

Accord­ing to Har­vard Busi­ness School, 92% of busi­ness plans fail due to poor exe­cu­tion. As a result, get­ting a plan to suc­ceed is difficult.

Your strat­e­gy should clear­ly explain your direc­tion, and how you will be dif­fer­ent from your com­pe­ti­tion. Then, your exe­cu­tion plan should detail specif­i­cal­ly where to com­mit your time and mon­e­tary resources to ensure you exe­cute that strategy.

In this episode, Kevin and Brad dis­cuss five things that lead to a bad strate­gic plan, how to avoid the pit­falls, and a method­ol­o­gy to devel­op effec­tive strate­gic plans that suc­ceed more often.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Kevin Lawrence 00:13

Hey, wel­come to the growth whis­pers pod­cast where every­thing we talk about is about build­ing endur­ing, great com­pa­nies, great teams, great, endur­ing cul­tures, great, endur­ing orga­ni­za­tions that take care of cus­tomers and do good things in the world. I’m Kevin Lawrence, and I’m joined as always with my co host, Brad Giles down in Perth, Aus­tralia, Brad, how you doing today?

Brad Giles 00:34

Pret­ty good. Thank you. Yeah, pret­ty good. It’s deep, dark, mid­dle of win­ter right here. And how are you doing?

Kevin Lawrence 00:41

I’m in the mid­dle of amaz­ing sum­mer right here on lemon. I just came from the lake, jumped in here to get the pod­cast and today it’s fine. I’m wear­ing a hat and casu­al. Yeah, it’s great. So hey, those of you lis­ten­ing, if you haven’t yet, hit that sub­scribe but­ton and give us a great rat­ing. If you think we’re doing a great job. That’s won­der­ful. Brad, what’s, what’s the top­ic that we’re doing today?

Brad Giles 01:06

Today? What makes a bad strate­gic plan? We’ve seen a lot of plans over the years. Quite a few. And yeah, so we thought it’d be inter­est­ing to chat about the five things that make a bad strate­gic plan,

Kevin Lawrence 01:20

right? Yeah. Good peo­ple mak­ing bad plans. And that’s what we’re about today. Cool. So your Word of the Day? What is your word today? I was think­ing about this as I was dri­ving up from the lake, I got one. But any­way, you go ahead.

Brad Giles 01:33

Yeah, it’s dys­func­tion. And so yeah, so dys­func­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly when it comes to teams. And we know that Pat Lencioni taught us about that. But in par­tic­u­lar, I was think­ing about dys­func­tion on a board. It’s a fair­ly com­mon thing on some boards, and what have you. So

Kevin Lawrence 01:52

mine was fam­i­ly that sews beau­ti­ful­ly into dys­func­tion­al fam­i­ly. I know, it worked. For me, it was, it was the val­ue of qual­i­ty time with fam­i­lies where we’re just, you know, hav­ing my par­ents and my kids and a group, you know, we’re spend­ing a week togeth­er at the lake. Just awe­some. And hav­ing that time where you’re just hang­ing out, and some­times you’re run­ning to the store and doing some things, but just qual­i­ty time away from work and you know, an oxy­gen mask, I talk a lot about resilience rit­u­als. And some peo­ple, their fam­i­lies are a lit­tle dys­func­tion­al and hard to spend a lot of time with. Yeah. Thank­ful­ly, most of that around me is not so just Yeah, I think fam­i­ly, and how it’s reju­ve­nat­ing essen­tial­ly, is the essence of it. So beau­ti­ful, func­tion­al fam­i­ly and dys­func­tion­al fam­i­ly, we could do a lot of talk­ing about that, but inter­est­ing thoughts to take into today. Cool. So as we take a look and jump right in here, today, we’re talk­ing about bad plans. Now, you know, Brad, you and I have been work­ing on strate­gic plans, whether it’s, you know, for you and your com­pa­nies before you start­ed advis­ing or, and myself been doing it this gig for longer than I’d like to admit some­times. But we’ve seen it all. And the real­i­ty is peo­ple, obvi­ous­ly we need plans, and peo­ple know that. But some­times peo­ple get into some things, and they don’t real­ize why it does­n’t work very well, and why their plans actu­al­ly are bad and not pro­duc­ing great results. Because they should. So we’re gonna dig into that today. And the dis­tinc­tion I want to start with is scal­able, ver­sus com­plex. One of my favorite say­ings is sim­plic­i­ty scales, it’s got to be under­stand­able to a grade sev­en kid to if they under­stand your plan, that means you’ve got it sim­ple enough, which means you actu­al­ly under­stand it prop­er­ly your­self if you can make it that sim­ple. And, you know, a quote I’ve shared before in a pod­cast by Mark Twain is, you know, I would have writ­ten you a short­er let­ter. But I did­n’t have the time. Yeah, sim­plic­i­ty is hard. So if you want your plan to in your strate­gic plan to exe­cute, and scale, it’s got to be sim­ple. And yeah, it’s got to be sim­ple. So go ahead, Brian.

