The War Plan

With the new year coming right around the corner, you only have a few days left to really create your strategy for the new year. The problem that most business owners face when going into a new year is that their strategy is solely their own and their team (read: the people that will actually be executing on the vision) don’t understand why they need to change or, even worse, how to change.

Now is the perfect time of year to sit down with your team and create your war plan. As a business consultant, it is my constant goal to never make suggestions to you that I don't personally use in my own businesses. This suggestion is something I do with all of my people. Here are the steps we used this year (and that we use every year) to create a solid war plan for 2021.

The first thing we did was to survey our employees to see where they felt our roadblocks were and how they felt the company was doing from their perspectives. From there, we surveyed the owners to see how they each viewed the business. Both of these survey sets helped the owners to then create a budget and a game plan to address the roadblocks that would otherwise keep us from success.

Once the owners had a budget and a plan together we shut down operations for an entire day and went through our plan with the workers. Here are a few exercises we did with them:

1.      We went through the budget line by line. We showed them all the different facets of the business. We showed them a stretch budget, the real budget, and then we showed them a break-even budget. The break-even budget is a great budget to go over with your employees so that they realize at what point the company will need to make those hard (employee-terminating) business decisions.

2.      We talked through all of the tangible ways they impact the budget every day and how they have the power to positively change the outcome.

3.      The third step that we took is a critical step. We asked them to help us solve our biggest problems. The problems that they called out in their surveys and that the owners spoke of in their surveys. We let them create the game plan and how they most want to attack next year.

You see, letting your employees behind the curtain is one of the most empowering things you can do for an employee. When they know how hard you are working and know what is at stake, it gives them a little bit more ownership in the process. They will know how their actions impact the business both for the better and for the worse.

So get out there and do it! Hold a “War Plan Meeting” with your team and get them in on the ground level of a successful 2021.

As a side note, thank you to all of you for reading my blog each week. From our family to yours, we want to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We will be back in the new year, ready to conquer 2021!

Enjoy,