EP22 My solo annual planning process Artwork

How To Be Moderately Successful.

EP22 My solo annual planning process

October 26, 2023 • Mike Scott • Season 1 • Episode 22

Find out more about working with me. mike@smbmastery.com.au or https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeadamscott/

Building a business is hard. Maintaining healthy relationships with those that you care about is hard. Staying fit and healthy in your body, your mind and your emotions is hard. This podcast is about finding and sharing tools, strategies and experiences that may help you to achieve and maintain moderate success in your life, whatever that means to you. There is a ton of content created by the billionaires, the ultra successful athletes, and by people that are at a level that the vast majority of us will just never get to. And if you're anything like me,

totally okay with that. This is a place where we talk about how to build a great business, but not necessarily a massive one. A place to talk about how we build a life that is balanced and integrated, but not necessarily optimized to levels that are not realistic for most of us. In short, it's a place where we explore how to be moderately successful. The work will always remain yours, and for the most part, it's simple, but not easy. I want to challenge you to be more than just a passive listener. I want to challenge you

with you from this episode and to teach it to somebody that you think will benefit from it.

and to do so in the next 24 hours. This will embed the learnings for yourself and you'll be helping someone else as well as the podcast. Lastly, please share this with whoever you think needs to have this in their lives. The more reach we can get, the more impact we can have. With that said, let's get into it.

Hey everyone, really good to be back. It's been too long. Lots is going on in my world. And today's episode is really about that. It's about a lot of change that is happening, really exciting change for me. And a process that I went through to help me think about and plan the next sort of, let's say, phase of my life. Mainly in a business context, but also how it relates back to my day to day, my family, et cetera, et cetera.

So the context here is that, as I've just mentioned, I'm going for a pretty significant change. So my business was acquired about two years ago. I've been working for the acquirer for since then until now. It's been great. Tons of learnings in a much, much larger business. That's now coming to an end in a really, really good way. And I'm now being very intentional about what comes next.

I won't talk too much about it in this episode, but what I've always absolutely loved and been good at and had good response and reception from is...

working with small to medium sized businesses and their leadership teams, helping them to improve their operating system of their business, their culture, their leadership dynamic, and ultimately just run better, more sustainable businesses. And I'm gonna be moving full time into that, which is really exciting. It's not a new thing, it's just I've never done it with full focus. And that's what I'm gonna be fully focusing on. So the context here is quite a significant shift

operating a new brand, new business, and just really getting intentional about that. So what I decided to do was to do a sort of a solo offsite.

Mike (01:51.446)
I've got a lot of experience facilitating off-sites for groups of people in a business context, but I've never done this in a one, you know, solo, one-on-one, not even one-on-one, like zero-on-one environment. So I just want to talk you through it and hopefully there's some value in this if any of you are thinking about building in a sort of a yearly probably rhythm for how you think about the year to come. I wouldn't do this every quarter. It's probably a bit much.

But once a year, I think this is something I'm gonna do annually. So look, the environment in which you do this is gonna change for everyone. I'm gonna tell you how I did it. It doesn't have to be the same for you, of course, but the idea here is to hopefully spark some thinking and to begin a process of building this into your sort of life rhythm and your life routine.

So for me, I left home, I did this during a week on purpose. I chose not to do it on the weekend because I wanted to be out in a natural environment and I wanted it to be very quiet and not distracted.

And I also like to be with my family on the weekends. So it doesn't have to be during the week, but I think it's better if it's during the week. And for some reason, there's a psychological thing for me that this work should happen during the week and you should carve that time out, but that's not critical. So for me, it was a Wednesday afternoon, I hooked up our camper trailer and I drove about an hour from our house to a beautiful beach setting. So I was sort of camping 20 meters probably from the sea and it was just like the perfect environment,

little tongue and I could really get pretty deep into the work and just chilling out as well.

