In my experience, any thoughtful strategic plan you come up with to scale and mature your business is going to take a minimum of 18 months and as much as 5 years to execute. At my school for business owners, Birthing of Giants, we look at each 12 months as a fundamental building block to achieve those longer-term milestones. The great thing about stacking up one year plans is you have to think long term but you have to take action in the short term.
For example, when Bob Eisiminger wanted to achieve his long-term goal of selling Knight Point Systems, his technical staffing business based in Northern Virginia, he dedicated the first year to rebuilding his recruiting department. This allowed him to fill open positions faster and with better candidates, resulting in increased revenue and profits.
Heading into the second year, for his next one-year-from-today plan, Bob sought and implemented advice from our faculty of post-exit entrepreneurs to make his company as attractive as possible to potential buyers. This included cleaning up his financials and getting certifications that enabled the company to be eligible for bigger contracts. Then he nailed down his leadership team with long-term compensation packages to ensure that, in the event of a sale, the most valuable people would stay with the company through the transition.
By the third year, Bob was ready to see how attractive his company was to the market. His year three one-year-from-today plan? Interview investment bankers and eventually choose one. Then, work with those bankers to prepare a pitch deck telling the story of the company and shop it around to prospective acquirers. By the end of his third year using this 12-month strategic planning process, he received a $250 million all-cash offer.
He would spend the next year—the fourth year in his plan—negotiating the sale terms and assisting in the transition, personally exiting with over $130 million at the time of closing.
Bob approached the strategic planning process by working backward from his desired outcome to sell and exit the company within four years. His plan broke down like this:
- Year 1: Rebuild his recruiting department from the ground up to achieve the end goal.
- Year 2: Clean up the company, harden the management, become eligible for bigger contracts
- Year 3: Find the buyer
- Year 4: Complete the exit transition
Most entrepreneurs I work with haven’t given a lot of thought to how a one-year plan builds to a longer-term result. What’s more, they haven’t developed the systematic culture that turns one-year plans into reality. Keep in mind that buried within each 12-month roadmap are four 90-day campaigns and twelve 30-day sprints. Ritualizing these campaigns and sprints creates a great deal of clarity for a leadership team that’s working with limited resources and multiple initiatives.
Shiny Ball Syndrome — Our Secret Superpower
Having worked with entrepreneurs for decades while operating my own companies, I know how we think. We became the boss because we believed we would hold ourselves more accountable for achieving our goals than any supervisor ever could. At the same time, no one is better positioned to respond to market changes than us because we are in touch with every aspect of the business. A new pricing scheme, a faster delivery schedule, a better value proposition — those kinds of changes come from our ability to listen to the marketplace, then set a new path forward. Sometimes we are accused of having “shiny ball syndrome.” Too many pivots with too little explanation confuses the people we need to help us implement. However, in my experience, those micro-pivots are our unique value proposition as entrepreneurs and visionaries. From those incremental shifts could come your next big innovation or opportunity.
Blending a thoughtful one-year-from-today plan with micro-pivots that respond to the marketplace can make the difference between success and failure. Your one-year plan is the spine of your 90-day campaigns, your 30-day sprints and your micro-pivots. And when you stack up your one-year wins over time, you can achieve huge outcomes. This process of strategic planning 12 months at a time enables the business owner to execute a multi-year strategy needed to make your company bigger than you ever thought, while shaving years of wasted “trial and error” and wrong turns.
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