Annual Planning for 2024

Brandon Lake:

Welcome to our webinar today, everyone. We're so excited to have with us, Andrea Ross, and she is an incredible advisor from Cultivated Advisors who helps business owners, and entrepreneurs find real clarity when it comes to managing their company, and finding true success. What I love about having Andrea with us today is that she has actually founded an award-winning Southeast Asian tourism company called Journeys Within. During her time there, she actually grew revenue to three million. She opened offices in Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Miramar, and she later sold the company, and now she brings all that experience to us today, and she helps other tour operators really be able to replicate some of what she did there, which I love. I had a chance to meet Andrea at Orlando in arrival this past fall, and I was super excited to chat with her. For those who don't know, in my world, I actually, in addition to running our tour operator booking software Resmark, and our digital liability waiver platform called Waiver Sign, and our marketing agency, Resmark Web, I also co-own, and operate two tour companies, Moab Adventure Center, and Western River Expedition.

So, Andrea, and I sat down, and had a fantastic discussion about what they offer at Cultivate, and I was so impressed. I said, we've got to share this with our audience, and even though our tour companies are fairly mature, I found as she went through the outline of some of the things they share at Cultivate, I was like, "Oh, my gosh, this is fantastic information", and had to do with marketing, and operations, and sales, and accounting, and all the areas of your business that are so important. And I was amazed at how much we could take from this, too. So, feeling like I wanted to share this with everyone here we are today, and I think as we consider our plans for 2024, this is perfect. Some of the things I'm sure you're going to go through today to just help get our minds into the vein of thinking about all these critical aspects of our business. I'm so excited with what you're going to share with us today. And with that, I will turn things over to you, Andrea.

Andrea Ross:

Thank you, Brandon. I appreciate it, and I'm glad you just went quickly through all the things you do, because if you do any longer explanation, it would be the entire webinar. So, thank you for making that a fast snippet. I'm always impressed by how much Brandon has on his plate, and manages so beautifully. Thank you all for coming, or for watching later. I know sometimes with these I sign up, and then when the recording gets sent out, I watch it on my time. So, hopefully, you can get a lot out of this today. The goal of today is to do some 2024 planning. Like Brandon said, I'm Andrea Ross. I started a Southeast Asia tour travel company. I had offices throughout the region. I loved it. I loved my team. I worked both as a DMC, and as a tour operator, and I actually had a hotel as well, and I started a nonprofit, so not quite as many things as on Brandon's list, but close, and I just learned a ton living in a developing country, working with a team.

It was one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. I got acquired about eight years ago now. I was very nervous with the acquisition, exit hadn't always been my plan. We'll talk later about building a vision. Hadn't always been my vision, but it became my vision. I wanted to do something different, was ready for a bigger challenge. So, we ended up getting acquired, which ended up being just one of the best experiences. I then went to work for that company, so got another set of experiences working for a much bigger company, much higher budget, and then met cultivated advisors, and realized that that was where all my passions came together. I do work with companies across all industries, but I do have a special place in my heart for the travel companies, because that's obviously my background. So, why are we here today? The purpose of today is to be really clear on what we want to achieve in 2024, and then set a clear plan to get there.

Now, I'll be honest with you, I usually do this webinar in the fall, so we're a little bit behind. With that said, I read a meme, I think it was yesterday, and it said January is just the trial offer, our subscription starts in February, and that resonated with me, because I've had a heck of a January. So, I'm like, okay, that was just a test run, and now tomorrow we hit 2024. So, this is perfect timing. So, I left some of the dates on here, because in future years I really encourage you to do what we're doing today a little bit earlier on so that you can hit the ground running in 2024. But with that said, you may have started already. You may be partway done, you may feel like you've got it, and you just want a refresher to see if you've missed anything, or you may have not even started, and that's okay.

The fact that you're doing it now absolutely counts, and is going to get you where you want to be by the end of the year. So, stick with it.

Stephanie Guerre:

Andrea? Andrea?

Andrea Ross:

Yeah, I'm so sorry.

Stephanie Guerre:

It's okay. Will you share your screen?

Andrea Ross:

That was so helpful. Okay, yes. And actually did everybody see, because it was hard to get this profile shot, so I just want to go back because this was not easy. I don't take great photography photographs, so I don't want to miss that slide. [inaudible 00:05:34].

Stephanie Guerre:

...nailed it.

Andrea Ross:

[inaudible 00:05:35] Thank you. Okay, so the outcomes for today, if you haven't already done so, it is definitely time to build this year's business plan. We're going to talk about what that looks like, and how to get that started. We really want to identify goals for 2024. There are incredible statistics about if you identify, write down, share your goals, the chances of you meeting them grows exponentially. So, I want to give you that chance. I want you to write them down, share them with me, yell them from the rooftops, because when you do that, you hold yourself accountable, and you're much more likely to hit them. I also just want to give you a basic confidence in how to go about business planning. How do you do this? How do you step into that role? Quick about Cultivate Advisors, we work off the propeller method. The idea being that with a propeller engine, you're not going to get off the ground unless all blades of the engine are at full capacity. So, we start with that financial engine in the middle.