Brad Giles 04:04

Yeah, so it’s fun­ny I in the old­en days, you and I used to work off paper plans. Now it’s emp­ty. No, we tend to use com­put­ers more. But in the paper plans each we would print it out and we would work to the box­es that were on the one page plan. And so one of my favorite say­ings was bub­ble wrap plan. In oth­er words, if you’ve got a box in the mail and would be full of bub­ble wrap, which only fills up the air, well, peo­ple would be doing that in their busi­ness plans. Because they aren’t think­ing deeply enough about it. And they’re just think­ing I’ve got to put some­thing in that books. What is it and it does­n’t mean any­thing it doesn’t

Kevin Lawrence 04:51

Oh as in just use­less crap in a box. It’s just use­less crap. A lot of air a lot of fluff a lot of yeah, a lot of fluff

Brad Giles 04:59

and does­n’t. So it just because you’ve got some­thing in a box or some­thing under any of the head­lines, right? It’s just, it’s just air. It’s just bub­ble wrap. Yep.

Kevin Lawrence 05:11

It’ll like it, we’ll see stuff like, yeah, you know, improve our cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. Well, why don’t you say like, make the sun­shine? Like, it’s, it’s what does that mean? And to what and how do you know and we’ll get into that stuff. So, so so scal­able ver­sus com­plex is a dis­tinc­tion. The key point is strate­gic plan­ning is hard. And we like it, we do it. We’ve been doing it for decades and done 1000s of plans and plan­ning ses­sions. There’s two main things of a strate­gic plan, there’s the strat­e­gy piece is decid­ing what we’re going to invest our ener­gy in align­ing our teams to those rate things that cre­ate scal­able growth, give us a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage, give us prof­itabil­i­ty, give us con­sis­ten­cy of how we can oper­ate our busi­ness. So that’s the strat­e­gy mak­ing those big deci­sions, then there’s the exe­cu­tion once you decide to get that crap done. And get­ting those sim­ple, but hard things are done very well, repeat­ed­ly. And you know, and Brad, as you shared, and I’m, you know, as we were talk­ing ear­li­er, some of the source arti­cle from us, I’ve heard it, but there’s an arti­cle Brad was refer­ring and HBS, from Har­vard Busi­ness School, is that 92% of busi­ness plans fail due to poor exe­cu­tion. And it’s inter­est­ing, because in the com­pa­nies that we work with, often we just get the exe­cu­tion engine going. And things get a lot bet­ter. Like, we don’t need to do deep strat­e­gy upfront, in a major­i­ty of cas­es, because they don’t even if we did, it would­n’t get exe­cut­ed. So there’s no point. So get­ting a strong a good strat­e­gy, but exe­cut­ed excel­lent­ly gives great results. So yeah, cool.

Brad Giles 06:51

Yeah. What’s inter­est­ing with that is that when you get a team at the end of a quar­ter, and they look across the plan, and they’re, let’s say, most­ly red, they’ve had a ter­ri­ble quar­ter with exe­cu­tion, we go back, we reset we rean­a­lyze. And we come up with some or many of the same things that they just need to go again. So when we don’t exe­cute, yes, well, then it just means that we’re delay­ing the com­ple­tion of projects, and we’re gonna have

