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2025 Annual Planning: Create a Strategic 2025 Annual Plan
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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BEFORE SESSION
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DURING 2025 ANNUAL PLANNING SESSION
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Annual Planning Process Checklist
Appoint Annual Planning Professional Facilitator
If you are the CEO, it is almost impossible to participate and facilitate your planning session simultaneously. Your team is already used to deferring to your opinions. Couple the power of being the CEO with the power of being the facilitator, and your opportunity to listen, learn, and get the best ideas from your team falls dramatically. Instead, pass the annual planning facilitation duties to someone else and immerse yourself in the meeting. Your ideas and contribution to the discussions will provide a much greater return than if you had facilitated the meeting.
When designating an annual planning facilitator, consider this: when executive team members facilitate your yearly strategic planning meetings, it can cause participants to withhold agendas or thoughts, to resist challenging others, not to be challenged in their thinking, and not to be fully engaged. However, using an outside facilitator can change this dynamic. It allows all of the best ideas to be heard. It encourages executive team members, especially the CEO, to fully participate in designing the best plan, fostering a more challenging and engaging environment.
As a company with more than 50 employees and $10mm in revenue, your time is valuable. We suggest designating an expert facilitator or hiring an outside facilitator to bring out the best in your team and you, and to get the best return on investment from your strategic planning session. This article outlines the complicated annual planning process. Rest assured, we are here to support you if needed, respecting and appreciating the demands of your time and expertise.
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Why Top CEOs Choose Rhythm Systems Facilitators
"Having a Rhythm Facilitator allowed me to be an active participant in our Annual Planning session. The decisions we made at that meeting helped us grow 140%, 3 years in a row.”
Dr. Steve Vogt, CEO, BioPlus Pharmacy
Need an Expert Facilitator? Contact Us
2025 Annual Planning Prep Work:
Annual Plan Meaning
An annual plan serves as a company's roadmap for the upcoming year, outlining the strategic goals, key initiatives, and priorities guiding its journey toward success. It acts as a compass, providing direction and focus, enabling the organization to align its resources and efforts toward achieving its overarching vision. By setting clear, actionable objectives, an annual plan helps to ensure that every department and team member is working in concert towards common goals, fostering a sense of unity and purpose across the company. Moreover, it is a critical tool for measuring progress, allowing leaders to track milestones, adjust strategies as needed, and stay on course to fulfill their ambitions. The annual plan embodies the company's aspirations for the year ahead, laying the foundation for growth, innovation, and achievement.
Here’s what the CEO should do to prepare well for the Annual Strategic Planning session:
- This sounds elementary, but one of the main mistakes CEOs make is that they need to schedule annual planning dates with the team and communicate their importance. As a CEO, you must own this so others see how critical their full participation is to the company’s success.
- Appoint a skilled facilitator. Great facilitators have critical skills to help set the agenda, manage difficult discussions, and drive the team to make decisions that result in a clear plan everyone supports. Their expertise comes from practice leading dozens of sessions. You may have someone on your team with these skills and experience, or you may decide to hire an outside facilitator.
- Please be prepared to discuss the high-level strategy and specific goals you want the company to accomplish to help set the tone for the meeting.
- Make sure that you have all of the right members of your leadership team in the room with you to get a complete view of the departments in your organization.
- Depending on the size of the organization, keep the number of people in the room to about 12.
Here’s what the effective Annual Planning Facilitator should do to prepare for the planning session:
- Set up a meeting with the CEO to determine a strategy session meeting agenda.
- Manage the logistics for the session - when, where, materials needed, food for lunch and dinner plans, etc.
- Create, distribute, collect, and analyze the proper prep work.
- Modify the agenda based on prep work feedback. Confirm the timing for all discussions.
- Develop the PowerPoint slide deck for the session and any other tools or handouts needed.
- Communicate key questions that must be discussed or decided upon to all participants so they have time to consider them before the meeting.