Mike (03:31.922)
So got there on the first day, really that first afternoon should be about getting everything set up so that you can get deeply into the work on the next day. This is a one full day process, but I really believe that the setup the day before and the sort of set, like the pack up the day after, is actually a big part of it. So you wanna just be getting into a mindset where all your admin is out the way so that you can wake up early on day two, in this case it was a Thursday,

get straight into the work. So that's what I did, had an early night, ate well and went to sleep early. So on the Thursday I woke up at 5.30, I was right by the sea. So I was able to do a very early cold water immersion. Just went for a swim, which was just like the best ever. And did the cold water immersion.

I drank a bunch of coconut water just because I could and I like it and it's good to hydrate before this stuff. And I then did a 15 minute meditation. And that's actually quite a big part of this is for me, this work is very intense mentally. And these little meditation breaks, they really help clear the mind and allow me to sort of work at a higher intensity for a longer period of time. So cold water immersion.

hydrate the body and do a 15 minute guided meditation. For what it's worth, I use the Waking Up app. I love it, but there are an endless amount of guided meditations on YouTube and apps and whatever else. From there, I really got stuck in. Okay, so what I started with is really, I wanted to think about like, what is the strategy of what I'm trying to do here? And the best framework I've ever come across with strategy is out of a book called Playing to Win.

And I've used this framework a lot now over the past year, year and a half. And it's really helped me enormously to take this kind of very broad topic of strategy and bring it into a very practical set of questions to answer and guide. So for me, I started working with this strategy and it's essentially five questions, right? And the first question is, what is our winning aspiration?

Mike (05:41.89)
This question is so critically important. So it's about starting sort of right at the top and saying like, what are we actually trying to do here? And I'm gonna speak in plural saying we and us because it's generally a business, but in this case, it was actually just me, but I'll still speak in the plural. So what are we trying to do here?

When we start a business, when we set a new strategy, a new product or a new service offering, it kind of shocks me how rare it is for people to actually stop and really get deliberate about like what does success look like here. So this took a long time for me to actually articulate in a very succinct way what...

the winning aspiration is here for me. So in this case, I won't give you the huge detail, but I'm trying to establish a coaching practice that is sustainable, effective and profitable. I'm not reading the words to you, it's much more detailed, but I'm just trying to sort of give you a picture. I've put in the financial goals that I've got with what success would look like here. I've put in...

what those financial goals should ultimately enable me to do. So the end goal here for me is not just building a practice. It's what does that practice allow me to do and enable me to do for my family, for the businesses that I'm working with, from an investment perspective, from a value creation perspective. It was getting really clear about the stuff which I've now got into quite a succinct statement.

Then for me, something that I like to add into this is what we call guardrails. So it's really important, I think, when we're setting goals and aspirations that we set these things, but we also get very clear about what the guardrails are under which these things need to exist to be successful. For example, if I use a very simple example, if you say, cool, I wanna double the sales of our business in the next 12 months, but the way that you do that is by going and selling things that you actually can't deliver and cutting out all of your margin.

Mike (07:44.03)
Have you actually won if you double sales? Not really. So your guard rail might be cool. The goal is to double sales in the next 12 months. A guard rail might be maintain a margin of X percent, maintain a net promoter score of above X and maintain a staff engagement score of above Y. In other words, keeping you honest of what true success looks like. So the next thing I did was get into guard rail. So for me, I had three guard rails. It was around how much.

time I'm going to work every week. It was around making sure that I have carved out time every week to what I call sharpen the axe. It was around maintaining mental and physical health in ways that I can measure and it's around

family time measured sort of by time out and holidays. So that was the first section. What is my winning aspiration? Get really succinct about it. What are the guardrails that I need to hold myself to in order to actually be winning here? And then I move on to the next question. The next question is, where will I play? So where will I play is...

You now have your winning aspiration. You know what you want to do, but now where do you play? In my case, it's geographic based. So I will start only in South Australia because I want to be face to face in this context. So I then spent a bit of time carving out the sort of target customer or client type or business that I think I can add the most value to, that I want to work with. And I wrote down some criteria here. So this was around where do these businesses needs to be? What do they need to look like? What attributes do they need to have?

And this is all based around who do I want to work with and why will I or how will I be particularly relevant to those types of businesses. So it's sort of a two way street. It's going, where do I want to work and who do I want to work with? So, I'm gonna go through this.

