The Elite Business Growth Method: Episode Four, With Brett Gilliland

Here we are. Week number two of our mini-series. This is the fourth episode. We’ve been sharing two episodes a week. This episode is the wind-up scene for this mini-series. We’re going to talk about how to maintain proper attention in the long term while delivering the short term. Remember, the goal is targeted, coordinated action on the things that matter most now and for the long-term health and growth of the business. We want everybody pulling in the same direction, pulling towards massive goals, and taking massive action together. That’s the key, targeted, coordinated action as a unified team on the things that matter most, both in the short term and the long term.

I thought a lot about some analogies. If you have ever had a car where the engine was running rough, like all the parts to the car were there and it used to run fine, but over time it started to run rough. If you’re a musician and your musical instrument played beautifully for a long time but then just went a little bit out of tune. Not horribly out of tune, but enough to where it didn’t sound right. Maybe you like to do exercise. Maybe you do yoga or you do some weightlifting type of routine. If something’s a little bit off in your back or one of your back muscles is off, you can’t quite perform at the same level that you normally would.

What I’m going to talk to you about is how to have that engine humming and running beautifully and how to keep that fine instrument tuned, so that instrument is playing just the right pitch and right notes, or how to have your body all loose and working well if you’re doing some exercise. The same thing that happens to your car, your instrument, or your body happens in your business. Over time, things get out of place, things get off. When you have a bunch of people, even if they’re great people with good intentions and they’re all doing different things, things can get off. Your business won’t be humming the right way. It won’t be performing just so.

That’s what we’re going to talk about, the key to making sure everything’s just right, everything’s in alignment, everything is fine-tuned, and everything is set up for you to take targeted and coordinated action as one team with the right amount of attention on the short term operational excellence and the right amount of attention on the longer term strategic progress side of your business.

Recap

A little bit of a recap. In Episode 1, I gave an overview of the Elite Business Growth Method as the way, especially for seven-figure business owners to build your business without all of the stress and chaos. There is a proven practical method, and I want to share that with you. I then taught you how to do the foundational work of setting the vision for your business, which simply means enrolling your people through a co-created process to articulate the purpose, the values, and the current mission of your business.

When you begin to fully internalize and embody vision setting as your number one responsibility as a leader, you will create more clarity, more alignment, and more passion in your business than you’ve likely experienced before, or at least for a long time. You’ll also come to realize that setting the vision is not a one-and-done activity. The initial work of meeting several times with your people and putting the right words together for the purpose, the values, and the mission may be a one-time thing.

For the rest of your involvement in the business, until you leave the business, until the business ends, or until you sell it, whatever your exit from the business is, for the rest of your involvement with this business, you will hire to the vision. You will lead to the vision. You will fire to the vision. You’ll constantly be teaching about it. You’ll constantly be talking about and reinforcing the purpose, the values, and the mission. That vision will become your drumbeat. Maybe even a better way of saying it is that it will become the heartbeat of your business. The lifeblood of your business will come from that purpose, values, and mission. That’s what we talked about in Episode 1.

Business Growth: Setting the vision is not a one-and-done activity. You will hire to the vision, lead to the vision, and fire to the vision.

In Episode 2, we talked about the longer-term strategic progress side of your business for the whole episode. We acknowledged that most business owners struggle to spend any time on this side of the business. Even the business owners who figure out a way to structure some time to work on the business regularly don’t always have a good process or structure for how to organize this longer-term strategic progress work.

While we couldn’t get into the specific quarterly planning process that we teach as part of the Elite Business Growth Method, I did share the structure for organizing the strategic progress work in your business. We talked about mission and mission goals, which will then allow you to create mission strategies. Having taken a stand on what you will and will not invest in with those mission strategies, you can then create annual priorities every year and quarterly priority with those SMART tasks or SMART projects each quarter. That’s what we talked about in Episode 2, all of the structure around the strategic progress and longer-term side of your business.

