Dan Martell - How To Create a Business Growth Strategy

00:00:00.080 No, the beginning of the video should be what we do when the video's not on.

00:00:14.560 How to execute your business growth.

00:00:16.520 Look, here's the deal.

00:00:17.940 If you're frustrated with where you're at in your business or every day you wake up

00:00:21.900 and you're like, how do I grow my business?

00:00:25.180 Or maybe you're frustrated with the people and just in general, like at the end of the

00:00:29.040 the day, I know that businesses hit a wall at five years.

00:00:31.440 And maybe you're in business 10 years.

00:00:33.480 And really, it's about not growing.

00:00:36.220 Because every time I get the call, people are like,

00:00:38.080 oh, I'm losing passion with my business.

00:00:39.980 Would you be losing passion in your business if you were

00:00:42.720 making a ton of money, right?

00:00:44.020 And I don't think it's about money, but I also want to make

00:00:46.720 sure that we address the right problem.

00:00:48.320 Because if it's the fact that you're not growing the

00:00:51.620 business, then that's what we need to talk about.

00:00:54.200 Don't say you're losing passion with the customer or the

00:00:57.240 market or why you started the business.

00:00:58.560 because those things are typically not true.

00:01:00.620 You know, what I know is that when somebody's connected

00:01:03.060 with their vision, the business grows.

00:01:05.540 When they are hiring incredible people

00:01:08.440 that also share in that mission,

00:01:10.240 that are really intelligent and capable,

00:01:12.840 the business grows.

00:01:13.740 When they have a plan of attack, the business grows.

00:01:17.280 Not having those things,

00:01:18.840 that's when you run into challenges.

00:01:20.380 And you know, I definitely understood this challenge

00:01:23.320 because to me, when I was starting my company, Sphere,

00:01:26.620 I literally just like kind of showed up every day.

00:01:29.860 I was working 100 hours a week.

00:01:31.560 I didn't really understand how to run a business.

00:01:33.820 I hated going to meetings.

00:01:35.720 You know what I've learned since then?

00:01:37.140 Is that meetings are the only tool that you have as a leader.

00:01:40.340 As a manager, as the entrepreneur,

00:01:42.340 the only thing that you can use to help guide and improve

00:01:46.600 and really kind of show people the way is meetings.

00:01:51.020 Now, nobody wants to spend 30, 40% of their time in meetings.

00:01:54.780 So what I wanna walk you guys through is a way of thinking

00:01:57.520 about overcoming that because my business,

00:01:59.620 Feric, shifted dramatically when I understood.

00:02:01.960 I was sitting down with my advisor, Stu,

00:02:05.420 really a mentor advisor.

00:02:06.520 I mean, I hired him.

00:02:07.400 I put down 150 grand.

00:02:09.100 I said, dude, I need you to come in to look at this business

00:02:11.660 to let me know where am I missing things

00:02:14.740 that are just obvious to you because, I mean,

00:02:16.560 this guy was retired, had run executive vice president

00:02:19.600 of one of the largest telecommunication companies

00:02:22.140 in our country.

00:02:23.040 So having that kind of expertise, look at the business

00:02:25.800 and give me guidance was invaluable.

00:02:27.440 The first thing he shared with me is he says,

00:02:29.780 look, the cool part is, Dan, you have a vision, okay?

00:02:32.840 So number one is you need a vision.

00:02:34.360 He was happy that I had a vision.

00:02:36.160 Here was my challenge.

00:02:37.380 I never shared it with anybody.

00:02:39.320 I mean, what's the point of having a mission

00:02:41.100 for your business if you never take the time

00:02:43.860 to communicate it with anybody?

00:02:45.920 And I was like, but what, I should be sharing this every day?

00:02:48.300 He's like, look, there's different ways you can do that.

00:02:51.600 You can kind of have everybody,

00:02:53.800 you can have meetings and recite it in the meeting.

00:02:57.040 You can talk to somebody and say,

00:02:58.640 hey, the work you're doing ties back to this,

00:03:01.100 which connects with our mission.

00:03:02.740 Or when somebody comes to you with a decision to make

00:03:05.820 and you can just kind of remind them,

00:03:07.720 well, here's our mission as a company,

00:03:09.080 which decision do you think would most align with that?

00:03:11.860 So he really taught me not only to have a vision,

00:03:14.660 but how to connect that within my team.

00:03:16.560 So that is, you know, if you wanna grow your business,

00:03:18.900 That is a prerequisite, has to be there, get on it.

00:03:22.280 Number two is you need to have a three-year plan.

00:03:25.400 And some people are like, well I want a 10-year plan.

00:03:27.740 Look, the vision is the 10-year plan.

00:03:30.740 It's what's possible.

00:03:32.240 If I wanted to grow 10x over the next five years,

00:03:35.220 10 years, 25 years, whatever it is, that's the vision.

00:03:38.760 What you need that's more granular is a three-year plan.

00:03:41.580 But here's the deal, I use one piece of paper

00:03:44.020 to draw my three-year plan.