Knowing your finances, understanding your finances, using that data is key to every other piece of your business. Then on the growth side, we have the sales, and the marketing. On the capacity side, we have recruiting, and leadership, and around the whole thing, we have productivity. [inaudible 00:06:49] We do all of these things smarter, not [inaudible 00:06:52] Our mission is to partner with committed entrepreneurs in propelling their businesses beyond expectations. And I do this every day, and I absolutely love it. I am very, very spoiled to have fantastic clients. So, agenda, we're going to quickly go through the planning mindset, the planning methodology, collaborative planning, and then I'll have time for any takeaways, and questions. I am going to talk fast. This is going to be a lot of information. It is hard to fit beginning of year planning into an hour. So, it's going to be a fire hose. Stay with me, grab what you can, and then you can work through it.

We're going to give you the tools to be able to work through it outside of this, but take notes, be engaged, be ready to get to work. So, the first thing is mindset. And I always feel like I need to slow down, and take a breath, because running through this webinar, I'm like actually, mindset is all about taking a deep breath, and being where you are today. It is so easy for us to focus on what has happened, or to worry about what's going to happen. And when we're planning for the year we're in, we really need to both physically, and mentally be present. And a lot of that means that we have to let go of some of that baggage. And I know COVID is starting to feel a little more like history versus reality, but it is a baggage that we're carrying with us still. And I think a lot of us, people will even tell me, "Oh, I'm nervous to plan because after COVID, you never know what's going to happen." And I'm like, "I get it."

But there were a lot of years prior to COVID, and a lot of years are going to happen after COVID where COVID doesn't happen, or something like COVID doesn't happen. And if we don't plan, we're constantly reacting instead of being proactive. So, I really encourage everybody to let that baggage go, step away from it, figure out where am I, where do I want to go, and how are we going to get there? So, be very present in the moment, which is hard for all of us. So, here are seven keys I use when I approach really being in the right mindset. Take space for your planning. We were joking earlier, I was getting the kids off to school, the dogs especially needy today. Actually, if I'm doing yearly planning, I leave. I go to either rent a space, or go borrow a friend's office, but I set some time aside where nothing else is going to distract me, and I'm able to be really present, and paying attention. Give your team space for planning.

We often like to throw ideas at our team, and expect almost an immediate response from them. And often we even know what response we want to get from them, and that's dangerous. We need to go to our team with a real expectation of curiosity, not judgment. We want to be curious what they think. We want to give them the tools, and the space to come with their own ideas. If we just sit in a meeting, and say, "Good news, I've done end of year planning, and I'm going to tell you exactly what's going to happen next year." That's not the collaborative approach we need to have. Say, "Hey, in our next meeting we're going to be talking about next year's plans. Here are some questions you could be thinking about so that you can come prepared to this discussion." And then we set our team up for success in that.

So, giving them the space, and the time to also bring their ideas. Plan out multiple scenarios, allowing to be more agile. I love this one, and I need this one. I'm the one that's like, "This is how my year's going to go." And I map it out. And then needless to say, something happens, something changes, a new product suddenly picks up in my market, and I don't feel like I can do that because set a plan. So, it's okay to have the plan, and then have some forecasts of some other ways this might go down that are also, okay, what if somebody quits? What if you find somebody that you really want to hire? All these things can kind of adjust. So, you've got to be agile within the plan. And that gets me to be firm on macro, but open to a path with micro.

So, set your big goals. When you've set your big goals, and where you want to go, be firm on those. Those are real. Try not to dally away from them, but how you get there, that can be all kinds of different journeys. We can, if you think about just a journey in general, you can take a plane, you can take a bus, you can take a car. There's so many ways to get somewhere. It's the same with business planning. And often what we do is we say, we want to get here, and this is the road that's going to take us there, but our team may not resonate with that road. They may want to take this windier route to get there, or they may have another idea. So, we need to be really open to the macro, I mean really solid on the macro, but really open to the path. Simplify to key performance indicators, key performance indicators, otherwise known as KPIs are really what we're tracking in order to know if we're getting to those goals.

And I'll get into this more in a little bit, but you really are going to want five of these that you're driving towards. And then increase your cash threshold. Capital is so important when you go back to the propeller. If your finances are stressful, or a challenge, we really need to step back, and say, "Okay, do we need to infuse capital into the business in order to give us the space, and time, and resources that we need to be successful here?" And then, of course, this is rather biased, but review it with an advisor, and stretch some scenarios. I'm going to say here, this doesn't have to be an advisor. It can be I'd be help, happy to help, but it could also be a mentor. It could be fellow business owners. Let's get together, and talk about our business plan for 2024. You'd be amazed how many entrepreneurs would jump at that, because you guys know when you're there, when you're an entrepreneur, when you're running your business, it can be really hard to not have a sounding board.

So, find that sounding board, whomever, whether it's an advisor, or just a trusted friend. And this is why it can be really hard to be an entrepreneur, because what everybody sees is this success, especially in the travel industry. They're like, "Oh, my gosh, I wish I had your job. You go the coolest places." And I get on a webinar like this, and I'm like, "Oh, I got to speed it up catching my flight to Florida." So, I get it. I get the travel looks sexy. But what people forget is that majority of what we do is actually under the surface. That disappointment, the failure, the sacrifices we make to be entrepreneurs, the hard work, and persistence we've put in, how disciplined we have to be because we don't have somebody telling us what to do. We have to be the ones telling everybody what to do, and then the dedication to usually something we are passionate about. So, I see you, I know that every entrepreneur is experiencing all of these things, and that's why I encourage you to reach out, and work with other entrepreneurs because they'll get it, too.