Mike (09:36.754)
and do these people, will they see value in what I have to offer? And my hypothesis is a bit more than a hypothesis because I've kind of proven this already, but the sort of hypothesis here should be not just I wanna work with them, it should be I wanna work with them and I believe that I will be particularly relevant to them. So that's the where will I play? It's about where are they? What are their attributes? What do they look like?

In this case, I also went through shared values. Like there are values that I need to have shared with people that I work with. So to give you an example here, these people need to at least acknowledge or resonate with my values, which is continuous improvement as a way of life. Do what you say you will do, communicate often and honestly, no matter what.

Slow is smooth and smooth is fast and don't be a dickhead. Like these are things that they don't have to necessarily share as their own values, but they are things that I am looking for. If there is a misalignment in any of these things, it's unlikely it's gonna be a success. So first one.

What is our winning aspiration? Second one, where will we play? The third question is, how will we win? Now, this one is really, this is a lot more work to do. So I'll just sort of go through some headings here that might spark some thinking. So this is like, we now know what success looks like for us, what we actually want from this. We know where we are going to be playing and focusing because, you know, like they say, if you try to be everything to everyone, you'll become nothing to nobody. So it's about getting focused. It's about finding your niche.

your target and it's about figuring out whether they're going to care about what you have. Then it's about going, okay, but how do we do this? So we've sort of up until now only kind of got the what, but this is like, how will we do it?

Mike (11:16.662)
So I broke this down into a couple of categories. The first one was like the value proposition. So what is it that I'm actually offering here, right? So I went through quite a lot of detail there and what kind of leadership team coaching I'm gonna be doing, what sort of one-on-one coaching I'm gonna be doing with the founders, how these off-sites annual and quarterly are gonna run. I have a pretty...

clear idea of this because I've been doing it for a long time. So that first part was pretty easy. I know what the value proposition is here. So that was kind of easy. The next one is differentiation. Like what's different about me. So here it was about going, okay, if I'm really honest with myself, there are a ton of people that call themselves business coaches or what have you. And it's a bit diluted. So what actually sets me apart here? Right. And this is an uncomfortable exercise for many of us because I don't know. It's just, it's uncomfortable. Right. But for me.

things that was quite a useful process for me. It's not quite clear that, you know, for me, what separates me here is I've actually been a founder for more than 20 years. I've successfully exited two businesses, most recent of which was, you know, in significant sort of figures. And as a result of this, I've...

got, I think, quite unique experience. I think a lot of business coaches, in my case, haven't actually had the founder or business experience that I've had. So what I'm bringing here is not just theory, it's a deeply practical and experience-based.

instead of coaching practices. So that's how I'm sort of differentiating myself. Don't have to worry too much about my situation. It's really asking you like, how do you differentiate, right? The next thing is the client relationship. So I won't go into huge detail with each of these things, but the next sort of heading that I went through here is like...

Mike (12:55.602)
What's gonna be, how am I gonna handle the client relationship? What's gonna be different about it? How am I gonna make this an amazing experience for them? The next one is authority building. So what makes me believable? What makes me credible? How am I going to show that? How am I going to deliver that to the world? I might be the best or the worst in the world.

But if I'm not building a set of content and a way to see this, no one's gonna know that, right? So in my case, it's gonna be around LinkedIn, it's gonna be around this podcast, it's gonna be around speaking publicly and a bunch of other things I won't get into.

A lot of detail. The next one for me is feedback loops. So how will I get feedback? How will I know whether my clients are actually getting a lot of value from this or not? Right. So I want to build in bi-annual feedback loops. I want to use a bit of a system. I want to use that system to allow interviews. I also want to then use that to create content, which is more credibility, et cetera. Then there's partnerships, right? The work that I'm going to be doing.

definitely works very well with certain other types of businesses. I might look to partner with some strategic finance people. I might look to partner with some marketing agencies, some legal firms, some venture capital businesses. You know, I'm going to be working with small and medium-sized leadership teams to improve their business operations. Those folks have got a lot of similar needs like the things I've just listed off.

