Annual planning is an integral part of conducting business. Here, Natalie Dawson, co-founder of business consulting firm Cardone Ventures, shares tips on the best ways to get started.
With the start of a new year a few weeks behind us, many business owners and entrepreneurs have already committed to a strategic annual plan. Annual planning, which refers to the process of setting goals and objectives for the year ahead, helps you as a business owner to be able to identify areas of growth, and work to take your business to the next level.
Annual planning is best done in the last quarter of the year as it’s the best time to look back at your progress and plan for the year ahead. But if you haven’t done it just yet, don’t worry! There is still plenty of time to get organized and create a plan of action for the rest of the year that can get you closer to your goals.
According to Natalie Dawson, co-founder of business consulting firm Cardone Ventures, and author of the 5-star rated business handbook, TeamWork: How to Build a High-Performance Team, annual planning provides a clear roadmap for both a company and its employees towards success as it allows you to get focused on what needs to be done, and work together to make it happen.
“As a business owner, you have to be really laser-focused on the pieces of the board that have to move,” she tells NY Weekly. “And when you know what those pieces are, then you must align the team that is going to help you move those pieces,” she continues.
When thinking about the pieces of the board that have to move, a great place for any business to start is by committing to a revenue target for the next fiscal year. This first step is crucial because it involves thinking critically about what you need to do in order to hit that target, and creating a very specific formula for how you will go about achieving it. Depending on your business model, that might mean launching a new product line, investing in marketing, or offering a brand new service.
“If I am trying to increase my revenue by 20% next year, and I’m a dental practitioner who is already running as efficiently as possible in my current location, I have to either go and acquire a new practice that will allow me to care for more patients, or do something else completely, such as launching an online teeth whitening company,” she says.
Once you’ve figured out what that new source of revenue is, Dawson says the next important step is to ask yourself, ‘who is the person, or persons, that are responsible for helping me hit this target?’
When you’ve established which department(s) within your organization are responsible for certain areas of growth, such as production or marketing, Dawson suggests meeting with those employees and asking them what challenges they anticipate will be faced when expanding in these areas. Then together as a team, you can start to think within each department on how to overcome them.
“One thing that I do with my team is SWOT analysis,” Dawson shares. SWOT analysis, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, works to identify what your business is doing well and should be doing more of in the following year, while also acknowledging what’s currently not working so that you can fix it. Completing a SWOT analysis forces you to really confront what the challenges are going to be and what you need to do ahead of time so that they aren’t actually challenges.
A great resource for when you’re conducting a SWOT analysis is to look at your metrics. “The more that a metric matters, the more frequent the reporting should be,” Dawson tells us. When it comes to Cardone Ventures, where her business model works by helping other business owners achieve their personal, professional, and financial goals, Dawson shares that she receives certain metrics updates on a daily basis.
“I know how many tenants we sold the day before, and that way if something goes wrong, I can course correct and pay attention to it,” she explains. By analyzing your metrics just as closely, you’ll also be able to ensure that your team is actually doing what they’re supposed to be doing.
“You need to get some sort of weekly or bi-weekly update on those core things that you know have to happen in order for those pieces of your puzzle to actually move,” she says. “There’s really no purpose in doing any annual planning if you’re not going to be committed to actually looking at these things. When things go wrong, you don’t hide from it. You meet with the team and figure out what needs to happen in order to get that thing to actually work,” she concludes.
If you found these tips helpful and want to learn more, be sure to check out Natalie Dawson on Instagram, and click here to get a free copy of her book, TeamWork: How to Build a High-Performance Team, where she delves deeper into these concepts and can help you build the team and success you’ve always wanted.
“No great business was built alone. You need a team to 10X your business, and TeamWork gives you the roadmap for scaling your team,” says Grant Cardone, real estate mogul and author of the New York Times bestseller The 10X Rule.
