BONUS 246: 4 Steps to Successful Strategic Planning

0:00Welcome to the 10 Minute Entrepreneur Podcast, intended to equip and encourage business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs taught by active business owner, best-selling author and teacher, Sean Castrina. All right, Sean Castrina with the 10 Minute Entrepreneur Podcast, and we're going to talk about on this podcast is how do you strategically plan? I'm going to teach you through the strategic planning process. Basically, the four steps that I use, this podcast is really like a graduate school in business. I was going to go back to college, I actually went to graduate school, but I was going to go back to UVA, the Darton School, and get an MBA, and I met one of the professors for lunch, his son and my son played soccer together, and I shared with him that I wanted to go back for an MBA and he goes, Sean, you'd lose your mind. He said, because you've already done it, you've already started countless companies, and you have a few very successful companies,

1:03you just need to pick and choose what you want to learn at this point, but 80% of what we would teach you, you would beat your head against the desk because you already do it, and you already understand how to do it. That's what this podcast is. My son is not going to college, and I can effortlessly afford to send him, but I teach him all these things. I mentor him and his business partner. They're both the same age, just graduated high school, and it's kind of exciting, and I love teaching the different things you need to know to be successful in business, and this is one of them. You need to understand how to strategically plan things. I'm going to talk you through the whole process, and this is a skill. This is at the top of the game. This is what the really good business owners do. Top level, top shelf managers do this. Great leaders have the skill to do this. Let me take you through the four steps to successfully learn how to strategically plan. The exact wording on that for those podcast

2:06listeners are the four steps to successful strategic planning process. The first thing is, is that for me to strategically plan, I need to identify the problem, the initiative, and or the goal that we're trying to solve. What are we planning for anyway? What are we strategically planning for? What is the purpose? Within my companies, we typically have a strategic plan, because we have identified a problem with crisis. We've identified an initiative that we need to take, because it would be great for our business, and or we have a goal that we're trying to achieve. You need to understand your why. The strategic planning process starts with what is it you're trying to accomplish, and normally it's you're trying to solve a problem, start an initiative, maybe it's something new within your company, a new division, a new profit stream, and or a goal.

3:12Maybe it's to massively increase profit or to increase customer acquisitions or increase better sales conversion rate. Whatever it is, identify why you're doing it. It's hard to have a plan in place if you don't know what you're trying to achieve. Second, now you create a strategy with deadlines on how this is going to get done. You've identified this what we're trying to accomplish. How are we going to do it? What's the strategy with deadlines? Strategy without deadlines is just a wishful list. I typically break our year up in quarters, and I have major initiatives for each quarter, and then one key objective, the measurable for that month to see if we're moving in the right direction. We create a strategy with deadlines on how we're going to get it done, and number three is we take action because of these deadlines to assess if we're making progress.

4:18So we take action within these deadlines that we've set, and we do this because we want to assess if we're making progress towards what we're trying to achieve. So again, boom, we identified the problem, the initiative, the goal we're trying to set. We create this strategy, and within the strategy we have deadlines. Okay, we start taking action within the strategy. What we're going to do, and we compare how we're achieving based on these deadlines we've set. We're three months in, and we're not making any progress. We've got to look at this. Six months in. We're not making any progress. We've got to look at this. Okay, and number four, if progress is not being made, you change the team or the player, if you only have one person working on it, or the strategy, and that's the secret. See, insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. The secret to strategic planning is you got to adapt. You got to change it.

5:25You remember when the Patriots were down? What was it? 28 to nothing in the Super Bowl? They changed for the better. They changed their plan. Problem is the Atlanta Falcons changed their plan. You never change a plan that's working. The Falcons got conservative and stopped doing what they were doing. They were actually up 28 to three, I mean, could you imagine, up 28 to nothing, then they're up 28 to three and end up losing the Super Bowl. Okay, that's the example of something was failing for the Patriots that made the necessary change. So let me take you through the four steps to a successful strategic planning process. I feel like I'm in like a spelling be these big words one after another. First thing you do is you identify the problem, the initiative, end or the goal you're trying to achieve or to solve. Okay, so you know what it is. And it should be something you could write on a board. We're trying to do this. We're trying to do this. Okay, it's measurable. It's something that people can tell when you achieve it. It's not this abstract feel

6:28good thing. Okay. Number two is you create a strategy with deadlines on how you're going to get this done, how this is going to be achieved, how you're going to reach this goal. Number three, you're going to take action with deadlines so that you can have periodically look and assess your progress if any's being made. Again, if you're three and six months into it, you're not moving towards the goal or you're not solving the problem. Customer acquisition still stinks or customer services. You're getting bad ratings. Well, then clearly the strategy's not working. Then what do you do? Number four, if progress is not being made, you change the player or the team or the strategy. Okay, but you don't keep doing the same thing. That's called insanity. So you change the player, the team or the strategy. All right, I just gave you a master's degree class on strategic planning

7:32in the process to do it very effectively and write this one down. This will help you. Again, the Sean Castorina. I'm definitely an entrepreneurial nerd. I like giving you guys steak. I like giving you the tools to be a successful entrepreneur. I just don't want to just just give you motivational stuff. I try to, if you look at the week that I put in this podcast, it is designed to absolutely take someone from point A to point Z in the entrepreneurial journey. I give you teaching lessons. Right. Teach you how to be a great entrepreneur. We do interviews with the best business leaders out there. People that have actually built companies. Okay, I get requests every day to be on our podcast. We reject countless people because we ask them this one question. What can you give my audience within entrepreneurship? How can you tell them? Can you give them a startup idea or can you tell them how to grow their business? If they can't answer that question, they're not coming on. And before they even get a chance to answer that question, I ask them why they deserve

8:35to answer that question. What gives them credibility on that question? Okay, so that, look at the week, the podcast. We teach you Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays. We put guests on there that we have great interviews. We have an Ask Sean edition. And now we're starting on Saturdays doing a mentor edition. This is what I do with my business partners trying to mentor you. These are short and sweet, but they're fantastic. If you want to grow as an entrepreneur. So again, Sean Castorine the 10-minute entrepreneur podcast. It's growing like crazy. Again, tell all your friends about it. Thank you again for listening to it. We will talk again soon.