We all, anybody that's run a business understands the iceberg success image. So, the question, how do I achieve my growth objectives in a simple way, and this is really what today is about. You have somewhere you want to go with your business. How do you get there in the simplest way possible? Because sometimes we overcomplicate things, and actually we need to narrow it down, and just give ourselves a plan. So, I'm going to jump into the planning methodology. This is my little planning pyramid. It starts with a vision, and long-term goals. Then we move into the macro goals. We identify the KPIs, we prioritize our initiatives, and we decide how we're going to implement them. So, I'm going to jump right into the top. This vision and long-term goals. This is where pull out a pen, pull out a piece of paper, take notes. They don't have to be pretty, they just have to remind you of the thoughts you're having, and give you a place to start when you start your planning. So, the question I like to ask myself around vision, and long-term goals is both, why am I doing this?

What is my why behind it? Is it because I want to make a living for my kids? Is it because I love to travel, and this gives me an opportunity to? Is it I want to make as much money as possible, so I am blowing this thing up, I'm going global, I'm going to sell it. I'm the next Elon Musk. This was my father's company, and I've taken it over. This was what my mother loved. And so she, and I do it together. What's your why behind this? Really think about why do you get up in the morning? Why do we do this? Because if we go [inaudible 00:15:49] iceberg, we know it's not all based on success. This is hard, and there's a reason we do it even though it's hard. So, think that through, and then really think through what do I want in the next three, five to 10 years? And I actually did an exercise with a client recently that really helped.

We closed our eyes, and I said, "Okay, it's three years down the road, and you're walking into your office. What do you see? What are people saying about you? How many staff do you have? What are they working on?" And we just kind of talked it through, and I said, "Okay, now it's two years later. Tell me what you see. Now, it's five years later." And we got to the point where he is like, "I see my daughter running the company." He started to really see what that could look like, and that started to shape his vision of what he needs to be doing with his company now to get it to that vision he has in three, five to 10 years. So, don't be afraid to be a little woo woo on this. Be a little ethereal, go a little big because this is the unicorn. This is end all, be all. Where do I really want to be? And then bring it back, and think, okay, and where am I now? And then the next question is, how am I going to get there?

And to figure out how you're going to get there, we're going to talk about those macro goals. So, the way I envision it, I'm a super visual person. So, I envision this vision statement that we have is floating somewhere up here, right? It's got this idea of maybe it's my daughter taking over the business. Maybe it's I want to exit with blank amount of money because then I can retire. I want to stay on as an ambassador for the company, but only work two days a week. I love what I do. I want to still be working five days a week. I mean, I have definitely had people give me that answer. So, it can be anything you want, but it is floating up here. And it may have some big, like, I want to buy this house. I want to be able to afford this. There can be monetary tie-ins to the vision, but mostly the vision is how you look, feel what people think about the company. More of the ethereal stuff. The annual macro goals are the staircase to that vision.

You're not going to get there in a year, probably, if you've done the job, and made the vision big enough. But what we're building is a staircase that gets us to that cloud vision. And if we build the staircase right, we will get there. Now imagine the staircase from the labyrinth. I don't know if you guys remember this. I have weird movie things, but it goes off to the side, and then there's one up here, and then another staircase is built off here. If you build those kind of staircases, the abstract ones, that aren't directing you to that vision, you're never going to get there. You're going to climb a lot of stairs, but you're never going to get to that vision. So, I really encourage people to build a staircase that leads to the vision, and then really stick to it. And one of the things that I think that these goals do for us is the ability to say yes, yes, working on this is going to help me get up the staircase. But more than that, it's the ability to say no.

As entrepreneurs, we are asked so often to do so much. Not just by other people, but by our own brains as well. Our brain's like, "Oh, that's a cool idea. Why don't I do that? That sounds fun. Maybe I should do that." And I am the queen of shiny things. If I saw something fun, and shiny, I was like, "We should do that. Let's start that tour." What I really realized is that was me building a staircase to nowhere. I was heading off over here. What I really had to do was say no, because then I was allowed to continue to climb the staircase that got me to my vision. So, really think about building macro goals that can allow you to climb to your vision, not just keep climbing. So, how do we set these goals? This is my favorite example. So, the first thing is be bold. Go big, or go home. Choose a goal that challenges you, and maybe even scares you a little bit. So, as an example, let's say I want to run a marathon.

So, we're choosing my nightmare as the goal. Then you have to be specific. The goal should be clearly defined, making sure you know can visualize it, and it should answer the question what? So, for instance, I want to run the Marine Corps marathon. We're creating a much more tangible vision. Then it should be measurable. Goals are more effective When you can measure the outcome, how do you know if you've hit it, if you can't measure it? So, we want to know that we hit it. So, I want to run the Marine Corps marathon in under two hours. We will leave that for a minute. We'll come back to it. Action oriented. What am I going to have to do to achieve this goal? All right? I want to train for, and run the Marine Corps marathon in under two hours. Now we got to back it up, and say, okay, but it's got to be realistic. You should be both willing, and able to achieve your goals.