But then there might be interesting things like venture capital or private equity firms where they are investing in businesses, but they will see value in someone like me working with some of their portfolio companies to know that from an operational perspective, they've got someone helping them with accountability and processes and structure, etc. So thinking about like, what partnerships do I need to execute on here to bolster credibility, increase chances of high quality referrals and increase the value delivered to my clients?

Mike (14:46.294)
The next one is pricing is, you know, you know, so this is still under all the heading. How will we win? So pricing is really important here. Pricing must reflect the value that I'm delivering. This is very deliberate. Do I want to be, you know, the cheapest or the best or the only, or how do I want to price myself here? Right. So I won't get into too much detail here, but the principles here that have really helped me out of a book called pricing, pricing creativity by Blair Enns. It's a fantastic book.

And I got really deliberate about how I will price this. This was quite an easy part for me because I'm lucky in that it's not the first time I've done this. So sort of this was really just about putting it down on paper. If it's the first time you're doing it, this can be a really tough part of the process.

Then it's about visibility. So I need to make sure that I'm consistently top of mind. I'm not gonna take on a lot of clients. They are high value clients. They last for a long time. I don't need to be selling widgets every day. It's a handful of clients a year that I probably need to sell to. But you wanna be top of mind so that when they are already in their buyer journey, they've heard you, they've seen you, they've listened to you, et cetera. So what's the strategy there? Because it doesn't just happen, right? So again, it's a combination of LinkedIn,

etc. Continuous learning, this is a big part for me. I have a lot of experience, I have a lot of tools, but this stuff consistently needs to be updated. There's a phrase that I love, I don't know where I heard it actually, but it's like, I'll do the reading so you don't have to. That sort of thinking is this core material that I like to use and this is about going deeper and deeper and deeper into the core material. These are sources like Patrick Lanzioni's work and the EOS work and

and Crucial Conversations work and Kim Scott's work and Michael Gerber's work and probably about 20 pieces of content that I lean very deeply into and it's about you know building in the discipline to continually master this kind of stuff and then in my case I'm actually quite keen to do an executive MBA so it's also going okay well if I want to do an executive MBA with one of the top schools in Australia how do I carve out the time and the headspace to do this within

Mike (17:01.156)
this, you know, to get very clear about why I'm doing this. I know why I'm doing this, but as part of this sort of process, you need to get clear about why you're doing this. The last heading I had under the last subheading I had under the how will I win category in this case was post engagement. So, you know, what happens when you're done with a client? Are you ever done with a client? How does this work? And again, I won't go into my whole business plan here, but you know, it's about getting very deliberate about this whole process. So all of those

Mike (17:31.156)
do this process, this is quite specific to me, but that gives you a sort of sense of like, how will we win? And you can see that this is sort of like quite a lot of meat in here and this requires a lot of thinking and deliberate thoughts. So that's that. The next one is five of these remember what capabilities must be in place. I won't go into too much detail here. I'll just give you the subheadings. But for me, the capabilities that are required for this are the skills and knowledge.

the operational systems, the branding and the visibility, the relationship management, continuous improvement, the learning and development, health and wellbeing, and business expansion. So you'll notice a lot of overlap from how will we win. This is sort of going into like, okay, but if we want to win by doing those things, what are the capabilities that we need present in order to be able to execute on the how will we win?

It's important at this stage to maybe take a breath and go, okay, there's a lot of stuff here. This might not all exist right now. We might not have the capability to do all these things, but that's kind of the point, right? Now you've got it down on paper. Now you can say, okay, it's clear where we lack capability, and then we can begin working towards that.

rather than just sort of fumbling through and just sort of hustling and hacking everything together. The last part is really getting down into the minutia in terms of like what management systems must be in place. So the final question is what management systems must be in place. So again, I won't go into huge detail here. I'll just share some of the headings that I thought through here. So one is like performance monitoring. So objectively knowing how well I'm doing or poorly.

The other one is feedback and continuous improvement. The next one is learning and development. The next one is client management. The next one is operational efficiency. So we're talking task automation, real resource allocation, et cetera. Next one is stakeholder communication and financial management, branding and marketing, health and wellbeing and strategy evolution, right? So that's just sort of like, this is now sort of rubber hits the road. Like what are the systems that must be in place in order to actually execute on this?