In Episode 3, we talked about the shorter-term operational excellence side of your business. We said that if you’re going to give a rule of thumb on the mix between short-term focus and long-term focus, you would spend about 80% of your collective time. The collective time and energy of your whole team would be spent on the operational excellence side of the business, keeping the lights on, keeping the billing happening, making sure that we’re going to be able to make payroll, all of the day-to-day, run the business, get and keep customers. That is the operational side. It’s about 80% of the collective energy and time investment of the whole team. In our little rule of thumb here, the other 20% would be on the longer-term strategic progress side of the business that we talked about in Episode 2.

For the rest of Episode 3, I spent some time talking to you about even if you know the working in the business side of your business. If you took a hard look at yourself in the mirror and you did some honest introspection, you would likely confess to yourself that you spend way more time working in the business than you would like. Even though you’re very familiar with it, you probably haven’t done the best job of making it effective. In other words, maybe you haven’t organized the work in such a way that you can comfortably relinquish control.

Can you confidently say that your people have the clarity they need to be true owners of their roles? If not, you can’t expect to hold anyone accountable. I hear business owners say all the time, “I wish I held my people accountable better. I got to be better at holding people accountable.” True accountability comes only from giving true ownership. They go hand in hand. If you haven’t organized the work well and given ownership to somebody, you can’t give accountability. It’s ownership with accountability.

Continuing in Episode 3, we talked about the importance of hiring A-players. I also taught you how to use a future org chart exercise to see what your business will become when you accomplish the current mission. Beginning with the end in mind in this way will help you see more clearly what your next hire is and how you’ll need to build out the roles in your business over time to eventually create that future business.

Finally, I shared with you a concept we call Big Three, which is simply to help every person on the team know exactly what’s expected in the role that they own. It is exactly what’s expected, how it will be measured, and how it aligns with company goals. They are the three most important results or activities. If you’re going to carve out ownership and give it to somebody with accountability, do they know what’s expected, how it’ll be measured, and how it aligns with the company goals for their three most important results or activities?

Just because most of us spend too much time working in the business, it doesn’t mean we run the shorter-term operational excellent side of the business particularly well. It means we spend more time over there. If we would do some of these things like hire A-players, do some org chart planning, and use Big Three to give real ownership with accountability, we would see significant improvement in the performance of your business. You’d free up some additional time to work on the strategic progress side of the business, the working on the business that we all say we want to do more of but can’t ever seem to get around to doing.

Establishing A Meeting Rhythm

Now, here we are to the topic that will bring it all together. The rest of this episode in the four-part mini-series will be about the key to ensuring we take targeted coordinated action as a unified team, allocating adequate time and attention to both the short-term, operational aspects of the business and the long-term strategic side of the business. It isn’t fancy. I’ll tell you that now. Nothing I’m going to share with you is rocket science or super sophisticated or fancy, but it is powerful. The key lies in establishing a meeting rhythm. I told you, it wasn’t super exciting.

The structure provided by the meeting rhythm will keep everyone in sync in the long term and the short term so that engine can be humming without missing a beat. No rough running. It will just be running smoothly. Without the discipline of a good meeting rhythm, even if you have great people with amazing intentions, they will naturally drift towards the loudest and the most pressing, the things that are in their faces or the things vying for their attention every minute of every hour of every day. Stuff is coming at them, and that’s naturally where their attention will get directed. Unless you use the structure of a good meeting rhythm to keep everyone taking targeted, coordinated action together as a team on both the short term and the long term. That’s what wins every time.

Think of the meeting rhythm as spanning both sides of your business like a spectrum. If you visualize the short-term side of your business on one half on your right side, and the long-term side of your business on the left side of you, you’ve got this even split. Even though the amount of time and energy that goes into the shorter-term stuff might be 80% and 20% over on strategic progress, I want you to separate those things in your mind visually 50/50.