So, you may need to adjust them to make sure that they are bold, but also realistic. So, for me, it would be I want to train for, and complete, and not get picked up by the bus of shame for the Marine Corps marathon. And that's the thing, it follows at the back. And if you go too slow, they make you get in. I want this to be time bound. So, when do you plan to accomplish this goal? How long will it take? It all needs to have a timeframe. I want to train for, and complete the Marine Corps marathon on October 30th, 2016. I did not in fact do that, just to be very clear, and transparent. Missed that goal. But the idea being that we set up a goal, and then we really dialed that goal in to make sure it is something we can achieve, something we can track, that we know when we're doing it, and we can hold ourselves accountable to it. So, when we think about these smart goals, we're now setting up, that's what we're hitting here to get us to this vision.

The next step, and this comes into the tracking, is identifying the KPIs. And this is where I think it gets the most confusing, to be honest, I think. So far, pretty simple, right? We've got this pie in the sky idea of where we want to go. We're building staircases with our goals on how to get there, and then suddenly everybody has to talk about KPIs. What is a KPI? It is a key performance indicator. What is a KPI really? It's really a way to delineate down our goal, to achievable bite-size pieces that we can track so we know if we're getting there. That took me a long time to learn. So, here's my lemonade stand. My revenue goal for my lemonade stand is 400,000 for the year. To do that, I have worked out that I have to sell 106,382 cups. If everybody on this call is not overwhelmed by that, and then it's a lot of lemonade.

Okay, so, I'm open eight, and a half months of the year, which means if I break it down again, remember we're taking it into bite-sized pieces. If I break it down again, it means I'm going to have to sell 12,515 cups a month. That still feels fairly overwhelming to me as I stir my lemonade. I'm open 37 weeks, which means that I have to sell 2,875 cups a week, and I'm open 260 days a year, which means I have to sell 410 cups a day. Now it's starting to feel a little more tangible. If I know my goal is 410 cups a day, I'm now able to think through how many cups do I need to buy? How much lemonade do I need to have, how many lemons? How many people do I need to have working in order to make that possible? So, now I'm getting to a bite-sized piece that allows me to both track it, but feel like I can take accountability of it, and know how to be ready for it.

And you can keep going. I'm open 10 hours a day, which means I need to do 41 cups an hour.

There's 60 minutes in an hour, so I need to [inaudible 00:24:10] 0.46 a minute. Okay. You see my point? We maybe went too far, right? There's sometimes just... A little too low. So, it starts, for me, I really like 260 days a year. I need to have 410 cups a day. But we remember with KPIs, there are other ways of looking at it, too. So, if I say my average purchase is $1.00 and 87 cents a cup, then I know I need 219 patrons a day. Now that that I know this, I can start playing with it. I can say, "These are my KPIs." What if I was able to get those 219 patrons to buy two, and a half cups, or maybe even [inaudible 00:25:00] cups? How do I do that? What if I had to go cups so they could take some home? What if I had my special lemonade sauce, or whatever we call it that they could take with them in a closed container?

So, now I'm kind of able to play to figure out how to get to these numbers. It also very clearly gives me things to give to my teams. Hey, marketing team, I need to get 219 people here a day. How are we going to do that? Right? I send that over to Nikki, and be like, "What's the plan? [inaudible 00:25:33] ...these people in." "Hey, sales team, how do we get those people to buy at least one, and a half cups? And in fact, how do we increase that, and try to get those people to buy two cups each, or two, and a half cups each? How do we do that?" And then, okay, what do I need to do as the owner operator to be ready for this? So, this is what KPIs look like to me. It's taking that big, scary goal, and breaking them down into bite-size, achievable accountable objectives. Okay, I'm going to skip that one.

Don't get scared. This is what that looks like when I work with a client. So, what I say to a client is, okay, we know we want to get to say 511,000. That's our big goal. But also they're a seasonal company, so we don't break it down evenly each month. We set our goal based on past years, and then we track it, and we go down, and we track certain things. We wanted to track new travelers. We wanted to track direct bookings. How many are coming from OTAs? So, this allows us to get a snapshot of our business, and to see our KPIs, and share these with our team. So, if I say to my team, "Hey, I want direct bookings to go up this year, and OTAs to stay pretty similar." Take more from direct bookings. So, we really want to push that. Now my marketing, that's the goal, more direct bookings. Keep OTA steady.

Then I'm going to talk to my marketing team, and say, "Hey, how do we attract these direct bookings?" Then I'm going to talk to my sales team, and say, "Great. When they call in, how are we going to make sure we land..." And then I talk to my operations team, and say, "Is there anything we need to do differently for direct bookings versus OTA bookings?" Now I've had this conversation, and each of my teams has a plan forward based on this KPI. And then we track it. And then we look, and we say, "Okay, did we", oops, "Did we hit our goal? Are we where we want to be? How are we going to get there if not?" So, this is how I track KPIs for a lot of... And some of them have very different KPIs.

Some of them were tracking how many Google reviews they got, some of them we're tracking [inaudible 00:28:00] and if their AR is going down. So, it can be a myriad of different things. But what we do is we take those big goals that we've [inaudible 00:28:08] the stairs, our KPIs is to know, are we actually walking up the stairs? This is how we track if we're making progress. Otherwise, we don't know if the initiatives we're putting out are actually having an impact, and we're actually moving towards those goals we've set.