Kevin Lawrence 07:18

any and you know that because you pick the same goals, which means think­ing was right. Yeah. And peo­ple will some­times make excus­es. Well, you know, I don’t think it was right. And you’re right, you go back and do it. Again, it was inter­est­ing. We just did the com­pa­ny work with the Los Ange­les group work with prob­a­bly, I’m guess­ing about four years, and was down there for the day last Fri­day. And as we went through and their process, strat­e­gy is clear exe­cu­tion, they prob­a­bly were exe­cut­ing at A, they’re an A lev­el, right? 90% of the com­pa­ny goals lev­el, and KPIs lev­el, and each leader in the com­pa­ny, also at that 90 ish per­cent lev­el, on aver­age, the com­pa­ny’s doing great, they con­sis­tent­ly do great. We also have strong exe­cu­tion on the peo­ple side and their tal­ent reviews, and bring­ing on strong peo­ple. So it’s like, it’s theirs to lose clear strat­e­gy, excel­lent exe­cu­tion on of the strat­e­gy, excel­lent exe­cu­tion on the peo­ple side, and exter­nal exe­cu­tion on the cash and finan­cial side, well, they got a well oiled machine, let’s just con­tin­ue to grow. But that’s hard to get to that point, because there’s so much oth­er stuff going on. So the kind of point is to kind of sum up this kind of ini­tial thought is that, you know, in the process of strat­e­gy plan­ning, lots of peo­ple often pick the wrong things. And they end up with com­pli­cat­ed sys­tems that don’t exe­cute well. So it’s a dou­ble neg­a­tive wham­my. Not only are they not nec­es­sar­i­ly pick­ing the right invest­ments, because they’re not sure yet. But they also have a com­pli­cat­ed sys­tem, so they don’t get exe­cu­tion. And either it’s, they have the peo­ple that can’t exe­cute, or they don’t know how to keep peo­ple focused on exe­cu­tion. And there’s lots of dif­fer­ent rea­sons. So, you know, we’re gonna dig into that a lit­tle bit more, but that’s real­ly kind of the set­up on it. And you know, I did­n’t want to add before we jumped into our list here, Bri­an, not just

Brad Giles 09:06

that there’s a few episodes that we refer to, that might be worth lis­ten­ing to it. First is episode 85. Get the most from your strate­gic plan­ning frame­work, then episode 90 annu­al strate­gic think­ing meet­ing. And then 117 The fly­wheel Part One, five ways to ensure that your fly­wheel will build momen­tum so just a few episodes that you may want to refer to.

Kevin Lawrence 09:36

Yeah, and a key thing that fly­wheel is a crit­i­cal piece of a good strat­e­gy plan strate­gic plan­ning for that big­ger long term think­ing so bad plan­ning what is it we see specif­i­cal­ly? And num­ber one is com­pli­ca­tion. And gen­er­al­ly you know, when you have peo­ple who aren’t mas­ters try­ing to do any­thing because they do com­pli­cate it even wrote into the lake and teach­ing a bunch of kids to surf. And I remem­ber the first time Lake surf­ing behind the boat. Remem­ber the first time I taught my son and his oth­er son, his oth­er friends are the same age. We prob­a­bly try like 150 times me and the oth­er dad. And it was a night­mare. And final­ly, we hired a kid, 17 years old to come teach us. He got them up in a cou­ple min­utes. We’re over the lake again this week. And you know, there’s anoth­er guy there who’s kind of con­nect­ed to the fam­i­ly. Yeah, he always doing these in the lake with the kids. When the boards about to go he flips the boards up and sup­ports the kid in the water. And they almost got up first or sec­ond try. Yeah, like in C, the sim­plest I’ve ever seen the absolute mas­tery. But we tried 150 times we tried every frickin thing in the work. We just did­n’t try the right things because we weren’t mas­ters. Yeah, yeah, you know, and com­pli­ca­tion. So basi­cal­ly, the com­pli­ca­tion is a prob­lem. And the oth­er rule of thumb, you know that there’s that say­ing kiss­er, keep it sim­ple, stu­pid. But it needs to be keep it sim­ple. And scal­able is a nicer way to say it, as we talked about up front. And it was I said, it needs to make sense to a 12 year old kid, sim­ple Eng­lish, some­one who does­n’t under­stand your busi­ness should under­stand almost every­thing in your strate­gic plan from divi­sion pieces, right through to the quar­ter­ly or month­ly or week­ly goals. The problem

Brad Giles 11:22

is, is that exec­u­tives, many are quite smart. And the prob­lem with this part is that smart peo­ple want to make things more com­plex. It’s just in their nature, they want to get into the nuances. And they tend to just by their very nature make things more com­plex than they need to be. I would disagree

Kevin Lawrence 11:47

with that, Brad. It’s smart peo­ple who aren’t mas­ters. So they’re not. They might be intel­lec­tu­al­ly smart, but they’re not actu­al­ly street smart, or smart in this sit­u­a­tion. Because true bril­liance is sim­ple. Right? So peo­ple who have a lot of intel­lect who aren’t mas­ters in what they do tend to make things complex.