Here’s what each participant should do to prepare for the annual plan review:
- Share the agenda with each executive team member and ask them to read it and provide feedback on any other meaningful discussions that need to occur.
- Ask departmental/other leaders to come prepared with relevant information to help the team make informed decisions.
- Complete prep work sent out by the facilitator, such as a Start, Stop, Keep exercise before the session.
- Come to the strategic planning session with all the data required to support strategic annual planning discussions.
- Are any course corrections needed to get us back on track for our 3-5 year strategic plan?
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2025 Annual Planning Process Step 1:
How to Write an Annual Plan
Before planning for the future, you must understand where you are. It is an integral step in the annual business planning process, as you need a clear understanding of where you are presently and where you want to be at the end of the yearly plan. Everyone on the team will come into the planning session with their unique perception of how things are going and some ideas for improving and growing the business. It’s great to start the meeting by getting everyone talking and sharing their thoughts. Allowing time for introspection at the beginning of the planning session will immediately engage everyone on the team. It will establish some context for the strategic and future-directed conversations you will soon have. Here are a few ideas to get you started.
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Learning from the previous year - Start the session by revisiting the plan you established for the year that is about to end (Targets, Theme, Key Initiatives), and then discuss the actual results. Ask the team: What did we accomplish this year? What improvements to the business did we make? What were our victories and bright spots? What did not go as planned? Most importantly, what lessons did we learn this year? This exercise aims to reflect on the past year, gather insight into what worked well and what didn’t, what you learned during the year, and what is different today than it was a year ago. Much work has been done over the past year, and it’s important to celebrate the progress you have made. All that you have accomplished and improved this year creates a foundation for planning that is stronger, wiser, and steps ahead of the foundation you were planning from last year.
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Start, Stop, Continue Exercise - The Start, Stop, Continue exercise is excellent to send out ahead of time as homework for the team. This gets everyone thinking about the future of the business before they come into the planning session. It’s a great way to bridge the gap and ease people out of their day-to-day focus and into a planning mindset. In this exercise, participants are asked to share their top three answers in the following areas:
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Start: New things to consider doing. What do you think you or your group should start doing that is not being done today? What things can we do to increase our growth rate?
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Stop: What is ineffective that we must stop doing and save energy for other opportunities? These are items that can help us "dehassle" the business.
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Keep: What is working well that we should continue? Look for bright spots - items working very well that we might want to replicate across the company.
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Opportunities and Threats - The 'Opportunities and Threats' discussion is a key part of the planning process. Unlike the internal focus of the Strengths and Weaknesses part of the SWOT analysis, this exercise encourages the team to consider external conditions, forces, or trends that could impact the business. This exercise prompts a more comprehensive and strategic planning approach by asking the team to assess the impact on the 3-5-year plan. What Opportunities are you aware of that could help you achieve your 3-5 year goals? What Threats are you aware of that could prevent you from achieving your 3-5 year goals? The team can brainstorm a list of potential Opportunities and Threats, then discuss, debate and agree on the top 3 Opportunities and the top 3 Threats.
Preparing For Your Session Is Very Time Consuming.
Expert Facilitators Make It Easier.
2025 Annual Plan Process Step 2:
Work on Strategic Annual Plan to Connect to 3-5 Year Strategic Goals
Annual Planning should include a good balance of strategic thinking and execution planning. This is your opportunity to prepare your team for a successful year and connect strategy to execution with your strategic initiatives. To plan for a successful year, you must have a good idea of the strategic direction you are moving in. Where do you want to be in the next 3-5 years and beyond? What are your strategic goals? What are the strategic priorities to help you achieve them? Because strategic thinking is a process, not an event, you must think about how to use this time most effectively. If you have a fully developed long-term strategy, you could use this time to review it with the team. If you have some pieces developed and some that need more work, you could spend this time focusing on just one strategic topic. Here are a few strategic decisions you should be working on. Consider where you are with each of these and customize this portion of the annual planning agenda to work on the areas most important to you at this time.