00:03:45.160 I literally start this upcoming year, three years later,

00:03:49.100 split it up into three years and then what I do is I do it

00:03:51.760 per quarter and I just kind of start mapping high level

00:03:54.700 strategies and say, well, what would need to be true for those

00:03:57.540 numbers to make sense?

00:03:58.740 How many people would I need on my team to make sure that I

00:04:01.740 could actually execute the strategy?

00:04:03.940 What kind of budget would I need to make sure that come

00:04:06.440 together because that's going to affect the different things

00:04:09.080 that I put together on the plan and what order I do them in.

00:04:12.160 So you need a three year plan.

00:04:14.160 The third thing that you need is a one-year plan.

00:04:15.920 Now, here's what's different of the one-year.

00:04:17.700 Picture this, you have a grid, you have four quarters

00:04:20.960 on your one-year plan, Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, and look,

00:04:24.840 I'm the first one to say and admit I hate corporate jargon.

00:04:28.880 I hate, I even hate the word quarter.

00:04:31.420 If there was like, look, there's three parts to your year,

00:04:33.680 or four parts to your year, I'll use that.

00:04:36.220 But for you not to have a grid that outlines,

00:04:39.180 all right, we've got the first part of the year,

00:04:41.220 which is three months, okay, call it Q1,

00:04:43.580 call it whatever you want.

00:04:45.080 What are the activities, the projects,

00:04:47.220 the strategies that we're gonna execute in each month?

00:04:49.780 So it's kind of saying, well if the three year

00:04:51.920 is just three years at a higher fidelity,

00:04:54.620 when you come down to the one year,

00:04:56.520 it needs to be broken off per month

00:04:59.000 and I like to plan in 90 day, three months,

00:05:02.840 call it whatever, 12 week windows

00:05:05.060 because I feel like that's as far as the ability

00:05:08.380 to actually make really good, accurate decisions

00:05:11.380 in your business is gonna happen.

00:05:12.580 So those are the first three.

00:05:13.940 Now, this is when it starts to get granular.

00:05:16.280 Number four is you need quarterly review meetings, okay?

00:05:20.160 Once a quarter, again, I hate the word quarter,

00:05:22.160 but look, what do you wanna say, once every three months?

00:05:24.560 Once a quarter, you wanna sit down with your team

00:05:27.060 and you wanna do two things.

00:05:28.420 First part of those meetings, and I usually say a minimum a day,

00:05:31.740 most often two days, depending on the size of your business.

00:05:34.340 You wanna spend the first part of the meeting

00:05:36.100 reviewing the previous quarter,

00:05:38.040 the previous three month window,

00:05:39.900 and saying, what did we plan and what did we get done?

00:05:42.480 How good were we at executing our assessments?

00:05:45.920 That is the first part because you want that data,

00:05:48.380 you want that information to inform planning the next part.

00:05:51.820 Okay, so then in the second part of the day,

00:05:54.120 if you do the first part in the morning

00:05:55.460 and then in the afternoon, what you wanna do

00:05:57.360 is start saying, okay, we know these things to be true,

00:05:59.500 how do we plan the next quarter to hit our goal?

00:06:01.740 So you have the one year plan,

00:06:03.140 you've got the next quarter in front of you,

00:06:04.460 you start planning the strategies.

00:06:05.980 Look, it should not take any more time than that.

00:06:08.780 But most companies don't give themselves

00:06:10.880 the opportunity to sit down and review it, right?

00:06:13.220 They just keep going and going and they get struggling

00:06:15.920 and then they're frustrated and they're like,

00:06:17.280 why can't I get any progress made?

00:06:19.320 It's like, well, you haven't planned.

00:06:21.500 You haven't given yourself the gift of stopping and pausing.

00:06:25.120 And really, not only just looking at what you've done,

00:06:28.040 but appreciating and rewarding yourself

00:06:31.240 and building that confidence of achievement.

00:06:33.700 Because I know you're not going every day to work

00:06:36.140 and not making progress, but I also know

00:06:39.040 that you're not taking the time to stop and reflect.

00:06:41.240 And that to me is what those quarterly meetings.

00:06:42.840 So you have three that are quarterly and then the last one

00:06:45.540 for the year for me, it's a yearly planning meeting.

00:06:47.740 So you have three quarterlies, you know, the end of Q1 and Q2

00:06:51.320 and Q3 and at the end of the year you do the same framework,

00:06:54.920 the same strategy, but you plan the whole year.

00:06:57.200 What do we do for the year?

00:06:58.400 What do we do for next year?

00:06:59.900 And that at a high level is super important.

00:07:02.260 So that's number four.

00:07:03.160 Five is weekly team meetings, okay?

00:07:06.240 Now, I'm deliberately saying team meetings

00:07:08.800 because the other day I was working with a private client

00:07:11.060 and I said, look, you know,

00:07:12.740 they were having some struggles in the business.

00:07:14.300 I said, invite me to your team meeting.

00:07:16.220 I just want to get on there.

00:07:17.260 I'm not going to say anything.

00:07:18.180 I just want to listen to the conversation,

00:07:20.020 the communication, how people are broken.

00:07:21.180 You can learn so much about a business

00:07:23.400 by just listening to how they communicate.

