Podcast Ep. #54 – Our process for annual business planning (Part 2)

Today on the Academy I thought we could spend a little more time talking about yearly planning since we’re approaching the end of the year. If you don’t actually have a yearly planning session at your company, it’s understandable. It’s the end of the year, work has been building up, and you’re just trying to get things done and settled before taking a little time off for the holidays.

Yearly planning is important though. It’s your opportunity to take some time and give yourself permission to stop working in the business and work on the business. In this episode, we’re going to talk specifically about running the 2nd-day agenda of your annual planning meeting with the leadership of your company. If you haven’t listened to part one of this series I encourage you to head over there now.

Taking the time to work on your business, instead of constantly working so deeply “in” the business can be highly valuable. Especially at the end of the year when you have an opportunity to rise above the day-to-day work and identify what went well, or what went wrong throughout the year, and then make an effort to do things that improve and move the company, and your team, beyond the status quo, come the new year.

This podcast series is all about making sure that you carve out time to do these meetings. Then you need to add some structure to your meetings. High-level planning meetings without structure can lead to a lot of unproductive swirling and distractions at best. At worst you’ll just get pulled down into a completely unproductive spiral, that’s just a waste of time.

To help you run great meetings, I’m going to recommend again that you check out The Entrepreneurial Operating System, or EOS, from the great book Traction by Gino Wickman. I’ve covered this before in a previous episode if you’d like to explore a system to run your business. But today I’d like to briefly summarize the second-day agenda for your annual planning meeting that the author recommends. Then I’ll sprinkle in a little advice and specifics about what we’ve done and learned as a team after years of following the recommended 2-day agenda.

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