Stephanie Guerre:

Andrea, can we pause there just to see, because that's such a big piece of... Just to see, give you a breath, and see if we've had some new people join in. I know they probably missed a little bit of the front half, but does anybody have any questions on KPIs? I know this can be kind of daunting, and you're probably already tracking them whether you're calling them KPIs, or not, but does anybody have any questions, or anything that they can relate to their business that maybe an example of something that they're tracking? Anything? Just want to open it up. We like to keep a little bit of conversation going, too, if anybody has anything they want to get more clarity on. This is your time.

Brandon Lake:

Andrea, I'll just say one thing really quick while others [inaudible 00:29:06] the question, but I love what you've said here about coming up with this overall vision, and figuring out exactly what it is that you're trying to do. We did a kind of somewhat inspired by some of our conversation that you, and I had earlier. We took our marketing team, sales team, not the entire team, but the people who were in charge of marketing, our sales manager, our operations manager. We all got together for two full days, and did this. We said, "Okay, what could we actually do with our... What is our actual capacity based on how many guides we've hired, and all of this?" If we were filling every [inaudible 00:29:45] that we have stored in our booking system, what would that look like?

Because ultimately as a tour company, that's our goal. We've set the schedule with guides to do it, and we want to fill it, and then we brainstorm. We actually use Post-IT notes, and we just throw down. We gave them... Let's take 10 minutes, think of every idea you can, and we put them all over the board, and some were way out there, stuff we'd never thought [inaudible 00:30:06] We do that all the time. And it was fantastic to pull all of that together, and then say, "Okay, which of these can we accomplish in this quarter?" Because as we are a seasonal business, so it's like we kick things off kind of in April, or March.

So, it's like everything that happens right now will really influence the rest of our season. So, I love that we're talking about this right now too. Super helpful. And I love how you hone it down to just a few, because I've been in that seat too, where you get totally like you've had so many KPIs, or on the marketing team, you're like, "I got these 18 things. And they're all important." And it's hard, and you want to look at [inaudible 00:30:46]

Andrea Ross:

But if you're not tracking them effectively, you can't figure out what the top five are, right? So, it's okay to start with a little bit of the spaghetti on the wall of what's going to stick, but it's really important that you're tracking what sticks, and that you're making sure that you're getting that ROI. I've had clients get teary-eyed when we've put together a CEO dashboard, because they've just never seen their business like that in a way that they can take qualitative, they have this amazing team, they're working on amazing goals, but then turn it quantitative, and see is it working? Is this successful? Are we getting from this what we want to get? If yes, great. If no, why not? And yeah, I think it's incredible, and it just helps all of us just see it in one place. And I have some clients who have maybe six KPIs.

I have some that have a lot more, but usually that's split into teams then. And it really helps, to your point, it helps hold the teams accountable, too, because as business owners, and we're getting to that in a minute, we're managing so much, especially when our teams get bigger that often it feels hard to help each individual team be the best they can be. But by having this shared vision, these shared goals, and then breaking it down into individual KPIs, now we're really setting each of our teams up for success. They know what the expectations are. We've talked through how they can get there, and now for them, it's just more of an implementation, and tracking, and so they're going to be [inaudible 00:32:24] effective in your business. It's again, we don't want somebody building a staircase heading out over here. It might be a beautiful staircase.

They might run up those stairs, but if those stairs don't lead to the shared collective vision, it's just stair mastering over there, they're not actually helping us get where we want to go. So, no, I think that's a really great point. And yes, if you can give people the time, and the energy to sit there, and have those conversations, it's incredible what comes out of it. I lead some leadership retreats, and some planning retreats, and it's one of my favorite things to do, because people get so excited, and that's why we started running a business, because it excites us, because it inspires us because we're passionate about it. So, to allow ourselves to be back in that space instead of the day to day putting out fires, it's really nice to give ourselves as leaders that gift, too. Okay, I'm going to jump in. So, I already went through the propellers.

I'm not going to do that too much, but just really quickly, when we think about some potential KPIs, it is maybe connecting revenue to sales conversions. How many leads do we get in? How many of those leads turn into sale? What's your percentage there? That's important to know. How many leads do we need once we know that percentage, right? If we've said, "Okay, we're setting", in this thing, we say, "Okay, revenue goal of 18,000", let's say our average traveler is [inaudible 00:33:57] we know we need to get at least 18 travelers. How many leads do we have coming in right now? If we have 18 leads coming in, this isn't going to work, because we know we're not... 100% of our leads. Let's say we work out by tracking that we close 80% of our leads. Now we know how many leads we need to get in to hit that revenue goal.

So, really thinking through what KPIs can I [inaudible 00:34:21] at that success, and that end goal that I have. In marketing, how do we connect leads to lead sources, right? If we're putting things out on Google Ads, and we're doing a direct marketing campaign, and we're doing a referral program, how do we... That we know which lead is coming from each of those programs so that we can track it, and know, "Hey, this program brings us a great amount of leads. We should put more money into it. We're definitely getting an ROI on it. This? We're just not seeing the return on this that we thought we would. Shift. Do we need to try something different?" And that's why we're doing this now...