You can think of all these meetings that I’m about to share with you as separate disconnected meetings, but I want you to think of them as the rhythm. They all work in concert with one another as the rhythm that pulls everything together and ensures the proper attention to both sides of your business. If you can see the spectrum and you have the strategic, longer-term, progress side of your business on the left, and the shorter-term operational excellence side of the business on the right, we’re going to start all the way on the far left with our meeting rhythm.

Annual Planning Meeting

The annual planning meeting, once a year, that’s going to be a completely strategic way over on the strategic side. No operational conversation at all, just strategic. We’re going to do this once a year. We’re going to do this towards the end of the year. I typically recommend two days for this annual planning offsite. I do mean offsite. You’re going to get away from the day-to-day. You have to separate from the tactical operational stuff, all the noise that’s coming from you. You have to pull away and go do annual planning with the right group of people.

If you don’t have a formal leadership team organized yet for your business, you will eventually. You’ll want to get a leadership team. Whoever’s responsible for setting the direction for the business and allocating resources to go achieve that direction are the folks who should be working together in an annual planning offsite, maybe late November or early December to make sure that we’re going to be ready to hit the ground running January 1 on the new year. I do mean offsite. Get away from the office, get away from the distractions, and make sure you have the right people involved. Go think strategically. Go think critically about the business. Get out of the day-to-day. Make sure that you’re talking about the things that matter most as you go into the New Year.

Business Growth: Get away from the office, get away from the distractions, make sure you have the right people involved, and go think strategically.

Some key deliverables for this annual planning offsite would be annual priorities with assigned priority owners, just like we talked about in Episode 2, along with evidence of success for those priorities. Hopefully, you’re minimizing the number of those priorities to the top three. They’re going to be aligned with the mission strategies to achieve the mission and mission goals. It’s what’s the work we are going to focus on in the coming year aligned with our strategy to make significant progress towards achieving our mission and the accompanying mission goals. It’s the big question we’re trying to answer with these critical few most important priorities for the year.

Depending on how your team operates, you can decide if you get into the annual financial and operational goals at the offsite, or you get the strategic high-level stuff done at the offsite, and then you have some separate meetings back in the office to make sure that annual plans are in place for the operational side of the business as well. We need goals probably around how we get customers. We need goals about serving customers. We need our financial imperatives. Whatever the yearly version is of the operational goals needs to come out of this annual plan as well.

You have to go offsite to do the strategic planning stuff. Once you’re clear on the priorities for the year, you’re going to have to come up with the annual goals together as a leadership team before you can move forward on the operational planning as well. I want the annual planning offsite to be strategic. Don’t come in there and say, “We’re having a problem with our AdWords. Poor customer experiences cropped up. We got a lot of bugs right now in the software.” Whatever your business challenges are on a regular basis in terms of daily operations, don’t bring that to the offsite. You can name those things as context when you’re going through your planning exercises, but the exercises should lift you out of the day-to-day, help you get super strategic, and pick the best priorities for the coming year.

Quarterly Planning Meeting

That’s the annual planning meeting in your meeting rhythm. The next meeting is called the quarterly planning meeting or the quarterly planning offsite. This is also a strategic meeting. If you can see the little continuum I invited you to create in your head or spectrum, you have annual planning on the far left for the strategic progress side of the business. Right next to it is quarterly planning. It’s still on the strategic side. We’re not moving over far enough right to get into the operational side of your business.

For quarterly planning, annual planning’s two days because you need to have annual priorities and you need to come up with your first quarter priorities. That’s why it’s a two-day meeting. Most of your quarterly planning meetings, so the other three quarters of the year, you can probably get away with one day of quarterly planning. If that feels too rushed with you and your team, maybe you have to extend it to a day and a half. In most teams that I’ve worked with over the years, most business owners are able to take their team of leaders, the people who should be involved in setting the direction and allocating resources for the business. They can get the quarterly planning done in one day.