00:07:26.880 And at the end of the meeting,

00:07:28.040 I called the CEO back after and I said,

00:07:30.940 you do realize that meeting was a client review meeting.

00:07:34.520 it wasn't actually a team meeting.

00:07:36.860 And they were like, what do you mean?

00:07:38.220 And I was like, well, you talked about all the projects

00:07:41.460 that you guys were working on, all the clients,

00:07:43.320 and how they're doing and how you're gonna get wins for them,

00:07:45.640 but you didn't talk about the business,

00:07:47.800 about the marketing, the sales, the operations, legals,

00:07:51.200 anything about improving the way the business does

00:07:54.280 what it does.

00:07:56.040 And they were like, oh.

00:07:58.920 I mean, little distinction, just a small little tweak

00:08:02.680 to realize that they didn't even have

00:08:04.180 the weekly team meeting.

00:08:05.280 So I gave them the format and the agenda,

00:08:07.920 and the following week they had a weekly team meeting.

00:08:09.580 The team was like blown away, it was like duh.

00:08:11.480 It was almost like a light bulb went off.

00:08:13.360 Of course we would talk about sales

00:08:15.560 and make sure that in our planning

00:08:17.460 we have those projects built in.

00:08:19.400 Right, of course we'd wanna get updates

00:08:20.960 on how are the financials doing,

00:08:22.760 how is the hiring and the recruiting process going

00:08:25.040 so that we can keep up to demand.

00:08:26.680 That to me is a non-negotiable every week.

00:08:29.280 As the leader, you need to be creating these meetings.

00:08:31.440 And then finally, number six, you need a daily standout.

00:08:34.820 You need one moment in your day

00:08:37.240 where the team comes together.

00:08:38.380 And you can do it on the phone.

00:08:39.440 I've used Uber Conference or other conference technologies.

00:08:41.880 You can do it on video chat using GoToMeeting or Skype

00:08:44.660 or Zoom or whatever technology platform you want.

00:08:47.460 Or, and that's why I call it a standout,

00:08:49.620 in person, nobody sits down, and it's a really simple format.

00:08:53.560 What are the top three initiatives that you did yesterday?

00:08:56.160 What are your top three objectives for today?

00:08:58.600 And are you stuck?

00:08:59.900 And it's a reporting meeting, nobody's collaborating,

00:09:02.160 nobody's discussing, discussing anything.

00:09:04.540 They do it, it should take six minutes,

00:09:06.240 and at the end of it, as the CEO and manager,

00:09:08.900 you circle back with anybody that's stuck.

00:09:11.540 That is the high level framework for running

00:09:14.020 and executing a growing business.

00:09:15.980 One, you need to make sure you have a vision.

00:09:17.980 Where are we going, what's the journey,

00:09:19.660 what's the destination?

00:09:20.660 Number two, you need a three year plan.

00:09:22.360 You need to at least say, here's where we're at,

00:09:24.200 here's where we're going, and here's the high level things

00:09:26.060 that would need to be true for that outcome to occur.

00:09:29.900 Third, you need a one-year strategy plan

00:09:33.080 that's like a grid, right, where you do it

00:09:35.340 on a monthly basis and split it up into four chunks,

00:09:38.140 call them quarters, call them whatever you want.

00:09:40.240 But that's how it comes together.

00:09:41.940 Then you need to make sure that you're doing

00:09:43.420 quarterly reviews on your team and yourself's ability

00:09:46.140 to execute, even if you're two people in your company,

00:09:48.360 you should do this.

00:09:49.880 And then you need your weekly team meetings,

00:09:51.680 looking at the different departments in your business

00:09:53.260 and how you're improving those.

00:09:54.600 And then finally, a daily stand-up,

00:09:56.760 some people call them huddles.

00:09:57.900 Call them what you want, it doesn't matter.

00:09:59.500 You just need to connect because the team that connects more

00:10:02.740 often grows faster.

00:10:04.540 It's just that the way it works, there's more opportunity to

00:10:07.640 not let somebody go off on a tangent or work on something

00:10:10.920 that's not valuable.

00:10:11.740 You need companies and teammates communicating frequently.

00:10:15.880 That is the strategy for you.

00:10:17.620 I'd invite you to leave a comment below.

00:10:19.680 I want to hear from you.

00:10:20.820 What strategy are you going to implement?

00:10:22.500 Are you going to start with the planning?

00:10:23.660 Are you going to start with the quarterly reviews?

00:10:25.260 What thing resonated with you?

00:10:26.760 Leave a comment below.

00:10:28.360 And as for usual, I want to challenge you 0.86

00:10:29.700 to live a bigger life and grow your frickin' business.

00:10:33.400 I'll see you next Monday.

00:10:35.060 If you like this video, be sure to subscribe to my channel.

00:10:37.440 I'd also invite you to join my newsletter

00:10:39.540 where I send out exclusive invites to private events

00:10:42.000 and other free training videos.

00:10:43.980 And if you're ready to go, I got two playlists queued up.

00:10:46.440 And I'll see you next week.

Dan Martell - March 27, 2017

How To Create a Business Growth Strategy

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