Jeff Standridge (Intro):
Welcome to season five of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. In this season, you’ll learn from successful innovators who have influential stories, practices, and strategies that will have your gears turning. Prepare to be inspired, challenged, and empowered. This is the Innovation Junkies Podcast.
Jeff Standridge:
Hey guys, welcome to another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. I’m Jeff Standridge.
Jeff Amerine:
And this is Jeff Amerine. Glad to be back.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, me too, me too. So, what do you want to talk about today, Jeff?
Jeff Amerine:
Well, I think coming into a new year, we’re going to talk about how to get ready for it, how to plan for it, the sorts of things to think about when you’re about to launch into a new calendar year.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, for sure. For sure. We work with a lot of companies throughout the year and help them not only run our Growth dx, which is our strategic growth diagnostic. If you want to learn more about that, you can go to growth dx.ai. But when we take that Growth DX information, that diagnostic information, we usually use that to inform the creation of a multi-year strategic growth plan that we update every quarter and certainly every year. Some companies may not. By the way, you want to learn more about the strategic growth system of Innovation junkie as well. You can check that out. We’d be glad to visit with you, but a lot of companies may not have that level of sophistication in their planning, but it doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t plan. And so why don’t we talk a little bit about some of the critical aspects of planning for, it’s certainly end of year, coming up on 2025, making sure that you’ve got the right pillars of your plan in place so that you can drive a solid year.
Jeff Amerine:
In the context that I’d like, and this is simple to understand, there’s been a lot written on it, and it’s been around since the 1980s, is this idea of the balanced scorecard when thinking about what to do in the next year, and that includes financial view, right? What’s the financial forecast going to be? What are the capital needs going to be? How’s all that going to look? You ought to spend the time to come up with a forecast based on your understanding of what’s coming up.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, for sure.
Jeff Amerine:
So that’s one. And the four pillars that I think about are the next one would be what about developing talent talent’s, your number one asset on your team, what are you going to do in terms of professional development, training and education and all that? That’s super important. You ought to have some customer-focused areas. Are you going to include things in the coming year like net promoter score? How are you going to gauge customer satisfaction? What are you going to do differently as it relates to the customer journey? That’s another kind of key important part. And then the processes that drive the business scrutinize and think about and plan on the internal processes that may need to be updated, changed, or improved. That balanced scorecard structure is a really good framework for thinking about the important considerations for driving a plant independent of the more comprehensive stuff that we do with the strategic growth system or with things like EOS and other things you might read about in traction.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, for sure. So yeah, so what are your financial goals for the year? What are your revenue goals? What are your expense budget goals? What are maybe some critical areas of expense that you want to keep below a certain level or you want to keep a particular watch on? We talk about the establishment of smart goals in each of those areas. Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. Relevant being you don’t want the achievement of one goal to be irrelevant to the total picture or to be sacrificial to another goal that may exist. And so making sure that they all g and haw, as we would say down in Pike County.
But yeah, making sure that you’re establishing goal financial goals for the year, maybe the amount of cash that you want to have on hand at the end of the year. Then as you said, your team development, your people and learning. Maybe it’s positions that you’re going to have to hire in the coming year, or maybe it’s some restructuring of the work that you want to do in order to enable you not to have to hire certain numbers of people or what have you. And then you move over to the customer aspects. This could be everything from customer acquisition, is our customer distribution, is our customer concentration or client concentration risk, right? Or do we want to improve our client concentration to get more clients of a certain type, fewer clients of a certain type, lower our client acquisition cost drive, the customer journey, as you’ve said, and then finally those internal process improvements.