Stephanie Guerre:

Oop, Let me see if I can get her to recap what she said this last couple of minutes. I love internet.

Guyan Gupta:

I was having bandwidth issues, so I'm going to turn the video off.

Stephanie Guerre:

You are? Okay.

Speaker 5:

Sometimes that helps.

Stephanie Guerre:

Yeah.

Guyan Gupta:

Always.

Stephanie Guerre:

Now's a good time for questions as well.

Brandon Lake:

Hopefully she's not frozen for good there. Oh, she realized.

Stephanie Guerre:

Oh, man.

Speaker 5:

Yeah, sometimes you don't realize it until you've gone through many minutes.

Stephanie Guerre:

I know she doesn't live anywhere too remote, but she has on webinars before had a little bit of a bandwidth issue. So, hopefully she'll jump back on quickly. There she is.

Andrea Ross:

I am so sorry you guys. I have never... My bad.

Speaker 5:

It's okay. It was only a couple minutes.

Andrea Ross:

Okay, good. Let me share my screen again. Okay, so then we jump into leadership. We need to always be identifying our staff needs. We need to be building out the needs for our current staff, and tracking that. What are we giving them? What do they need to succeed? And then from recruiting. Recruiting becomes a really big one with KPIs that we often miss because for recruiting, we need to pull in this, what are we going to need in order to manage any growth we're seeing. We need to predict attrition, and we need to make sure we know what our forms of recruiting are working. Does Indeed bring us the right people, do referrals bring us the right people? Really holding ourselves to KPIs around recruiting, especially for a lot of your businesses that are seasonal businesses, really thinking through how am I getting an [inaudible 00:37:10] recruiting? Because it can be so brutal to the bottom line to have to bring all new people in, and train them. So, really thinking through when does that need to happen, and what does that need to look like?

So, those are just some example KPIs that I used with some of my clients. But honestly, it's up to you, and what's going to be best for your business. What's happening here? Okay, last, well, not last thing. Second to last thing. Initiatives prioritized. So, I like to think of it as we built this cloud in the sky vision. We've built these steps of our goals to get to that vision. We've identified some KPIs on those steps that we know we've hit the right level, and then we need to figure out how the heck to get there. So, to me, what initiatives are is we're saying what we can see on our KPI is we want to be here, but we are here. What do we need to do to close that gap? And that's where the initiatives come from. What pivots, or shifts, or changes do we need to do? What orders should we be approaching this? What new initiatives can we roll out? We may want to do an affiliate program. Hey, we've really tapped into the direct market, and the OTAs, but we haven't ever done an affiliate program.

That should be an initiative we prioritize for Q1. We got to get that set up. It's going to be another source of revenue which we need to do based on our goals to get to this revenue number we're going to need to bring this into the picture to get us there. Not only that, but our vision might say we want to be a really important part of our community. So, again, the affiliate program is going to tie into all of that. So, find those initiatives that get you to your KPIs, that lower the gap in your KPIs that get you to your goals. Keep you climbing those stairs, and even potentially add a little... What do we need to do to shorten the gap on our KPIs? Then we talk about implementation. And this is key, because often as business owners, this stuff can be quite fun for us. It's fun to think about where we want to take our business. It's fun to think about setting goals for our business.

Even sometimes, once you understand KPIs, it's fun to set some KPIs, and think, how are we going to attract this? Where are we going to pull those numbers? I love the initiatives prioritized phase. That's my favorite phase. How are we going to get from here to there, and coming up with these cool ideas, and the team all working together. And then this, the initiative implementation. This is the closing the loop phase, and this is a harder phase. I'll be honest. This is probably where most of my clients have a harder time, because it's fun to have the ideas. It's fun to think through what we're going to do. It's actually harder to galvanize everybody, and get everybody rowing in the same direction. So, we really need to think through, once we've set all of this up, what is the strategy, the process, the systems, the procedures, the training, and leadership plan to implement the initiatives?

This is quite honestly where I as A CEO would turn to my COO, and say, "Okay, how do we do this?" Because they were good at building the SOPs. They were good at creating processes, and that wasn't necessarily my strength, but I recognized how important it was. Now, if you're a one person shop, which I know some of my clients are, then this has to be you, too. You have to own this piece as well. But it's very important to be thinking through not just where do I want to go, and how am I going to get there, but also step by step, how am I going to map this out so somebody else can get there too? If our vision, and our goals, and our KPIs only exist in our head, our team is not going to be able to follow that. Everybody will have their own vision. Everybody will be building staircases to goodness knows where. We need to bring everybody together, and that's where our initiative implementation comes in.

So, here's some practices. Well, these are pitfalls, and I left the dates in, and I didn't leave the dates in to make anybody feel bad. I just let them in. So, next year you can think, yeah, that is an October priority. I want to pull that back, and make sure I'm doing that in the fall, so I'm ready for January, but I also just want to make sure I'm giving you a gold star for being here today because it's good to start. The earlier the better. So, generally, we're doing this vision of macro planning in October. We're starting to lay out KPIs in November, and we're starting to implement, and think through a 2024 plan in December. Try not to make it too complex. It's just a one page business plan. This is our approach to 2024. We want to get everybody on board, and if we make it too complex, we're going to lose the team.

