Mastering Strategic Planning
The Key to Leading, Adapting, and Growing Your Business
Leadership isn’t about having all the answers, it’s about being willing to learn, adapt, and grow. Focusing on continuous personal development will not only inspire your team, it will strengthen your company, positioning it for sustained growth.
This week, we'll explore how to create a strategic plan and address the challenges you may face in the process. We'll review:
How to set aside dedicated time and resources,
breaking the planning process into manageable steps,
building a team to help develop your vision and goals,
delegating tasks, and
building flexibility into the plan.
Set aside time and resources
You will need to allocate time away from the chaos in your office/life/truck/jobsite and create a little bubble where you can focus. I often tell clients that if they are unwilling to do this first step, the harder ones after will be impossible. So be sure you’re setting yourself up for success.
When you do create some space to lay out your plan, here are some simple tools to help:
Conducting a SWOT analysis: Where you are right now.
SMART Goals (clear & measurable goals): Where you want to be.
Designate KPIs (more on this below): to get you where you need to be.
Talent Development: Who will help everyone stay on track and who will be held accountable for getting the team where you want to be.
Develop a communication cycle: How often will you meet and speak. These should be scheduled and reoccurring. Everyone should be held responsible for showing up ready to report. Make it clear the meetings aren’t planning/working meetings, but reporting meetings.
Existing technology: What technology is out there that can help systematize and smooth out the biggest pain points? I’m not talking about jumping into ProCore, but maybe start with somewhere where you are most at risk like payroll. Mason Workforce is a construction payroll software company I bring to many of my clients. It’s easy onboarding in the field for new crew members, hour tracking, union or non union hour/rate tracking and keeps you compliant. It’s easy to implement before moving to another solution, maybe for Project Management.
Spend the time to do some research, you may end up finding ones that work better for you than those noted above, but I would start here and keep it super simple. These are the ones I use when I’m first starting with a client to develop their plan. Beware of staying in perpetual planning mode.
I would suggest limiting your time to one month, schedule regular weekly meetings with yourself at the coffee shop or wherever you can find some space to think without interruptions. They should be at least one hour, I would not go over three, or you’ll end up doing other things. Create some structure for your meetings, if that helps you, but you need to prioritize this work.
Manageable steps
Before we start discussing next steps, let’s talk about strategy frameworks, or strategic frameworks. They are the methods (and there are many of them) that you can use to develop your strategic plan.
If you’ve been on any large scale construction projects, you’ve likely heard the term “critical path”. In project management, the critical path refers to the longest sequence of dependent tasks/trades within a project, meaning that any delay in any of these tasks will directly impact the overall project completion time, making it crucial to prioritize and closely monitor these activities to ensure the project finishes on schedule; essentially, it pinpoints the potential failures and delays in the project and often strategies to mitigate the risks.
A strategy framework does the same, its aim is to demonstrate how your business plans to use projects (dependent tasks) and other initiatives to uphold the overall vision (project completion).
So where will you begin?
Before you start looking far into the future, I would suggest deciding what your short term (no longer than a quarter) goals are and create KPI’s, key performance indicators, to track the likelihood of success, they are kind of like mini-goals.
Using the project analogy, KPI’s are like the weekly project progress meetings; the GCs Project Manager needs to make sure the subs are hitting their KPIs, so the GC hits their goal for completion with that trade. That feeds into the larger project completion goal.
Here are the steps to take to create KPIs:
Define your goal for the quarter.
Choose measurable data points that reflect progress.
Once you have your data points, choose performance levels. Keep it very black and white. You want to be able to say definitively “Yes, we hit this mark” or “No we didn’t”. Make it quantifiable, numerically. You also want to make sure you have the infrastructure to track the data. If you can’t, you have your first goal for your first quarter.
For example, if your goal is to increase project profitability, your KPI may be tracking labor hours or material cost vs budget. Your measurements are already numerical and, as long as you can honestly track labor hours and material purchases, you can compare actuals against your estimate. Now the outcome will give you a baseline, your next project you can make it tighter, so instead of 1400 hours, maybe you can get more streamlined, put more technology solutions in place or create stronger communication loops so you can cut that down to 1200 hours.
But what happens if you realize you can’t create those KPIs because you don’t have the system in place to track labor hours, let alone material purchases? I would suggest you make this your first goal.
Strategic planning is not a silver bullet, if anything, it will show you all of the areas where things aren’t working and it will feel like everything is falling apart, which may make you panic and back pedal to how things were before (at least you knew what to expect).
I would urge you to keep moving forward. Your team is going to be very important, their willingness to learn and grow will be imperative.
Building a team
If your plan is realistic and laid out properly there is no reason it won’t work, you may need to make some hard decisions about staffing and the tasks that you tend to avoid (like going to networking events). Be real with yourself about what you can make yourself do and what you can’t.
The first few cycles of any plan won’t go well (just like your first projects), they’ll be messy and you’ll forget things. Keep these cycles short, a quarter to start. Keep the energy high and get to the end of these giving plenty of praise to the people that made it through with you.
What you should begin to see is who on your team is fighting change and who is adapting well. Don’t bury your head in the sand, if you genuinely want to to grow your business you will be constantly changing and adapting. You cannot do this on your own and the ability of your team to walk down this road with you is one of the key gauges of your success.
Delegating Tasks
The point of these first few cycles is to get into the rhythm of meeting, finding out who is going to be willing, able and ready to keep the plan moving forward and who will be a drag on the momentum, and if your goals tend to be more audacious than time allows.
Goals are important, and in my experience the goals aren’t the issue as much as the time business owners expect to reach them. If you need to move out deadlines or lower your expectations, I would do sooner rather than later.
When you begin to delegate you want to keep pretty close tabs on outcomes. Here are some tips to keep in mind as you begin to delegate tasks:
Identify key stakeholders in your company and get them involved, this is linked to the segment above, but it’s worth restating. The team members who are excited to learn, have enough confidence to give you candid feedback and who you respect enough to listen will be cornerstones of your success.
Develop a team to monitor progress (like a project manager and project administrator). Neither of these should be you, they should be someone that can hold you and everyone else accountable when the plan loses its luster and you begin to long for “the good old days”. If there is no one in your company that can do this, you may want to look at outside consultants that can facilitate this change.
Prioritize communication. As above scheduled and reoccurring. This keeps everyone accountable and moving forward together.
Know when to call in help (external expertise)
Keep an eye on overall progress and delve into details whenever needed. If you don’t have access to granular information that would help create accountability and give you the clarity you need, make it a goal for the upcoming quarter.
Flexibility
Being flexible, adaptable and adjusting regularly is critical to mission success. As you move from quarter to quarter you’ll start to uncover issues you hadn’t seen before, so be sure to hold your goals lightly. It doesn’t mean that the goals aren’t important, but rather that you need to be more flexible than rigid as you begin down this road. As you begin to gain a better understanding of your company's weaknesses, your goals will likely need to be adjusted. You may have loads more work to do then you first realize.
Create an approach that allows you to be agile and responsive to issues that arise, so you can evaluate if they need to be addressed and corrected before moving forward.
By being practical and flexible, and addressing issues as they arise you’ll increase the chances of success in the long run.
Today we reviewed how to set aside dedicated time and resources, breaking the planning process into manageable steps, building a team to help develop your vision and goals, delegating tasks, and building flexibility into the plan.
Next week we’ll discuss outlining your company's mission and values. This may seem a little silly at this point, but values (like principles) can help align your team around what you are creating and why. Yes you want to make money, but how you go about doing so will help attract and retain the people who will get you and your company there.