And it’s real easy, and I was having a conversation with the CEO of a client company today. We’re going to be doing some planning coming up in early December, and there are a lot of things that we could do. I think the challenge is to take on the right number of things that will drive the right amount of outcomes and not try to take on too much, right? I’m not saying establish a bunch of layups. I’m saying, what are the 20% of activities that are going to move the needle? 20% of the things you could do that are going to produce 80% of the results back to that Pareto principle or that 80-20 principle.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, it makes good sense. It’s also never really a bad idea to go through a bit of a SWOT analysis. What are our strengths? What are our weaknesses? What are the opportunities? What are the threats? It is a useful tool. It’s been around forever, but it forces you to look at everything you’re doing and it kind of encourages you to think about, does our existing strategy make sense? Is our mission really aligned with what we actually do? Do we have a clearly articulated vision? Are we thinking the right way about our culture or are there some issues there? I mean, all those sorts of things are, I think it’s useful going into a new year to address it. Even if you’re not going through a formal strategic planning process, it’s always good to evaluate where you stand in those areas.
Jeff Standridge:
Something that I see get glossed over in the SWOT analysis is the strengths and weaknesses are really an internal view of the organization, and the opportunities and threats are really an external view of the organization.
Jeff Amerine:
Exactly.
Jeff Standridge:
And so making sure that you have that distinction in the SWOT analysis as well. I’ll tell you another exercise that I like to do that you could kind of shortcut this entire process. If you don’t have a more sophisticated strategic growth system that really goes from the top down to the bottom is to do what I call a game changer sprint or an innovation sprint to say what problems or opportunities if we solve them. So pull your leadership team together, your executive team, maybe a few other individual contributors from the organization, and bring in an external facilitator if you want or have somebody in the organization run it and just pose one question, give ’em all a bunch of sticky notes, post-it notes, and say, what one problem or opportunity, if we solved it being a problem or we seized it being an opportunity, what problem or opportunity, if we solved it or seized it, would be a complete and total game changer for our organization in 2025, and leveraged the collective wisdom of your entire team to fill the wall with ideas of game changers in that regard, and then start using small groups of those teams to come together and cluster those by affinity.
Maybe you end up with six or eight clusters of items with multiple post-it notes under them, and then use those experts in your organization, theoretically, your executive team or your senior-most experts in the organization to do some down-selecting some multivoting and downs, selecting to identify the top 2, 3, 4, maybe up to five and say, all right, are we confident that these are going to be the game changers? Then go flesh those out, do a little more work on those, gather some relevant data to substantiate, establish goals, be very clear about the problem you’re trying to solve or the opportunity you’re trying to seize, and then spin up fully staffed initiative initiatives, staff ’em with proper teams to actually go and tackle those things over the next 12 months.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, it’s a great idea. It’s a great technique, and it’s something that we frequently facilitate, actually. That’s right. I’ve used that to great effect either as part of an overall strategic planning process or independent of it just as a way of pulling people out and getting them thinking more strategically about stuff that will make a difference for their business. All of this stuff, it requires the leadership team to take a step back and to stop fighting the fires of the moment and think more about strategic issues, and I think that’s really critically important. Coming into a new year.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s right. That’s right. Making sure you’re focused on the vital few versus the trivial mini. Right,
Jeff Amerine:
Exactly.
Jeff Standridge:
Really looking at those potential game-changers. So we’re talking about if you don’t have a strategic growth system and you’d like to talk to Jeff or me at Innovation Junkies about either our growth diagnostic called GrowthDX, growthdx.ai, or our strategic growth system, we’d love to talk with you about that if you don’t have the time or the complexity in your organization to be able to do that just yet. Then some quick and down-and-dirty ways that you can plan for a solid year coming up in 25. To use the cliche, what is it? Failing to plan. It’s like planning to fail. So, even a rudimentary amount of planning can go a long way in making sure you deliver solid results in the coming year.
Jeff Amerine:
Couldn’t agree more. I mean, that, coupled with the ability to be flexible and tactically agile can make all the difference.
Jeff Standridge:
Very good. Very good. This has been another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. Thank you for joining. We’ll see you soon. See you next time.
Jeff Amerine (Outro):
Thanks for tuning into another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. We hope you gain some valuable insights and inspiration from today’s conversation. Be sure to subscribe for more episodes featuring leaders in the forefront of innovation, and don’t forget to connect with us on social media to continue the conversation. See you next time.