And then another pitfall is not having them on a visual display. I see this all the time. People are so excited. They're like, "Here's my vision, here are our goals." They have these, to Brandon's point, two day, wonderful retreats where they talk it all out, and then everybody disperses, and get back to work. And you're back to working in the business, and you maybe never mention the goals again, right? Maybe at the end of the year you're like, oh, we almost got there, or we did get there. These goals, and initiatives should be talked about all the time. This should be your north star for the business going through the year. Every time you get together with your team, you should say, "Hey, let's read through those goals again, we put together at our retreat. How's that going? Any shifts here? Are we tracking what we need to be tracking to be getting to these goals? Hey, remember our vision? That was cool. Anybody remember it? Want to talk about it? What does it mean to you?"

This needs to become part of the culture of the company so that everybody can understand where they're going. I read an example the other day that said, imagine you hadn't seen a movie, and somebody described it to you. Well, there's a field, and he's built this field in corn, and then some ghosts arrive, and they play baseball. If you said that to 10 people who had never seen Field of Dreams, they would all have a very different interpretation of what that would look like. If that's how we set up our vision, imagine how many different interpretations, or baseball fields are going to be built by your team if they actually can't see your true vision. So, instead of just telling them the vision, you have to show them the movie. You have to give them enough information, enough of a picture, that your baseball field looks like their baseball field, and the ghosts look like Ray Liotta.

But that's the idea, is you're painting a picture for them so everybody knows what they're pushing towards, and then you're keeping it front of mind. I'm going to walk through collaborative planning pretty fast, because I got 10 minutes. There's different ways that we lead, right? Some of us just lead ourselves. If we're solopreneurs, we are out there doing it ourselves. We give ourselves the pat on the back. We give ourselves the timeout, but we really are leading ourselves. Some of us lead everyone, which means everybody's reporting to us. We're holding it all together. Some of us lead leaders, we have sales team leaders, marketing team leaders, and we're able to work with them on a more strategic approach. And why is it valuable to collaborate? And I would say valuable across this? I'm never going to say that if you lead yourself, you shouldn't be collaborating. You absolutely should.

The reason for that is our goal as leaders in our company is to give context, is to give that vision, is to paint the picture, explain what Kevin Costner, and Ray Liotta look like, what the field looks like, what the corn looks like. We're painting this picture so that the rest of our team can see it. And then we're saying to the team, "Okay, so that's what I want to build. How do I get there?" And allowing our team to come back with the plan. So, we give them the context. The team then comes back to us with the plan. We're setting that macro goal, but we're allowing them to devise the road to get there because then they have ownership. They're empowered, they know they can do it, and we're supporting them because we don't actually care how they get there. We just care that they get there. So, we give them the context, and the vision, and the goals. They come back with a plan. Then we all sit down together, and figure out how do we integrate this into our current business?

What does that look like? How do we take this 2024 plan, and make it work? And then we bring it out to the rest of the team, and get buy-in for the rest of the team. So, it's really important whether we lead ourselves, whether we're leading others, that we are getting this mapped out. I have solopreneurs that I work with that do this with me. They tell me where they want to go in the context, and I come back with, "Hey, what about this? Could we do this?" Because the truth is, if you do this collaboratively, it will come out better. More ideas are more valuable. [inaudible 00:46:39] So, how do you kickstart collaboration? Uh oh. Is that me? No. Okay. The first thing to do is formally review the planning process with your collaborators. Lock in dates. This can't be something we rush. We need to take our time. We need to have thought around it. And remember that different people on your team process differently. So, some people on your team are verbal processors.

They're going to want to sit in that meeting, and talk it all out, and that's great. But some people are external processors. They want to step away, think all this stuff through, and then come back with their ideas. We want to give them space as well. So, I really recommend when I talk to leaders to make sure that this is an accessible approach to all members of your team. So, I send out an agenda before any planning session, and say, "Hey, here's what we're going to be discussing today. Here's some questions you should ask yourself before you..." And that way, anybody that's an external processor, they're going to spend some time thinking through that, and they're going to come prepared. For those people that know they can just show up, and spitball, and get through ideas. They're going to just show up, and do that. But we're giving everybody a level playing field. Otherwise, our more external thinkers have a bit of an advantage for these kinds of meetings.

Discuss the format, and deliverables of each stage. Be very purposeful in what you want to get out of each meeting. Hey, we're meeting today to talk about the vision. At the end of this, I want to have a one page vision, story drawn picture video made in my head of what our vision looks like. Hey, in our next phase, we are going to set five goals, come thinking about what those goals should be. So, really be very mindful, and purposeful about each step of this process. And then step... Schedule [inaudible 00:48:32] with each collaborator. Discuss the context of what has been delivered. Review the plan, make sure you know how you're going to integrate it, and how you're going to get buy-in from their team. Together with your leaders, come up with a vision with these big goals, and then with your KPIs.

But then you need to sit down one-on-one with the leaders of each of your division, and say, "Okay, how are we delivering this to your team? How are we making sure we get buy-in from them? How do we make sure we're not missing some brilliant idea that they might have? Let's talk about what that collaboration would look like." And again, being very purposeful, and mindful about integrating the whole team so they all feel like they have the shared vision. That is me. Any questions from anybody?

