Annual Planning Starts Well Before Your Planning Meeting
Q: When should annual planning begin?
A: Now if not sooner.
Here’s the misconception about annual planning (and most strategic planning, actually).
It doesn’t start on the date of your annual planning meeting.
That session is extremely important, but it’s a time to align the team and prioritize together.
If you walk into an annual planning meeting without a very good sense of what your goals will be for the next year…you haven’t done your homework.
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Many approaches to running a business, including ours, break things down into different components. For example, we have four Growth Quadrants in the Growth Method: Strategy, Finance, Operations, and People.
It’s a helpful way to think about areas of your company. But when you are actually running the business, all of those areas have to come together to help you make decisions.
For example:
Your annual goals for next year need to tie into your goals for the next 3 years. So what you decide to get done for the next 12 months needs to connect to your broader strategy.
The goals are determined by, and help determine, what your budget will look like for next year. You should be building that out as you think through your goals, because the two are inextricably linked. If you set a revenue target, for example, what goals do you need to have in place to make sure you achieve it?
And, of course, it’s all contingent on people to get the damn thing done. The people you have today, but also the people you will need tomorrow and throughout the next 12 months. Bringing the right people into the fold needs to be part of your budget, and your goals, for the year.
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If coordinating all of those different elements sounds intense…well, it is.
You can’t possibly do that process justice during a two-day planning session.
A great planning session is often predetermined the moment your leadership team walks through the door (or hops on Zoom). How well have you prepared in advance?
Don’t get me wrong. The planning session itself is still critical. It’s where, as a team, you commit to specific initiatives and priorities.
You come to agreement and get into alignment about what direction your company will move in for the next 12 months.
Producing that final set of goals for the year can feel amazing. If you’ve done the prep work, you’ll walk away from an annual planning session feeling confident and capable about what lies ahead.
It’s the middle of October now. There is plenty of time to get this work started and set yourself up for an amazing 2025.
And if you contact our team sooner than later, we’ve got bandwidth to support you with the thinking process and the preparation that go into annual planning.
(We DO get super hectic in December, so don’t wait until then to get started.)
Book a free one-hour annual planning prep session with a consultant today.
I want to see you crushing it in 2025.