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CORE VALUES
These are the handful of rules that will remain constant over time that you believe are key to the long-term success of your business. They already exist and are evident in the behavior of individuals representing the organization's very heart. Discovering, understanding, and encouraging these core values will strengthen your company’s culture and will provide a good foundation for every individual in the company to make decisions on a daily basis.
CORE PURPOSE
Understanding and reinforcing your Core Purpose will provide inspiration for people on a daily basis. People need to be inspired. They need to understand how their daily work connects to a greater good being served through the company's success. Your Core Purpose will answer the question, “Why?”
BHAG
Your Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) creates a vision of future success for your company. It should paint a picture of what things might look like 10-20 years in the future when you have achieved this wildly ambitious, measurable goal. Your BHAG will also inspire your people and create a framework for strategic decision-making.
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BRAND PROMISE
Working on your Brand Promise will require you to identify and understand your core customer, your company’s core capabilities, and your unique position in the market. Clarity around what is meaningful to your customers and what you promise to deliver will provide direction on internal improvement initiatives, marketing messages, and sales and delivery processes.
3-5 YEAR STRATEGIC PLAN
These are specific; revenue-generating growth strategies, you will execute over the next 3-5 years that have the potential to 3X your business. You could use this time in your Annual Planning session to brainstorm and select new Winning Moves or evaluate progress and next steps on existing Winning Moves.
2025 Annual Planning Process Step 3:
How to Prepare an Annual Plan with a Vision
Before you can start working on the specific details of your Annual Plan, you need to align the team around a common vision of what a great year looks like. To do this, we recommend a team exercise called the Destination Postcard. This idea comes from Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s book Switch (ch. 4, Point to the Destination). A Destination Postcard is a vivid picture of the near-term future that shows what could be possible. It asks the team to consider how the company will be different a year from now, how life at work may change, and how you will celebrate your success.
Make sure your annual plan is successful. This will help you create your four-quarter flyover and envision your path to success.
Destination Postcard Exercise
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Ask each person to take a few minutes to quietly think about and write a descriptive narrative of what a successful year looks like to them. They can write a paragraph or use bullet points, whatever is most comfortable for them. It should not just be a list of KPIs or financial targets. Those may be included, but what you’re looking for should be more descriptive than that. Ask them to consider how the company will be different a year from now, how life at work may change, and how you will celebrate your success. Manufacturing companies can get a head start on their Key Performance Indicators by reviewing our 25 KPI Examples For Manufacturing Companies.
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Ask each person to consider what three things must have happened during the year that made it possible to achieve this vision. They should write down the three specific objectives that were accomplished.
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Once everyone is finished writing, go around the room and ask each person to share their description of a great year and the Top 3 things the company accomplished. Capture the Top 3 things each person mentions on a flip chart. You can use checkmarks if more than one person mentions the same thing.
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Leave the flip chart notes on the wall and refer back to them as you work to develop the details of your Annual Plan.
2025 Annual Planning Process Step 4:
Annual Process Planning: Create Quarterly Action Plans
Now that you, as a key player in our team, have created the proper context, confirmed our strategy, and envisioned a successful year together, we are ready to discuss the details of our execution plan for the next twelve months. We must consider and agree upon four components of the Annual Plan.
Targets - As key players in our team, it's your crucial role to set the measurable results we want to achieve this year. These targets, including Revenue and Profit targets, are not just numbers. They are the Milestones that will guide our Journey and measure our Success. Choose a handful of targets that are strategic and meaningful to our company.
Theme/Main Focus - Your input is vital in agreeing on the main thing the company must focus on this year. What barrier do you need to break? What Winning Move must pay off this year? Maybe this is the year to focus on your company’s culture. It could be anything. The idea is to identify one overarching theme for the year that you are confident will drive your business forward. Creating this kind of “rally cry” will help people remember those things they know are most important throughout the year.
