How to Prepare for Your 6-Month Strategic Planning Meeting

Tempus Fugit. I learned Latin while being homeschooled. This phrase has always stuck with me and grows more true with each passing year. It seems like just yesterday that my team and I were gathered in an off-site location to conduct our annual strategic planning sessions. In truth, this happened back in January. But now it’s almost July and it’s time to regroup and take stock of our progress toward the goals we set back then. So, today, I’d like to talk about how to prepare for your 6-month strategic planning meeting.

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TIME INDEX:

• 00:45 – How to Prepare for Your 6 Month Strategic Planning Meeting
• 05:59 – Create an Agenda
• 17:28 – Choose an Appropriate Location
• 19:34 – Have a Facilitator
• 23:47 – Summary

Getting Your Bearings

When I was a boy, I worked at a golf course, keeping the grounds. This is where I learned the fine art of “striping” a lawn. My manager told me to simply look far into the distance, focusing on a fixed location, and don’t take my eyes off of it. As a result, I was able to mow lines so straight that they looked as though they were laser-guided. However, as business owners, there’s a tendency to just stare at the ground in front of you, so to speak. When you do this, it can cause you to get off course.

If you find that you have strayed from the charted course, you need to take a moment to get your bearings and correct your course. That’s what your 6-month strategic planning meeting is all about: taking a pause to regain your bearings and make sure you’re still on course to meet your goals. I remember an instance when my father, my brother, and I were tracking wild hogs in the swamps, back home in Georgia. The water was murky and black, and all of the trees looked identical.

As I went deeper into the swamp, I lost my way and ended up miles from where I was supposed to be. Thankfully, I had been raised in this environment and learned how to get out of situations like this. I took a moment to examine my surroundings and made my way back to where I wanted to be. I had to stop and familiarize myself with where I was in order to get back on track. The same is true in your business. Sometimes, you need to look up and get your bearings to continue moving toward your goals. But how do you ensure that your pause will help you get back on course?

Three Points for Your 6-Month Strategic Planning Meeting

Unlike your initial strategic planning session, the purpose of this meeting is to quickly review and adjust. You want to see where everyone is at, refocus, and find your targets. But to do this as efficiently and effectively as possible, I want to share three points to help you prepare for your 6-month strategic planning meeting.

Create An Agenda

The first point for your meeting preparation is to create a meeting agenda. Now, if you’re reading this and thinking, “Justin, why do I need an agenda,” the answer is simple. You have one day to get this meeting done. This isn’t like your January strategic planning meetings. Our team takes 3-4 days to conduct our strategic planning session. Some of you may take a little longer or a little less but you should be completing your 6-month meeting in one day. So, what should be on this agenda?

First, you want to revisit the initiatives from your advanced strategic plan. This is where you’ll look at the tactics and action steps that were laid out in the original meetings. What can you cross off the list? How many are ahead of schedule? How many are lagging? You want answers to these questions because they help with the continuity of your plans. Similarly, you’ll want to review your SWOT analysis with your managers and key advisors. Take this opportunity to hear what they have to say about the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that affect your business.

Next, you’ll need to include a state of the business that looks back at the previous 12 months’ results, and forward, to the next 12 months’ projections. This should include in-depth looks at your revenues, expenses, profit. Ultimately, these will apply to a pro format. You need to be able to see how your business faired, financially, over the past 12 months and what your expected revenues look like in the next 12-month cycle.

Additional Topics for Your Agenda

Now is also a great time to update your organizational chart. This is why I always like to include new team members, divisions, and changes to the organizational flow in the agenda. While reviewing this area, you can also update and define job descriptions and compensation plans. If there’s some reason that these can’t be updated (i.e., a growth initiative within your company) you still want to be able to discuss the details of that during your 6-month strategic planning meeting.

Our team made it a goal to outline and solidify our KPIs this year. Therefore, I would include that in my meeting agenda. In this section, I suggest looking for holes in your performance metrics. You want to see where your KPIs are plotting and if they’re plotting in the right direction. If not, why? Likewise, you want to build continuity and solidify the descriptions in your metrics. This could be done by ranking them in order of importance and creating an SOP on how to find and track each KPI.

RELATED CONTENT: Our Team’s Journey to Discover Our KPIs

Likewise, you may want to include customer validation in the agenda. Here you can determine the segmentation (by division or service offering) of your customers. In some cases, you can even view your customer validation through your KPI metrics. This can be done by looking at average size, revenue, or even concentration by revenue or division. You want to avoid the risk of customer concentration. So, this is a great time to evaluate that. Of course, I would be remiss not to mention including your six-month initiatives (objectives, tactics, and actions).

Choose An Appropriate Location

The second point to preparing for a successful 6-month strategic planning meeting is choosing an appropriate location. Where will you have your meeting? You might be thinking, “Justin, I’m just going to gather the team into the conference room.” You could do that. However, I’d like to challenge you to take it outside of your normal workplace. Whether that’s a job site, a physical office, or even your home, it’s important to break up the monotony of your usual surroundings.

I actually just met with a client that I was going to have to have a difficult conversation with. In order for them to reach their goals, we needed them to do some things in their personal finances and in their business that, frankly, were going to be very uncomfortable. Because of this, I needed to remove them from their comfort zone. We didn’t meet in my office. Nor, did we meet in theirs. They were too accustomed to both of those environments. Instead, we met at a Cracker Barrel restaurant. Although I wanted them out of their comfort zone, at least they were able to get some comfort food.

With that in mind, think about where you will host your meeting. You might choose to do it in a retreat-style setting. Our office is going to meet in one of my colleague’s homes. He has a gorgeous lake home that he just remodeled. We’re going to gather in this beautiful and serene setting with the cell phones turned off and work through the agenda that I described in the first point. Wherever you book your meeting, be careful of games. I was involved in one such meeting where the business owner invited everyone to bring their boats. By the time breakfast was over, we were all ready to get out on the lake and nobody got any work done.

Have A Facilitator for Your Meeting

When we host our meeting, we will be bringing our own advisor along. I always say, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Just as we serve our clients, we also receive external advice and coaching for our business. You see, we are too close to the business. Therefore, we need someone to come in and look at our blind spots. As great and talented as our team—and yours, I’m sure—might be, we benefit from having an outside advisor who’s intimately familiar with our goals and mission.

That’s why we bring a facilitator to our 6-month strategic planning meetings. They are able to moderate and mediate our discussions and ideas. Likewise, a facilitator will help to keep things honest. They don’t suffer from proximity bias, as we business owners so often do. Now, if you’re thinking, “Justin, I don’t have anybody like that,” reach out to us. That’s what we do. That’s what a good advisory firm can do for you. You need somebody who can point out your inefficiencies.

Wrapping Up…

Friends, time flies. Tempus Fugit. Before you know it, it will be time to begin preparing for next year’s advanced strategic planning sessions. That’s why it’s so important to find your bearings, refocus, and finish the year strong. Proper preparation for your 6-month strategic planning meeting can help you maximize the time you have left. Every day is a new opportunity to make your business better than it was yesterday. Don’t waste a moment on the things that don’t matter.

Look, I know life is hard but life is so good. Keeping up with your planning efforts and preparing to successfully meet your strategic goals can be frustrating, but it doesn’t need to be. By following these three points, you can make preparing for your 6-month strategic planning meeting, at least, financially simple. Hey, let’s go out and make it a great day!

Do you need an advisor that will show you where your blind spots are? Reach out to us! The team at Financially Simple is here to help.