Brad Giles 12:10

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that that is true. But if you’re walk­ing your team, or you’re a coach walk­ing your team through a strate­gic plan­ning process, and they’re not mas­ters at it, they’re going to intu­itive­ly try to make it more complex.

Kevin Lawrence 12:26

Yeah, I think yes. Because they’re not mas­ter. Yes. They’re not mas­ter­ful, and I got­ta know, what you’re say­ing is, is that they have a lot of intel­lec­tu­al capa­bil­i­ty. Yeah. And because they’re not mas­ters, it makes it a big­ger mess some­times, where if a per­son was­n’t that intel­li­gent, they would prob­a­bly just have sim­ple ideas. Yep. And because they have less­er under­stand­ing, well, these peo­ple have a lot more data a lot more under­stand­ing. And it’s very hard to boil that down into real sim­plic­i­ty, which is, yeah, love it. And that’s our job as facil­i­ta­tors, when we when our teams to do that kind of stuff, is to get it so that it is sim­ple, which, you know, with the fly­wheel, for exam­ple, get­ting a fly­wheel. It’s hard to real­ly nail the fly­wheel as we’ve talked about in oth­er episodes, but and you have to do mul­ti­ple ses­sions nor­mal­ly, to help get all that good smarts there. Let it sim­mer, come back, do it again. Let it sim­mer and final­ly prob­a­bly lock it. So yes, com­pli­ca­tion me in some way. Remem­ber this one com­pa­ny, won­der­ful peo­ple, like get­ting bad advice. Like you need­ed to be able to run four dimen­sion­al mod­els in your brain to under­stand this thing. Yeah. Like it was so com­plex. And it was basi­cal­ly their strat­e­gy. The strapline was okay, let’s do every­thing, includ­ing the kitchen sink, the bath­room sink, the bath­tub, and the old dog­house out back of the house, like every­thing was in the frickin thing. But they had so neat­ly orga­nized and all these lit­tle quad­rants and sec­tions. But real­ly, it takes us back into our it’ll be cov­ered off in point num­ber two, a lit­tle bit as well. But it was just, it was like, There’s no way they could win. It was there was no yeah, it was very com­pli­cat­ed. So it was takes us in this point num­ber two beau­ti­ful tran­si­tion that we flipped into there is a dilut­ed focus. Yeah. Right. Where you’re basi­cal­ly you got it’s about pri­or­i­ti­za­tion, not doing every­thing, it’s say­ing no to a lot of things. That’s why we have a rule of thumb, max­i­mum of five on any­thing, max­i­mum five core val­ues, max­i­mum of five thrusts, you know, ide­al­ly, by exec­u­tive you’d like to have around five KPIs or indi­vid­u­als, you know, max­i­mum of five goals for the com­pa­ny, max­i­mum of five goals for the indi­vid­ual. Gen­er­al­ly a max­i­mum of five direct reports maybe six or sev­en depend­ing on your com­pa­ny in an org struc­ture. have, you know, max­i­mum of five strengths? No, you don’t have 17 strengths give me a frickin break. Like, you know, it’s it’s lack of dis­ci­pline, lack of pri­or­i­ti­za­tion, just dilute your focus, because it’s about it is its strat­e­gy is instead of being like a shot­gun that just sprays stuff, right now might be a choke shot­gun that has more focused, but ide­al­ly a rifle, where you’re focused on var­i­ous very spe­cif­ic things.

