Rhythm Blog | Patrick Thean

Rework is such a pain and such a waste of resources. It costs you time, energy and emotional distress. Nobody likes to clean up their mistakes or somebody else’s mistake. It is even more painful when we have to ask a customer for forgiveness for disappointing them by missing deadlines. 

Yes. It is painful. Have you experienced the pain of rework? For most of us, that would be a “yes” multiple times. Ouch! To add salt to the injury, don’t forget about the opportunity costs due to rework. Most of us only total up the cost of the mistake. We seldom pause to calculate the total cost of rework that includes opportunities lost and client relationships burned.

It’s time to slow down and develop a world-class team execution plan for next year. When we don’t slow down to plan our execution, our teams don't end up being focused on the right things, leading to mistakes and rework, and ultimately smacking our profit with a 2-by-4! How strong is your execution this year?  I get asked every year how to do team planning, and I am sharing some of my insider tips with you.

I ask these questions to check if you had a good and strong plan this year:

• Does your team know what the company is supposed to achieve this year?
• If your team does know what the company is focused on, do they know their roles in making that happen every quarter?
• Do they have clear success metrics so they can tell if they are on track or not?

Mike, a long time customer, asked me recently how to revitalize his daily huddle. He shared how they have been doing it for years and have received great value in the past with their daily huddle. They are clear on the purpose of their daily huddle:

• Sync up the team and get aligned
• Help and support each other
• Act on issues faster instead of waiting until the weekly meeting to find out about the issues

If you want your team to be focused and aligned on the right projects, you need to connect your strategy to execution.

Successful companies have too much to do. New opportunities come about, and it is hard to say "No." But strategy is more about saying "No" to the wrong things than saying "Yes" to everything. Most entrepreneurs are not wired to say "No." We are wired to find a way to say "Yes" and get more opportunities into our companies. If that sounds like you, then you don’t have the danger of dying from starvation. But, you do have the risk of dying from over-eating from the buffet of opportunity!

In a recent Annual Planning session, one of our clients asked us to help them review and renew their Winning Moves, the 3 year strategic growth initiatives to help you double you revenue.  They wanted to make sure that their growth strategies were still powerful enough to drive growth over the next 3 years. We highly recommend reviewing your Winning Move strategies every year.

During good times, it is easy to neglect working on your Winning Moves. Then when growth begins to slow, we realize that we are already late to the game at developing new revenue growth moves. If you want consistent year over year growth, you must review and renew your 3 year strategic growth plan in a regular rhythm to continue to test assumptions and make adjustments to your plan.

It is best to only have a few Winning Moves. Otherwise, the team might be spread too thin as resources get allocated across too many initiatives, causing teams to inadvertently compete for some of the same resources. Competition for internal resources often causes negative stress and reduces team productivity, even to the extent of building silos. 

I’d like to share our Winning Move Strategic Planning Process so that you can have an objective way to discuss, debate and agree on the best 2 or 3 ideas for growth.   In order to sustain long-term growth rates, you need to be continually working on these business plans.  Growth rates will continue to rise organically and your team culture will transform into one that is continually looking for the next the next source of revenue growth.  

It is easy to confuse your strategy and your 3 year strategic plan. I have seen somany leaders tell me that they have a great strategy.   Yet, when asked specifically what their strategy is, they have difficulty sharing the key strategic initiatives they are going to make - and when.  Strategy and strategic moves should not be as complicated as we sometimes make it.  This is the very reason that there is a strategy or execution debate.  You must do both well to succeed, and you need the right rhythm to get it done. 

How do you define success when buying a company? People buy companies for a number of reasons: to increase revenue growth, to acquire new customer accounts, or to gain access to special technologies or patents. These are all reasons that support the common goal: to grow the company. The goal is simple, but why do over 70% of mergers fail to improve share holder value?