How To Setup Your Team With Clarity

Welcome to 2020.

I think one of the challenges of this year is if you’re in Australia at least, is you are kind of back at work but you’re not back at work. My kids are still around. They don’t go back to school until the 1st of February. You’re kind of a little bit half on holidays because you’ve got a bunch of holidays that come up in this time. I guess the challenge is how do you use the time in a productive way so that you don’t waste it?

Set The Year Up

I just wanted to share what I’ve been doing just to set the year up. Just to give context to this year with my planning, I’m in this process where I’m not changing my business or I’m not changing my vision. I’m not changing my purpose or my vision. So there’s some company I work with where they are, and I help them do that, and we create sort of a three year vision statement of where they are going. In my business, I’m not doing that this year.

So this year, is more about what do I take that’s working, the stuff that is working, how do I reinvest in that? And the stuff that’s not working, what do I do about that? So I just want to talk you through how I’m thinking about that, so it might help you to use this time between now and you do the same.

Think Of Your Business Like A Theatre

I’ve done a bunch of detail, but what I want to sort of talk you through is the framework for how I’ve sort of gone about this. And I can probably come back to me initially, that the analogy is that think of your business like a theatre. And actually what got me thinking about this as I just walked past the Novotel here in Manly. It always reminds me of one of the theatres, weirdly enough, that I go to and it just got me thinking, “Hey, that’s the analogy I can use”.

But the sense of the theatre is that the theatre has got a front end and a back end.

The Front End

So a front end in the sense that it’s got. You walk through the door and you get an immediate experience of, “Hey, what’s this theatre like? Can I get a drink? Who are the other clientele that is here?” What’s the experience of you enjoying the show?

The Back End

But at the back end, you’ve got the people who are doing the lights, you’ve got people doing costumes, you got all the actors, producers, directors. And they’re working their butts off to create this amazing front end. So that’s the analogy.

The Operating Plan

So when I think about the front end of my business here, I’m thinking about the client experience, the customer experience, from beginning to end. And then when I’m thinking about the back end, I’m thinking about all the processes and everything we do at the back, just like a theatre that’s involved in doing it.

And then what I kind of do is build out an operating plan from that from the front end and the back end and I sort of split the page in half. And then what I’ve got is I split up what are all the front end processes in my operating plan. So I’ve got basically mostly marketing and sales, but I’ve also got delivery. That fits across the back end and the front end. I’ve got all my financial processes. And I’ve got all the product process, which are at the back end, because the creation of those then often transfers over to the front end experience here.

Add New Process

And what I did then was, just write down what are all the things that I need to keep and what are all the things that need to change in 2020. I’m not going to go into detail, because I want to tell you about my business, but that’s basically the framework I used. In the video, you can see all the different colours I’ve got there. The pink and the purple and all that sort of stuff on the actual plan I’ve got.

So what I did with those was the pink colour were the ones that were new processes that I needed to turn into quarterly projects. All right? 90-day projects that were new, the things that I needed to feed into the yearly plan. And the blue ones were ones for the team. So I’ve got sort of about one, sort of two main people that work with me, but I’ve got a cohort of sort of five people that do different things. Do my financial stuff, my marketing, admin, all that sort of stuff. Right? So that meant when I was able to talk to the team on Tuesday, I was able just to look at those areas I’d circled and say, “Here, guys. Here’s some of the projects kind of coming up in the next 90 days.”

Summary

So it’s been quite a long video. Clearly I’ve come out of Christmas not particularly succinct. But here’s the lesson. The lesson is don’t lose the time between now and January, now and Australia Day because I think we can do it really easily. It’s a chance to get your head around where you’re at and what you want. For me, this is a year when my purpose and vision isn’t changing, so it’s more about getting clear on the operating plan and where I’m going. And there’s a framework to do it. Think of your business like a theatre, the front end and the back end, what needs to change on the front end, what needs to continue on the front end, what needs to change on the back game, what needs to continue on the back end. And then circle the projects and then circle those projects that need to be owned by the team.

Leave me a Comment or Get in Touch 

Use this framework to setup your Operating Plan this year. If you have any questions, get in touch and chat about what you need. I hope this has been useful. Talk to you next time on The Reason & The Road.