In the November and December timeframe, we’re doing two days, so we can do planning for the coming year and the Q1 priorities. For the other three quarters of the year, we’re doing a one-day quarterly offsite away from the office, usually in the last two weeks of the quarter. In the last two weeks of March, we’re doing quarterly planning for April, May, and June. The last two weeks in June, quarterly planning for July, August, September, and so forth. At these quarterly planning offsites, you need to get clear on what the quarterly priorities are going to be. You’re not going to go recast the annual priorities. You’re going to take the annual priorities and think about what is the next body of work over the coming 90 days.

Now that we’ve completed the previous quarter’s priorities, how are we going to move forward this next quarter in line with the annual priorities and in line with the strategy that we’ve put for the company so that we can achieve the mission and mission goals? It always ladders back up to mission and mission goals. The quarterly planning meeting is one day. It’s still the leadership team. It’s the team responsible for setting the direction of the company.

Monthly Meeting

For allocating resources, they’re the ones who should be involved in this quarterly planning day once a quarter. The next meeting is where we start to cross over. We get right in the middle of our continuum or that little spectrum I had you visualize between strategic progress and operational excellence. Right in the middle is a monthly meeting. Annual and quarterly are all strategic in nature. Monthly is where it starts to cross over, where we want to check in on the strategic progress. We want to see how we are doing with those quarterly priorities. For every quarterly priority, there should be a priority owner, evidence of success, and those SMARTS tasks, deliverables, or projects that we’ve talked about in Episode 2.

All of that should be in place. Every month, that same leadership team needs to be getting together to make sure that the progress is happening in the quarter like it needs to be on the strategic progress side of the business. On the operational side of the business in the monthly half-day, and I do recommend a half-day for the monthly meeting, we’re going to spend about half the time checking in on strategic progress work. The other half of the time, we’re going to spend on the shorter-term operational excellence side of the business.

When you’re having weekly meetings, challenges, and problems may arise in that meeting, that may require more time and discussion than the meeting allows. There may need to be a deeper dive into an operational issue that comes up from time to time. We would call those big rocks. If you imagine in your mind the machine of your daily operations is going, and then some big rock clogs it all up or some big rock creates a problem that we’re having to work around a lot, maybe you can’t slow down long enough in the weekly meeting to address those, but you might address some of the bigger operational challenges in a monthly half day.

The monthly is where we’re straddling. We’re straddling the strategic side and the operational side. We’re dedicating about four hours or half a day a month as the core leadership team to make sure that we’re on track strategically and that we’re on track operationally. It is a very important month. On the operations side of things, it’s normal for us to have monthly goals. The monthly meeting would be a good time to make sure that we’re wrapping up any accountability on monthly numbers. We’re setting goals together or we’re reviewing goals that were set at the beginning of the quarter. We’re making sure that they’re still relevant or that they’re still the right goals as we move into the new month.

I hope you get the sense that the monthly meeting is a very important bridge meeting between strategic progress and operational excellence. It’s a chance for the leadership team or the core group of people to be together and make sure that both things are getting the needed attention, the longer term and the shorter term.

Business Growth: The monthly meeting is a very important bridge meeting between strategic progress and operational excellence. It’s a chance for the leadership team to be together and make sure that both things are getting the attention they need.

Let me say something else that I like to do on a monthly cadence. I also strongly encourage you to gather the whole team together. Not just the leadership team for a half day, but sometimes not too long after that leadership team half day, you would have a monthly company meeting to make sure that everyone in the team, not just leaders, but everybody knows what’s going on, “How did we wrap up last month with last month’s goals? What are the goals this month? How are we doing on our quarterly strategic progress items, our quarterly priorities, and our SMARTS? How is all that going?”