Mike (19:32.702)
So once I had done all of that, so sort of just run you through that again. The first question is, what is our winning aspiration? Second one is, where will we play? Third one is, how will we win? Fourth one is what capabilities must be in place? And the fifth one is what management systems must be in place?

This left me feeling pretty damn good and clear about like, okay, now I have a strategy and a rough sort of idea and plan of like what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, who I'm doing it for, what the value is, how I'll make money, how I will build it, where I need to focus, et cetera, et cetera.

So at this stage in the day, you know, this was a big chunk of time. This was probably, what, probably two to three hours of very deep thinking work with no distraction. So at this stage, I, it was probably, what was it? It was about 9 a.m. in the morning by that stage because I started early. So at this stage, I went to get a coffee, hydrated quite a lot and went for like probably a 20 minute walk and jumped in the ocean again, right? So just move, coffee, refreshment, et cetera. I also ate something at that stage. I don't normally eat that early,

I felt like I needed to eat something there. So then I took a quick little break and then I got into the next section. So the next section was now how do I execute on this? So this led me quite neatly into setting my OKRs. So if you know what OKRs are, that's great. If you don't, they stand for objectives and key results. I will not go into a lot of detail on this. It's a goal setting framework that was created by Andy Grove, who was the founder of Intel.

very, very powerful way to set and monitor strategic objectives and goals and what have you in your business. So I started with the annual OKRs. So like what are my annual objectives and goals for the year and then the key results. So how will I measure those? I'm not going to go into OKRs now, but I'll give you a sort of sense of what these things looked like. I'll probably admit some of them just because some of it is private, but

Mike (21:30.59)
I had quite a lot for the year. Normally, I will, when I'm working with clients, I'll try to keep them to three. I had five because they're quite small. And it's really a, it's a phase of this venture that's quite early in startup-y, I guess. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done. So the first objective is...

establish a robust SMB business improvement coaching practice. And then I've got key results underneath that of what success looks like. So their key result, number one, will be increased the number of clients from X to Y by the end of Q4 2024. Second one will be achieving a net promoter score of nine or above from all the clients I've worked with this year by the end of Q4 2024. The key result will be 50% of new clients acquired through referrals. Right. And so we go. The next one is enhanced brand visibility.

bunch of key results on there around lead generation and quality of lead generation. There's around podcast releases etc. The next one is cement the foundation for continuous learning and development and a bunch of key results about what makes that true.

The fourth one is maintain personal wellbeing. So this is, you know, this is all a waste of time if I'm actually just deteriorating my health and my relationships. So this is, you know, what does this actually look like? How do I measure it? And the last one is to forge strategic partnerships to enhance client value. Spoke a little bit about this earlier. I won't go into a lot of details, probably irrelevant to a lot of you, but it's about this, this leveraging partnerships to be better.

Those were the annual OKRs, right? Once I finished those, I then moved immediately onto this quarters OKRs. So that was a little bit easier than the annual because now I've set the annuals and it's kind of like just saying, okay, well in the next 90 days, how can I break those up into 90 days size chunks version of those? So they're pretty much the same headings. They're very largely the same key results. They're just broken down into much smaller

Mike (23:26.928)
I'm sure it's going to change next quarter and the next quarter. And so we go, but when you're doing this sort of first quarters, okay. I was straight after you've done the annual. Okay. Ours it's usually a lot easier because it's kind of like just the annual. Okay. I was divided by four roughly. It's not always quite that simple. So now I'm sitting with my strategy. I'm sitting with my annual. Okay. Ours, I'm sitting with my quarterly. Okay. Ours, and I'm feeling, I'm feeling pretty good about the plan and the measurability of the plan, the specificity of the plan.

the strategy, the target, all of these things. It's looking and feeling pretty good. At this stage.

of the day, it's now sort of close to midday. I do another 15 minute meditation. This is really hard to actually have the willpower to sit and do it, but it's critically important for me. So I jump in the water, come back, do a 15 minute meditation. It's a huge return on investment of time. I then have some lunch and I get back into the work. So now it's after lunchtime and I get back into the work. The next phase of what I did here was...

