How To Get More Clarity Than You've Ever Had Before

wales
Nigel has talked for many years how, every October half term, he and Sue sit down and map out their plans for the following year. They start with what they want to achieve as a family, whether that’s holidays, home improvements, changing the car, school fees, whatever and that translates into a requirement for an amount of money to fund that lifestyle. Those personal goals are then brought into the business planning process and the targets for the business are setup to give plenty of scope to achieve those personal goals, and more.

Now, whilst there’s a little bit more to it than that, in truth, it’s not much and Mastermind member Keith Edmunds decided that this year he would follow Nigel’s approach precisely. Here’s his
story, in his own words…
“Let’s go away somewhere nice for a long weekend.”
My wife, Cecilia, looked at me unbelievingly. “And do some business planning,” I added. Cecilia looked more believing now. “Is this one of your mate Nigel’s ideas?”
“I’m not sure I’d describe him as ‘my mate’,” I said, desperate to get the conversation away from whatever relationship I might have with Nigel and back to the planning weekend.
In the end, I delegated to the person who does our office admin, and who I happen to be sleeping with (and, incidentally, married to).
“I want somewhere nice, three nights, and we need to be able hire a room with a big table, huge whiteboard, and an Internet connection.”
Thus it was that we found ourselves hurtling down the M4 to Carmarthen to drop our seven year old daughter Lucy off with her grandparents for the weekend (question of the week last week: “Daddy, what’s ‘profit’? – I’m still preparing the presentation to answer her). We then went to Llwyn Helyg Country House (above) – a fabulous, very high quality B&B a few miles away – for The Planning Meeting.
Like many of you, I’d heard Nigel talk about how he and Sue spend time each October planning what they want for the following year and, well, it seemed to work for them, so I thought I’d try a bit of swipe and deploy on technique.
“Right then,” I said as we sat down on Friday morning in the “work” room we’d been allocated, “I’m not really sure how to start this.” My wife gave me that look (you know the one), so I quickly added, “But today we’ll talk about what we want, and tomorrow we’ll work out how the business can provide it. Let’s start with the house.”
I could fill the Circular with the story of our house, but suffice to say a) lovely location b) not so lovely house c) we want to knock it down and rebuild it. We started discussing the budget, pausing only to drink real coffee and eat fresh scones, provided by our hosts.
We wrote down a number with a pound sign in front of it that we would need in 2015 (and again in 2016: this will be a two-year project). The number looked a bit scary, so we hid it under some other papers.
“Holidays,” I announced. Soon we had holidays marked up in the year wall planner I’d thoughtfully brought along, and we decided to mark in a few long weekends away as well. This was getting easy.
More numbers with pound signs allocated to each holiday and long weekend, but these were a bit smaller than the Big One under the paper.
“Living costs,” I commanded, on a roll now. We keep a reasonable record of our outgoings, so this wasn’t too hard. Then a bit for horses (gentlemen, if you think shoes are expensive, don’t encourage your favourite femme to get into horses), a bit for gliding (excellent use of funds), a fund for Lucy’s activities (she will one day make a lucky man significantly poorer), and so it went on.
At the end of day one we had a very clear picture of what we’d like to do in 2015, together with the associated costs. We didn’t go completely wild, but we did try to focus on what we wanted rather than constrain ourselves. We went off to a great local restaurant to muse on the day.
On Saturday morning, back in the work room, we added up all the numbers we’d gleefully written the day before (including the one hiding under the paper). “Goodness gracious,” we both said, “My oh my.” It was quite a big number. I felt my comfort zone sneaking out of the room.
“OK…” I said, with more conviction than I felt, “What does the net profit need to be for us to get that much money in our bank account legally?”
We did the sum. Then, knowing our percentage of net/gross profit for this year, we worked out what the gross profit had to be, and knowing our average income per client, we worked out how many clients we needed. A significant part of our income is from support contracts, and we decided that the majority of the increase of revenue required should come from support contracts. We know the average monthly support income per client, and we started to form a picture of what we needed.
With this clarity of goals, we worked on something else that we knew needed fixing in our business: goals for each employee.
I’d had some excellent support from my Mastermind group in getting some ideas together, but now we went through each role in the business and wrote down the key elements that role had to contribute to our goal, and how we were going to measure and reward each staff member.
We also decided to set a company goal for 2015 with a long weekend away for everyone and their partners if (sorry, WHEN) we reach it. It’ll be Paris or Barcelona or Seville or similar (Cecilia and I didn’t agree on everything).
I wasn’t sure how useful we’d find our planning weekend, but now I can honestly say I’ve never had such clarity in both our personal and our business goals. The word we both coined was “liberating”: just being able to think freely and decide what we wanted. I don’t have to feel guilty about what a holiday costs: we’ve budgeted for it already.
Cecilia felt the same: it was an excellent use of our time to get away from the business, the emails, the phone calls and even Lucy asking for the nineteenth time in a day if she could play Minecraft. We just focused on us (the WHY) and then the business (the HOW).
Cecilia even conceded that My Mate Nigel’s idea was a good one. I’d be embarrassed if he found out about that moniker, but hopefully he won’t read this (will he?).
keith-edmunds