Every month, I strongly recommend you pull the full team together. This doesn’t have to be more than an hour or 90 minutes, but it’s just a chance for you as the leader of the company to champion the vision or to hit purpose, values, and mission. Again, maybe do some recognition around that. Maybe call out some examples of how people are serving customers the way that you want to reinforce. It is whatever you want to do to boost the team’s energy and positivity around things that are going well. Focus everybody on the things where we may need to make some adjustments collectively.

Every month, updates on the progress towards the operational goals, “How did we land last month’s plane? How are we doing this month? Where are we going? How are we going to make sure that we have a successful month?” Every single month, company meeting, everyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re virtual or all in the same location. Gather people once a month, either online or in person, and make sure that everybody’s on the same page.

If it’s the first company meeting of the quarter, that meeting would be heavy on wrapping up the previous quarter’s priorities, SMARTS, and celebrating any of that, wrapping up the quarter in terms of reporting on goals we had for the quarter for the company, and then making sure that everybody knows what the new quarter’s priorities and goals are for the operations side of the business. This is a key leadership meeting. A lot of business owners skip this or don’t even know that this would be a good idea. Have a monthly leadership meeting. The next week, have the company meeting to report on how things are going to get everybody on the same page.

Weekly Meeting

Let’s move to weekly meetings. Now, I’m over into the operational excellence side of the business. Monthly meetings, straddled, strategic, and operational, quarterly, and annual were all strategic. Now, we’re over here on the far right end of the spectrum or the continuum where I want to talk about weekly meetings and daily huddles. These are completely operational in nature.

If you’re not doing this, I highly recommend that you create a weekly meeting that I like to call the Monday morning meeting. It’s the thing to start off the week with. It doesn’t have to be the very first meeting of the day on Monday, but I like it to be early in the day as opposed to later in the day. Here’s why. If all of the right people in your business are taking a look at the key performance indicators for your business every single Monday morning, like a drumbeat, heartbeat, clockwork, whatever analogy you like the best, without fail, if we’re always looking at the key measures that help us know whether or not we’re on track, then we can make adjustments along the way.

If something starts to get off, we can make adjustments. If we don’t look at these numbers ever or we look at them too infrequently, then we’re just waiting to see what happens, and then we’re reporting what happened instead of getting ahead of it or being a little more real-time with the adjustments to make any course corrections we might need to make.

I love Monday morning meetings with a good dashboard. It doesn’t have to be complicated. A dashboard can be simple as long as it’s giving you the views that you need into the most important measures in your business. Not for information’s sake, but for action’s sake. You want to be able to have an impact on the business going forward based on the charts, graphs. Whatever reporting visualization you use in the dashboard, I want you to be able to see an instrument panel in your car or the airplane. I want you to make adjustments in real time as you see what’s happening in your business.

The other important weekly meeting that I’m going to throw out there is a weekly one-on-one. This is an opportunity for every single person in the company to self-report on their ownership, those big three that we talked about. If you’re my boss and I work for you, I’m going to report to you every week how I’m doing on my big three, and then we’re going to have a one-on-one conversation. I can report to you in the one-on-one or I can report to you before the one-on-one. Our one-on-one just means our individual meeting, the leader and the team member, talking about how it’s going with the ownership that they have of the role.

This creates an ongoing dialogue about the performance of the individual, which will never be a surprise to you or never a surprise to the team member because, every single week in a rhythmic fashion, you’re going to talk about what’s going on from a performance standpoint. You don’t have to be micromanaging. You don’t have to be a big brother. You don’t have to be judge. All you have to do is just set up the structure so that they’re self-reporting to you on their responsibility every week, and it works like magic.

Business Growth: You don’t have to micromanage. You don’t have to be a judge. All you have to do is set up the structure so that people are self-reporting to you on their responsibilities every week, and it works like magic.

Once you have these weekly self-reporting things in place, this one-on-one conversation, you can add to your meeting rhythm once a quarter a more formal review of their performance and a more formal plan for the next quarter’s performance and the next quarter’s development. We want to be planning performance and development every single quarter, and then we’ll use these one-on-one weekly conversations to check in, “How’s it going? How can I support you? What do you need? Where are you getting stuck?”