This stuff is all great, but it comes down to actually getting shit done. And for me, I require more accountability to get stuff done. So this next phase was about building in my mechanisms and artifacts. They're going to help me and improve the chances of success of actually getting this stuff done.

So I've spoken about this before, but the next thing I did is I sort of rent and revisited my habit tracker. Um, there's a lot of literature around this available. James Clear's work is probably the best work I've found on habit trackers. So for me, this is about, um, having a little map. I think I've shared this on LinkedIn already, uh, sort of Sunday to Sunday. What are the, in my case, I've got, what have I got? I've got 15 habits and behaviors that I want to exhibit pretty much every day. These are things like get early morning sun, cold shower.

Mike (25:24.996)
seconds every morning, weights three times a week, compliment my wife, cardio four times a week, core work three times a week, meditate for 15 minutes every day, three liters of water a day, the 333 process every day, you can google that if you want, it's a cool productivity process, tomorrow's top three the night before, present with family in the evening, no alcohol,

dinner connected every night, fast from 6pm to 10pm every day, no sugar and eight hours of sleep every day. These are my habit trackers that help me to be accountable and I feed this into a weekly accountability process with a group of people that I know quite well. So I sort of revisited that and recreated that. That's really great. If I can do these things every day, chances are I'm gonna be in a better head space and more productive.

The next thing was then taking it a little bit further into let's say the business realm and it was creating a scorecard, right? So scorecard is a very similar concept. Habit tracker is basically a scorecard, but the scorecard is more specifically to keep a leadership team accountable on a week to week basis on the leading indicators of what are gonna lead to success in the business. It's quite difficult to do this. It's a very simple thing to do, but it's a very difficult thing to do. So if you can just sort of visualize a scorecard,

The heading is, you know, weekly scorecard for Q2. At the top, it's got the week ending in. So for me, I like to do scorecards that end on a Friday. And that's got a bunch of criteria with targets. So for example, I have a new referrals criteria, who is responsible for it. Well, obviously it's me, because I'm the only person in this venture. The target is one, and then the actuals are what's actually gonna be the actuals. And I've done conditional formatting so that if I don't meet the target, it shows up as red. If I do, it shows up as green. Another one is new leads outbound,

LinkedIn posts, target seven, this is on a week. LinkedIn leads inbound, target one, podcast episode release needs to be fortnightly, so it's one every fortnight, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's other things in there around like the ratings that I get for every session that I'm gonna do. The other ones is gonna be the average ratings and the other ones is gonna be in-person meeting with prospects. So this is about leading indicators. At this stage, you can hear it's very much about building the business, so it's very sort of sales,

Mike (27:42.04)
And the idea here is that every Friday, I fill in all of these details. If I see lots of green, that's great. I high five myself and I go good week, it's objective, you know, objective measurement and I move on. If it's red, this thing means I need to drop down, what am I going to do in the next seven days to change this from red to green? And I put that onto my version of my to-do list, which is the getting things done method. You can Google that. It's a very, very good productivity method, but...

whatever, you don't have to use that. The point here is...

If it's green, that's great. If it's red, that should be a catalyst for you to immediately go and commit to something you're gonna do in the next seven days to turn that from red to green. So this is my weekly scorecard done now. And that also feeds into my weekly accountability process. So every Sunday, I'll be sending off to my accountability group. Hey guys, this is how I've done on my habit tracker. This is how I've done on my scorecard. And then the next part of it is my, and this is the last part of it, is my getting things done.

my GTD list. I'm not going to go through the whole GTD method with you, but it's basically a way to capture my entire world's worth of things that I need to do, things that I am doing, projects that I have on the go, projects that are upcoming, what am I doing today, what am I doing next week, what do I have to do at some point, but not this week, etc.

point is that the accountability loop is me saying here's my scorecard and here the red things and this is what I'm going to be doing in the next seven days that's what matters here is this accountability of saying I'm going to do something about this in the next seven days by the stage of the day it's pretty much late tissue in the afternoon

Mike (29:25.894)
The last thing that I did was to look at my schedule design. So I think it's probably around 3.30 ish in the afternoon now. It's been a pretty intense day. My brain's pretty exhausted at this stage. The last thing I want to do is not massively sort of thinking work, but it's designing my schedule. And the way that I design my schedule is I think about different day types. So what I'm trying to do here is I'm trying to create a...

coaching practice that is valuable and successful and sustainable and enjoyable. That means I'm going to have different day types. The sessions I run with leadership teams are typically about three hours at a time. If I'm doing a quarterly offsite, it's an entire day. If I'm doing an annual offsite, it's at least a day and a half.