Brandon Lake:

Here's just a question for you, Andrea. [inaudible 00:49:32] You've obviously shared this sort of outline, and plan with a lot of different companies. You've been part of their planning meetings, and done all of this. What do you see, even if someone goes through the whole process, they get there, they have a vision that makes sense, they put in place the KPIs, they plan the initiatives, they do all of that. After that point, and the year starts to move forward, where do you see things most commonly fall apart? Where are some of the biggest challenges? If someone were to implement everything we just talked about, what might they confront down the road?

Andrea Ross:

It's a great question. I think the first one is exactly what I said is that they get put aside, they get written. It's all really pretty, it's even on board, and then they get set aside, and the working in the business takes over, and everybody's putting out fires all over the place, and we never go back, and revisit them. And at the end of the year, we kind of pull them out, brush the dust off, and see if we made it. And it's unlikely you did. If you're [inaudible 00:50:34] it as you go, it is unlikely that you have stayed on course, right? It's a little bit like using GPS. You have to have way points, and know that you're getting somewhere. I think the second way it gets derailed is if early on we either blow some of [inaudible 00:50:51] the water, which does happen, or we don't hit goals.

And then as leaders, we are usually, and I'm making a very broad statement here. Usually we are not good at celebrating, nor are we good at the hard discussions. So, when we blow those [inaudible 00:51:14] the water, it should be a celebration, and we should reset goals. We should say, "Hey, this is great. We've had a huge Q1. We've beat a lot of these goals. Let's sit back down, and see if we need to reassess the rest of the year, and let's have a little party, and celebrate. Well done, everybody." But hey, let's push it now, because we know we can. We often say, "Huh, I'm hitting all my goals, I'm done." And then you lose steam. And by fourth quarter, those numbers are no longer where they were. I see it time, and time again. It's almost like we get too passive.

And then I think the other way is if you have a horrendous first month, first quarter, and you think, "Gosh, this is going to be demoralizing if I show this to my team, if I keep bringing it up, and they keep seeing how we failed, and I'm of the opposite, bring it up. Let's talk about it." Oh, my gosh, this is what we thought we could do first quarter. Okay, why couldn't we? What's going on here? Do we need to fix some other KPIs? Is there something intrinsically going on in the business? Hey, sales, what's going on? Well, our internet cuts out every time we're on Zoom. Okay, let's try to get Zoom better. Strategically going in instead of bearing our head in the sand, and saying, "That's going to be hard. That's going to be a hard discussion." We need to step in, and lead. So, I see that issue a lot. And then, I mean, the biggest issue, Brandon, and this is across all entrepreneurs, and I was guilty of it, too, is we get so busy working- ...our business, especially when it's a seasonal business.

And I have clients tell me all the time, "Oh, I can't possibly work with you over the high season." And I'm like, "You can, and you will, because the biggest challenge is to keep working on your business even when you're consistently getting pulled into your business." So, how do you step back, and if the two hours working with me a week is what forces you to step back, and look at these things. You have to do it. So, I think that's it, is really making sure you keep these up on the bulletin board in front of you, good, bad, or ugly. You look at them every month, and you don't ever let your head go in the sand, or get pulled away by too many fires.

Brandon Lake:

I love that. That's great.

Andrea Ross:

Well, thank you for having us.

Brandon Lake:

Yeah. And maybe here's one last question, Andrea, I see on the screen the free advising session. So, you, and I had a discussion, and I loved this. It was pretty eyeopening for me. You asked me a ton of different questions just to get into our business, and I was like, "Oh, that's a good thing to think about. Oh, yes. That's great." And kind of going through that, maybe just give us 15 seconds about what someone would expect if they were to scan this QR code, and say, "You know what? I'd like to just walk through this." I think even just the questions you ask during that are really insightful. They cause people to think about some things that maybe they haven't as you think about working on the business. And we love that. We all love it. That's why we started [inaudible 00:54:14].

Andrea Ross:

Yeah, that's why we do it. Yeah, exactly.

Brandon Lake:

So, maybe just give us a really quick overview of what that looks like.

Andrea Ross:

Yeah, absolutely. So, our free advising session is two hours, and we sit down with business owners, obviously like...

Stephanie Guerre:

I will jump in here. So, it's two hours to sit down with Andrea, or one of our other advisors. And what we do is, sorry, Andrea, help you understand what your big goals are, and then break it down into each area of the business. So, we look at your financial goals, your sales goals, marketing, leadership, recruiting, and productivity, going all through the propellers, really to help you give not only a taste of advising, but build a roadmap of how you are going to reach your goals. We also combine it with this business health, and value assessment, which gives you an idea of what your business is worth, what it's potentially worth, and how you can improve your business to get there. So, if you're curious, or want more information, scan the QR code, and I will follow up with you with those resources, and make sure that you have everything you need to make 2024 your best year yet. So, thank you so much. Thanks Andrea. I know you [inaudible 00:55:14]

Andrea Ross:

Thank you. I'm so sorry for the internet. No idea.

Stephanie Guerre:

That's okay. That's why I'm here.

Andrea Ross:

I know. I appreciate it. But it's nice seeing everybody, and I am going to run to the airport.

Stephanie Guerre:

Yes. All right, safe travels. Thank you, Resmark. Appreciate you guys, and we'll see everybody later.