3-5 Annual Initiatives - Now comes the hard work of prioritizing and choosing 3-5 specific Key Initiatives you will commit to completing this year. The right Key Initiatives will support your ability to achieve the Main Focus, hit your Targets, move forward on your Winning Moves, and execute your core business excellently. To identify your Key Initiatives, refer back to your work in the first three steps: Lessons from the Prior Year, Start, Stop, Keep ideas, Opportunities and Threats, Strategic Decisions, Winning Moves, and the Destination Postcard. Based on all this, what are your Top 3-5 Key Initiatives for the company this year? In addition to identifying these Key Initiatives, you must assign an owner for each, determine the Red-Yellow-Green success criteria, and map out the sequence and timing of significant milestones for each initiative.
Quarterly 90-day action plan - Now you are ready to get to work. As the last section of your Annual Planning Session or in a separate meeting, take the next step in your Plan Rhythm and create the execution plan for the first quarter. Like the Annual Plan, the Quarterly Plan should include a Main Thing, 3-5 Top Priorities that can be achieved in 90 days, owners, and Red-Yellow-Green success criteria for each Priority.
Year Plan 2025: Annual Planning Process Step 5
Annual Business Planning: Departmental Planning and Communication
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Having a great Annual Plan created by the executive team at the company level is essential, but the truth is that most of the actual work will not be done at the executive level. Most of the work will be done at the departmental level, and even then, only when it’s broken down into bite-size quarterly pieces for your cross-functional teams to execute. Once the company plan is finished, each department leader should meet with their team to share the vision for the year, explain how the plan supports the long-term strategy, and discuss the department’s role in supporting it.
The leader should also share the 3-5 Priorities the executive team has identified for the first quarter of the new year. Based on that, the department should consider their year and determine the 3-5 Priorities they will pursue in the first 90 days. Each department’s Quarterly Priorities will also need an owner and Red-Yellow-Green success criteria. Taking it one step further, each team member should also identify the 3-5 Individual Priorities they commit to that will support the business unit's plan.
Once the departmental plans are finished, many companies will schedule a kick-off meeting (or series of meetings) for the whole company. This is a great way to bring people together, create positive energy, and make sure the company plan is communicated in an inspiring way to everyone. Remember, your plan is only as good as your ability to communicate it to those who will carry it out effectively. The best time to break down departmental silos is in the planning process, have your discussions surrounding shared resources in the planning stages.
Why Top CEOs Choose Rhythm Facilitators
Create an Annual Planning Agenda for Free [PDF]
This is the standard Annual Planning Agenda Template however, top CEOs customize their agenda. Download the agenda based on decades of professional annual planning sessions and and annual plans now.
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If you find yourself short on time and resources to execute Annual Planning effectively, consider reaching out to us. Our Rhythm Systems Facilitators can provide the expertise and support you need to streamline your planning process and achieve your business goals.
Your Annual Planning session is a crucial opportunity to align your team and organization around a select few priorities. These priorities, once accomplished, will propel your company towards its 3-5 year targets and, ultimately, the 10-20 year visionary BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal). Your Annual Plan will not only inspire your team but also form the bedrock of your Quarterly Plans.
You and your executive team should take five steps to ensure that your Winning Annual Plan effectively connects your strategy to execution. There are many ways to structure an agenda that includes these steps, and the details of that agenda will vary based on where you are as a company, how much of your strategy has already been developed, and the specific questions and opportunities you are faced with. The annual planning definition Rhythm Systems uses includes a clear plan to hit your targets.
Download our free 3 Steps to Ensure Your Meeting Will Be a Success to ensure you are ready to lead an annual planning meeting or drop us a line to see if we can help. Rhythm Systems has 20 years of expertise in creating winning annual plans for mid-market growth companies and helps keep your team on track with our patented strategy execution software.
Learn how Rhythm Systems can help you create a winning annual plan with our yearly professional planning facilitation services.