So I have different day types. I have the type of day where I'm running a three hour session. I have a type of day where I'm running an all day session. I have a type of day where I'm not running any session at all. Those are about the three different types of days that I have.

So I went and I thought about, okay, there are three types of days that I've got that are dictated by the sort of in-person sessions that I've got. So what happens on these days? How much time do I have on day one, day two, day three for exercise, for family, for, as I call, sharpening the axe for studying. If I'm gonna do an executive MBA, where am I gonna fit in the studying time, right? So I went and created three different scheduled types from 5.30 in the morning until when I go to sleep, which is about 9.30 in the evening.

for like, okay, eight hours sleep, X many hours of family, Y many hours for space, you know, and just getting quite deliberate about the three different day types that I have and how I'm going to allocate time in those different respective day types.

Mike (31:17.034)
This will probably change. I mean, in fact, I know it'll change because I've done this a few times, but it's a great reality check ongoing. Are there actually enough hours in the day to do what I wanna do? Generally, there are. Generally, we're just really bad at sort of using our time well. So just to summarize everything, what I ended up with is a strategy using the plane to win framework with the five questions that I mentioned, OKRs or goals or focuses for the year and then broken down into the quarter, the 90 days.

the habit tracker around the behaviors that I wanna exhibit every day, the scorecard to look at the leading indicators to drive success in this business venture, and then the schedule types around how I'm actually going to allocate time, and all of this is wrapped up into an accountability process where every week I hold myself accountable in front of other people to increase the chances of me continuing this.

Is it perfect? Of course not. Am I gonna follow it to the T and never veer from it? That's completely unrealistic. Of course I will make mistakes and of course I'll change it. And of course sometimes I'll just be crap and fall off the bandwagon. But what's amazing about this is now I've got it all down. It's really clear, it's really simple. And it's a question now of execution. It's like, get it done now. I don't have to think about stuff every day. What am I gonna do? How am I gonna do it, et cetera. It's all pretty clear in front of me.

This should and will change as the environment changes, as data changes, as my experience changes. But I'm not reinventing the wheel every morning on a wake up and go, what the hell should I do now? How am I gonna make this work? This is really, really clear to me now. Like if it doesn't work, it's not gonna work for two reasons. One, because I didn't execute on it. Or two, I was wrong about the strategy, right? In which case I can change the strategy.

or I can get off my ass and execute more. So like I say often, there's nothing complicated here. This is really simple, but it's not easy. But at least I've taken the complexity out of it and made it really simple. And now it just shifts the focus to execution. And in fact, this podcast right now is kind of the first piece of that. I haven't released a podcast for a while. I've realized this is part of the whole strategy. So literally it's Tuesday. I did this work last week. I'm recording a podcast. This is already catalyzed.

Mike (33:32.34)
action. So yeah, look, this is my process. As I said, I'm sure this won't resonate with everyone, but I'm confident that there's pieces of this that will be valuable to everyone listening to this. So you're welcome to, you know, as I always say, rip off and duplicate, just copy, like take whatever you want from here, execute on it. And, you know, if you want to reach out and talk more about this, you're welcome to, my content details will follow.

And yeah, my hope is just that this was useful and that it got you thinking. So I will see you back again in the next two weeks. Ciao.

If you want to talk about working with me as a business improvement coach, please reach out either on mike@smbmastery.com.au or you can find me on LinkedIn. Please do share this podcast with whoever you think will get value from it. And if you have five minutes, please do give us a rating and review. They really do help with making the podcast visible. The link is in the show notes. Thanks for listening. And I'll be back soon with the next episode.