Brad Giles 15:29

Yeah. And these things have got to inter­con­nect, they’ve got a link with one anoth­er. There’s, there’s no point hav­ing, let’s say, if we talk about the Hedge­hog, some­thing that you could be best in the world at, that does­n’t con­nect with your pur­pose, or it does­n’t con­nect with your prof­it per x. And what I mean by that is, the dif­fer­ent com­po­nents of the plan have got to make sense. And I like to say with teams, when we get it, right, there’s almost like a clique. That you sense. Yeah, that makes sense. It con­nects to all Oh,

Kevin Lawrence 16:03

my gosh, it’s so sim­ple. It’s so obvi­ous. Why did­n’t we think about that before? Yeah. Yeah. So you’re feed­ing into the third point here, Brad, which is about mis­align­ment is that often the pieces don’t fit in, and you know, you’re ever doing a puz­zle, and he can’t get a piece to fit, he got this one, if you kind of just give it a lit­tle bit extra elbow grease, you can kind of jam it in there. You know, and it’s kin­da like, some­times, peo­ple with their plans, they’re just jam and all the whole thing. And then they won­der why the puz­zle does­n’t look any­thing like the pic­ture when they’re done. Yeah, because they jam this one, and then they just jam anoth­er one, then you have to jam anoth­er one, because you haven’t done it right. Now, hey, when you’re get­ting start­ed, it’s iter­a­tive. It takes quite a few quar­ters for our clients to get a plan where every­thing’s tight, don’t get us wrong. But you know, things should be aligned. Like you should have a lot your long term vision, you know, your midterm invest­ments should be in sync in har­mo­ny with that, right, and your short term goal and medi­um term goals and your short term goals. And so when we map it out real­ly is like, to be real­ly tac­ti­cal, is like your quar­ter­ly goal should link to your annu­al goals. And your annu­al should be in har­mo­ny with most­ly your three to five year thrusts. And those thrusts should be con­nect­ed to and deeply LED or inspired by your fly­wheel. And your fly­wheel should be con­nect­ed to and aligned to your hedge­hog, which includes your behav­ior your hedge­hog, and behav­ior tied into a or b hag is at the cen­ter of your hedge­hog. Do use Collins terms. And, and you know, when you do your 20 mile march, and all of that should be aligned to your pur­pose and your val­ues like con­nect­ed to the cul­ture. It’s just they’re all linked. No, it does­n’t have to be per­fect. And but it needs to be in har­mo­ny and in sync and kind of feel like it was paint­ed with the same paintbrush.

Brad Giles 18:10

Yeah, yeah, it makes sense, log­i­cal­ly that if we fol­low this path, it’s one sin­gle path, every­thing is on the same jour­ney. Yeah, yeah, you got it.

Kevin Lawrence 18:23

And that is, again, that align­ment of your plan and hav­ing things in har­mo­ny, it just takes work. Right. And it takes time over time. And it’s no dif­fer­ent than when design­ers build a beau­ti­ful car. All the parts are kind of engine and the parts come from dif­fer­ent sup­pli­ers, all kinds of dif­fer­ent sup­pli­ers. But they’re engi­neered and designed to fit togeth­er and flow togeth­er into one seam­less pack­age. Again, that’s it. I know, we’re tight at the ulti­mate, but for sure these things need to be aligned.

Brad Giles 18:51

But like those, you make those improve­ments, like one day at a time. Yeah, you know, all of that align­ment. You can’t just go away and do a two day plan­ning work­shop out of nowhere, and every­thing will fall into place. It, it just does­n’t hap­pen. It takes years of con­tin­u­al focus to get all of the align­ment and every­thing so that it’s oper­at­ing in the way that you’re describ­ing. Yeah,

Kevin Lawrence 19:19

like it does to become real­ly mas­ter­ful. It was inter­est­ing, um, I was think­ing about this. We, there were some neigh­bors, some peo­ple stay­ing with neigh­bors at the lake. And there’s a young fam­i­ly had kids, you know, kids sim­i­lar ages. And so we invit­ed them to come up with us on the boat, had a great time, got their kids up surf­ing, too, and had a bunch of even this one six year old kid. It was awe­some. It’s super excit­ing watch­ing, but the dad was real­ly big into hock­ey and he runs hock­ey acad­e­mies. He was in town for the coach­ing at a big hock­ey clin­ic. In the area that we’re in. I had a great chat about becom­ing and I have a son who’s a About up and com­ing and hock­ey, and talk about what it takes to be mas­ter­ful. It’s prac­tice and prac­tice and prac­tice and get­ting coach­ing and feed­back and dial­ing it in and get­ting bet­ter. And all of that takes a lot of com­mit­ment, a lot of ener­gy. And, you know, build­ing a great com­pa­ny takes that. And what we’re talk­ing about in these things, it’s dis­ci­pline over time, no dif­fer­ent than becom­ing a pro hock­ey play­er or, you know, a bal­let dancer or artist or any­thing that you want to mas­ter. It’s a lot of work.

