If you want to break through different revenue ceilings, strategic planning is a critical tool, but it is only useful if you outline measurable, accountable action along with it.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result, and most of the time building a tactical plan in a trade type service business that we’re in is ‘We’re going to do the same thing this year, but we’re going to do it better,’” says Chris Angelo, president and CEO of Stay Green, Inc., based in Santa Clarita, California. “What does better mean? ‘I don’t know. Just better.’ Well, you don’t get an A for the effort. You get an A for the results and the outcomes.”
Tony Nasrallah, president and founder of Ground Works Land Design, based in Cleveland, Ohio, says without a strategic plan, there’s confusion, failure, and you can end up wasting time and money.
Tim Gardiner, president of Meridian Landscaping, based in Sterling, Virginia, says while strategic plans take perseverance, they are excellent for ensuring the company stays focused on their key objectives.
“People can ask the question, ‘How does this align with one of our objectives?’” Gardiner says. “If you can’t answer that, then either your objectives are wrong, or the other piece is something that’s not really that important.”
Many assume that strategic plans are easy to execute but quit once they realize it’s much harder than initially expected. If you’re going to invest the time to create a strategic plan, make sure to avoid some of these common mistakes.
Not Setting Aside Enough Time
Jono Fries, VP of operations for Schill Grounds Management, based in Westlake, Ohio, says if you’re going to create a strategic plan, you have to be prepared to dedicate meaningful time and energy to having a proper planning session, but it is time well spent.
This means pulling key people out of the field and placing them in a setting they may not be naturally comfortable in.
While you don’t necessarily need to rent a fancy off-site location to conduct your strategic planning, you do need to make sure you have a no-cell-phone zone, so your team members can be present and engaged.
“If you do have the resources, I always advise to go off site, away from your facility, to do your planning, so that the environment you’re in isn’t making you think about a triggering moment of ‘I got to take care of this client’ or ‘I’ve got to address this project,’ because you’re confined in the walls of the business that you’re trying to plan for,” Angelo says.
Angelo says they’ve found it particularly rewarding when they are in a setting that allows them to reconnect with nature. He says they’ll build in a day of fun to foster camaraderie with the team, which also helps lower defense levels.
In your planning sessions, team members must be willing to have real, genuine, tough conversations about the organization and how they’re servicing the client. Angelo says this can be extremely intimidating, but it’s also rewarding.
Not Having a Clear Vision and Solid Data
Fries says if your team isn’t clearly aligned on your company vision, it’s very easy for strategic planning to turn into creating initiatives for the sake of initiatives instead of building toward a larger purpose.
“Leadership has to be able to clearly explain the ‘why’ behind the plan and create genuine buy-in around the goals the organization is pursuing,” Fries says. “If strategic planning simply becomes a list of financial targets created in a vacuum by executives or ownership, it rarely creates meaningful engagement across the company.”
Before your strategic planning session, make sure you have the necessary data to make informed decisions. This includes gathering everything from the previous year’s numbers to collecting survey responses from the team.
Without solid data, it’s far more challenging to make a worthwhile strategic plan, as you don’t know where your strengths and weaknesses are.
Not Executing Your Plan
Angelo says the biggest mistake is if you get a great facilitator to run your planning session, take your team to a great destination, build a really good plan, print it out, throw it to your team and then walk away from it.
“It’s got to be measurable,” Angelo says. “It’s got to be discussed. It’s got to be in your weekly and monthly dialogue.”
Gardiner says leaders need to hold themselves accountable on following through with a strategic plan once it has been created.
“If you’re the president of the organization and you did this and you wasted your team’s time to go through this whole thing, and then you just put it in your drawer and left it, then how are they going to feel when the next initiative comes up?” Gardiner says. “Scrapping it and putting it away, that’s a leadership failure.”
Not Creating Specific or Challenging Goals
Angelo says if your strategic plan only looks at the high-level aspect, it can come across as ambiguous to the rest of the team.
“They want to know the why, the how, the when and the where, and so all of that has to be answered in the tactical approach to the plan,” Angelo says.
Gardiner says it’s also important to make sure you have an agreed upon definition for your goals. For instance, everyone wants their renewal rate to be 100%, but your team needs to come to a consensus on what that looks like for your company. Does it include buildings that are sold, lost because of customer service or lost because of pricing?
“It starts at the top piece of just making sure that our goal is clearly defined, and then once that happens, the objectives and the results tend to be a little bit easier,” Gardiner says.
Gardiner adds that you shouldn’t set goals that are too easy. If your team is hitting 100% of their goals, then you didn’t set them up right. He says your team needs to get comfortable with failure.
“We should have some sort of failure in there,” Gardiner says. “If you put a high number out there to go get, and you only got 90%, that may be a win.”
Not Holding the Team Accountable
Strategic plans also fail when individuals aren’t held responsible for the outcomes. Fries says you need to have clear, actionable goals that the team is aligned around and executing against.
“Without strong ownership, accountability, measurable metrics, and clear definitions of success, strategic plans can very easily fade into the background and lose momentum over time,” Fries says.
Nasrallah says that in the past, he struggled with staying lean and holding team members accountable. Now he spends more time on his people and has quarterly check-ins with every foreman and manager across the company. He adds that having an open book policy also allows the team to have a scoreboard and know how to influence it.
Gardiner encourages companies that are struggling to not quit. If a strategic planning meeting wasn’t successful, dive into why. He says when they first started, they were creating too many objectives and were involving too many people in the process.
“There isn’t a formula that says this is exactly how it has to be done for everybody,” Gardiner says. “I think each organization, if you do it, it should be tailored to your organization and the skill sets of your organization, because people may have different leadership teams, different dynamics. Make it work for your organization, and don’t worry about what other people think.”