You get to become more of the coach, the mentor, the leader, not the judge, not the person on the other side of the desk being the nasty boss. You get to sit on the same side of the desk, look at the numbers together, and be supporting them in delivering their ownership. I got a little carried away on that. I’m kind of passionate about those one-on-one meetings. If you haven’t tried it, give it a try.

The last meeting is a daily huddle. These are very tactical in nature and super operational. I set daily huddles. If you’re not doing something like this now, it will feel very strange to you at first, but if you’ll connect with the team very quickly at the start of each day, you can do a short standup huddle. That’s a popular thing for team members that are working out of the same location. If you can’t do a standup huddle together in the same location because you’re virtual, you can hop on a Zoom meeting together. They’re meant to be short. It’s just a quick injection of some positivity and focus for the day.

You can ask each team member to share a positive focus, something that they’re planning on getting accomplished that day, any blockers that might be keeping them from doing their work, or any support that they need from anybody else on the team just really quick round the horn. Sometimes you might call it tweet style. Make sure every team member gets a chance to report in and start off with a lot of focus.

That was a lot of material. Each of those meetings deserves a lot more time and energy than I’m able to give on a mini-series like this. Rest assured, in the Elite Business Growth Method, we have a detailed plan for how you do the quarterly planning. There are exercises that we teach. There are a lot of tools and help for how to do each of these meetings effectively. Let me start to wind this up with a thought that I’d love to share. The best leaders build the best businesses, and the best businesses win every time.

Elite Business Growth

The Elite Business Growth Method can help you build a best business. There isn’t a one and only best. The best businesses win every time. There are lots of best businesses, but only the ones who learn how to have consistency in their business, how to balance the short term and the long term, and how to set a vision and align everything in the business to it.

The Elite Business Growth Method is a way. It’s proven that it can help you build a best business. This isn’t rocket science. Some of you have done a lot of this work already and you’ve tried to piece it together over time. It’s just a matter of pulling it all together. The Elite Business Growth Method pulls it all together into one cohesive, practical approach for powerfully building and leading your business. With a clear vision, the right focus, processes, and structure for both the short-term and the long-term work, and a meeting rhythm, that key piece of the meeting rhythm that we talked about, and keeps the right amount of time and attention on both sides of your business, you will become unstoppable.

You will experience less weight on your shoulders, less stress, and less frustration with all the disappointing results. Instead, you and your team will be re-energized in ways that you can’t even imagine now. Results will improve, and morale will go up. You might even find yourself thinking about how much fun you’re having in the business again. Wouldn’t that be nice? Winning is fun.

The best leaders build the best businesses. I’m inviting you to become the best leader so you can build the best business, and the best businesses win every time. I’m going to keep saying that because that is the underlying truth of all of this. If you want to win, you build a winning business. If you want to learn how to build a winning business, we have exactly what you need in the Elite Business Growth Method.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Elite Business Growth Method than what I’ve been able to share over a show, you can go to our website where we’ve got a free eBook on the Elite Business Growth Method, including a great visual that pulls it all together. You can see visually everything that I was trying to share with you over this show. You can go to GrowthElite.com. Once you’re there, you’ll be able to opt-in to receive the free eBook on the Elite Business Growth Method. We wish you very well in all of your business-building endeavors. I hope that you’ll come and find out more about the Elite Business Growth Method, and let us help you intentionally build a winning business.

Important Links

• Episode 1 – The Elite Business Growth Method: Episode One, with Brett Gilliland – Past Episode
• Episode 2 – The Elite Business Growth Method: Episode Two, with Brett Gilliland – Past Episode
• Episode 3 – The Elite Business Growth Method: Episode Two, with Brett Gilliland – Past Episode
• eBook – The Elite Business Growth Method