Brad Giles 20:31

Yeah, it sure is.

Kevin Lawrence 20:33

So the fourth thing that we see, so the last one was mis­aligned. So review Quick­Books, so we got com­pli­ca­tions, dilut­ed focus, mis­aligned pieces. And then the one that real­ly is prob­lem Microsoft plans is big ideas, or con­cep­tu­al goals, like big, fluffy goals. Like we’re going to have the we’re going to have best in class cus­tomer service.

Brad Giles 21:01

Yeah.

Kevin Lawrence 21:02

Like, what the heck does that mean? And in real­i­ty, we’re try­ing to get down to account­able clear exe­cu­tion goals, quar­ter­ly, with all kinds of details in it, but crys­tal clear deliv­er­ables? Yeah, imag­ine you’re pay­ing a mil­lion bucks for what each of these goals, what’s in it for the com­pa­ny? You know, that’ll what’s in it for me?

Brad Giles 21:28

So if you just said, best in class cus­tomer ser­vice? Well, how do we mea­sure that Navy gets a net pro­mot­er score? Okay. How do we know when we’re halfway there? How do we know when we’re a quar­ter of the way there or three quar­ters of the way there? So it’s okay to say that, but you’ve got to be able to back it up with how do we mea­sure it? And, impor­tant­ly, how do we get there? Because when you look at a plan, and it’s got all those fluffy things that you say? Yeah, it’s, it’s just, it’s just des­tined, maybe not des­tined to fail, but like­ly to fail?

Kevin Lawrence 22:02

Well, actu­al­ly, well, well, well put away How do you even know if it fails? Because you don’t even know what the heck it is? Yes, des­tined to not improve per­for­mance? That’s for sure. Yeah. But fail­ure is hard to gauge. How do you cre­ate per­for­mance? It’s like, if you had, you know, a game like whether it’s, you know, Amer­i­can foot­ball or rug­by. Like, if there’s no lines across to get a goal. You just got a bunch of ath­letes run­ning around on a field. Yeah. Where’s the line? How do you know when you get the point? And when you don’t get the point? Right. So yeah, so you got to have a very mea­sur­able what I look like out­comes, what’s the clear out­come? I also like to know is show me the mon­ey? What’s in it for what’s the eco­nom­ic ben­e­fit. And as you’re talk­ing about the roadmap of how often in our ses­sions, when we have com­pa­ny goals, we get the peo­ple who will be work­ing on that to map out all the details of the house, like the leader of it, and the sup­port if they’re in the room. And then we have the whole room look at and say, Okay, and what are some what could be miss­ing? What are the depen­den­cies on oth­er depart­ments? You know, what else? Could it be due from learn­ings in the past to improve the how, you know, let’s use the col­lec­tive intel­li­gence and brain­pow­er on that. And then final­ly, the account­abil­i­ty, like who is the per­son account­able? Like one per­son account­able? Right, there gonna be lots of peo­ple help­ing? Yeah, but one per­son­’s job is to drag it across the line. And with help, but one per­son will lose asleep if we don’t get it across the line? At least one does, for sure.

Brad Giles 23:36

And we did a pod­cast on that. Rac­ing, count­ing account­abil­i­ty ver­sus respon­si­bil­i­ty. That was it was a good one. Yeah. A lot of peo­ple have com­ment­ed on that one over time. Yeah. So you know, goals can be garbage, we’ve got to make sure that the goals are spe­cif­ic that we know, impor­tant­ly, how we’re going to get there. Because if the busi­ness plan does­n’t explain how we’re going to exe­cute it, then it’s just a list of dreams. That’s just it. Would­n’t it be won­der­ful if we had excel­lent cus­tomer ser­vice? Or would­n’t it be won­der­ful if we took our busi­ness from 15 mil­lion to 50 mil­lion, or what­ev­er it might be? Yeah,

Kevin Lawrence 24:16

yep. Not rock­et sci­ence. And again, all of this stuff in the world that we use is sum­ma­riz­ing it in a one page strate­gic plan. One page keeps it sim­ple. And over time, we’ve edit­ed and tweaked them in dif­fer­ent ways both of us have to make them super their clients. We added a lot more good Collins prin­ci­ples into the one that we rec­om­mend peo­ple use. The point of it is it sum­ma­rize some, some are sim­ple. So the big ideas and con­cep­tu­al goals very clear, account­able goals with clear exe­cu­tion plans set at a min­i­mum every quar­ter. And final­ly, final­ly, go ahead. Go ahead. You go ahead. You take it Yep,

Brad Giles 24:55

no prob­lem. Final­ly, no indi­vid­ual own­er­ship is So every­thing that’s going to be exe­cut­ed needs to have some­one who is going to exe­cute it. But the way that I like to describe it as in 90 days time, who’s going to be the per­son that voic­es to the room that this is red? Or this is green? Like some­one’s going to have to do? We can all speak in con­cert? Who’s gonna be the per­son? And who’s going to be the per­son through­out that dri­ves that to be exe­cut­ed to ulti­mate­ly be green? You know, we can you’re wear­ing a hat at the moment, Kev, we can only wear one hat at once. Yes, yeah. So we need to be real­ly clear on who has the own­er­ship over that. And that could be the pri­or­i­ties that help to work on the busi­ness. Or it could be KPIs for that indi­vid­ual. But what­ev­er it is real­ly clear own­er­ship as to, this is my job. And that’s your job. And I’m not here to do your job, and you’re not here to do my job.

Kevin Lawrence 25:55

Yes. And I also know, at the end of the quar­ter, I’m going to stand and deliv­er and present how I did, I am going to present my report card to the team and show how I did on all these things. So I can be account­able. So real sim­ple stuff, right. And peo­ple, you know, sim­plic­i­ty is hard. But we know that bad strat plan­ning is good peo­ple doing their best, like I don’t know. And often, some­times they you know, it helps to have the right tools. That’s why we’re in the busi­ness, the rib, but com­pli­ca­tion, keep it real­ly sim­ple. And you need sim­ple tools to help and do that we have a lot of sim­ple tools that we use, and they’re almost insult­ing­ly sim­ple to some peo­ple that might, you know, take pride in com­pli­cat­ed intel­lec­tu­al tools. Ours are sim­ple and they just work, dilut­ed focus, and you’ve real­ly just got to pri­or­i­tize and think max­i­mum of five on almost any­thing, but isn’t the purpose

Brad Giles 26:52

that they work? Like, the pur­pose of a tool is that it works.

Kevin Lawrence 26:57

Now, but most of the stuff is way too com­pli­cat­ed to scale. That’s, that’s the prob­lem. Yes. You know, peo­ple have insane­ly com­pli­cat­ed things where I’m exag­ger­at­ing, but it’s like you need to be a PhD to under­stand it, or you need to sit down for a half an hour to under­stand it. Ver­sus it’s obvi­ous and eas­i­ly under­stood in 37 sec­onds. Yeah. So com­pli­ca­tion, delud­ed focus, you got to pri­or­i­tize mis­align­ment, make sure your plans are into line and over time sewed them togeth­er. So they’re in sync and in har­mo­ny, and they kind of things feel helped to fuel each oth­er. Instead of big ideas and big bold ideas and con­cep­tu­al goals, clear, account­able quar­ter­ly deliv­er­ables, and annu­al deliv­er­ables and three rules. And then no own­er­ship, who is the per­son that owns it so they can stand and deliv­er? They can present the record Por­caro, how they did? They can take the applause, or feel the ten­sion of hav­ing let peo­ple down for not delivering.

Brad Giles 27:56

Awe­some, awe­some good stuff. Yeah, episode. Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, which was five things that make a bad strate­gic plan. You can find us on YouTube. If you search the growth whis­pers if you are so inclined to look at our smil­ing faces. Obvi­ous­ly, we are also on pod­casts where you’re prob­a­bly lis­ten­ing to us. And my name is Brad you can find me at evo­lu­tion part​ners​.com That Are you or Kevin? You can find at Lawrence and koat​.com. Also, we’ve both got inter­est­ing newslet­ters that you may enjoy that we put out each week Kev­in’s and mine are sep­a­rate. You’ll find it at our rel­a­tive address­es. I hope you’ve enjoyed the episode. I look for­ward to chat­ting to you again next week. Have a great week.

Kevin Lawrence 28:45

Have a good one.