Is Your Agency New Business Plan Holding You Back?
It’s deeply satisfying when agency leaders tell me after a coaching session or a workshop that I’ve made a positive difference and that they feel energized and inspired to try new approaches to win more of the right kind of clients and control their new business destiny.
They return to their day-to-day business lives and then…
For every one of my clients that fully embraces action, there’s a handful that gets stuck in the inertia of the day-to-day. There just doesn’t seem to be enough time for new business. Too many immediate needs, too many fires to put out.
Full disclosure: I myself am not immune to the allure of reacting to immediate needs that pop up every day in the course of running a business. They’re so satisfying to cross off my to-do list! But they take my focus off my goals for long-term growth as well as personal and professional fulfillment.
This may be the same for you. And, when you realize you’ve neglected your strategic plan for growth, perhaps you compensate by chasing the first pitch opportunities that come your way. You’re off in the pursuit of a win, like a greyhound chasing a mechanical hare around a track.
I don’t mean to dismiss the need to pursue (and secure) new revenue. Agency leaders carry the burden of ensuring the doors stay open and everyone stays busy and gainfully employed. Nevertheless, reacting to any and all new business opportunities that come your way isn’t the most strategic approach to reaching an agency’s growth goals.
If we want change, we must take action.
The allure of the annual plan
This is the time of year when we formulate our plans for the year to come. Maybe you’ve made a commitment to pursuing new business more strategically. You’ll gather your team to strategize, set big, visionary goals, and commit to doing what it takes to achieve them over the next twelve months.
Having that plan in place feels great. At least for a while. At least until sometime between June and November when you realize you’ve been so focused only on the everyday block and tackling that you’ve yet to execute it.
You go back into greyhound mode, chase a few RFPs that might win you some business and bump up revenue for the year.
Unless they don’t.
I see this pattern too frequently and I want to break it. I want to keep everything that’s good about an annual plan—the strategy, the goal setting, and the momentum generated at the outset—while eliminating the tendency to stall. “What if,” I thought, “the solution was to start smaller?”
Ready. Set. Go?
A 12-month plan encourages us to think big. And it’s the bigness that also gets us in trouble because it’s big enough to ignore.
A year flies by faster than you’d expected, and if you haven’t reached your goals, you rationalize they were too big to begin with.
What if you were to shrink a twelve-month new business plan into twelve weeks focusing on quarterly milestones rather than annual goals?
This is not an original idea. It’s a concept that’s been popularized by business strategists and entrepreneurs like Gino Wickman in his book Traction (a book that I know some of you already have on your bookshelves, whether read or unread).
I apply the idea to new business to give agency leaders, especially those running smaller shops, a more effective way to see progress on the foundational elements that lead to consistently generating revenue.
Here are a few guidelines from the playbook we’ve been working with—
Big, visionary goals are important, but save them for the three-year plan.
Instead, set tangible, specific objectives for improvements you want to see between now and this time next year that will move you toward the big visionary goals.
Then, break those objectives down into quarterly milestones. Stretch your boundaries a bit but don’t be delusional. For instance, doubling your agency’s revenue within a year is not a realistic goal when you have zero infrastructure for proactive outreach. Instead, you might want to focus on setting up the infrastructure first.
Choose no more than three milestones per quarter.
This may be challenging because, when you start to think about it, there’s just so much to do. Again, you have twelve weeks—how can you prioritize and identify the top two or three?
Define discrete action steps.
What must you do on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis to get you from here to where you want to be? Defining specific steps to take within a shorter time frame lessens the chances you’ll feel the hangover of confusion and trepidation after the euphoria of goal-setting wears off.
Determine the leading and lagging indicators that point toward success.
A lagging indicator describes where you want to end up; a leading indicator describes whether or not you're heading in the right direction. Lagging indicators, like hitting a revenue target or doubling your agency’s win rate, are sexy and sound impressive. But it’s the leading indicators—the steps you’re going to take on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis—that are literally going to lead you toward achieving your goals.
Take a no-excuses approach to managing your time.
What got you here isn’t going to get you there. Be willing to look at what must change to reach your goals. For most busy agency CEOs, this will mean a radical rethinking of how to allocate their time.
Track–and score–your progress each week.
That’s right, give yourself a grade from 0% (as in, zero action taken) to 100% (you completely slayed your weekly action plan). It’s not always fun—it sucks to end the week with a low score—but it’s effective. If you’re doing everything you’d planned to do, your leading indicators will point toward a positive outcome. If you’re not, ask yourself, “why”? What part of the plan—your goals, the tactics, your commitment, or time management—requires tuning?
There are also intangible benefits to tracking your progress. Putting a checkmark next to completed activities each week leads to positive momentum that builds confidence. New brain patterns are being established that will eventually replace old bad habits and beliefs with new, more positive ones, like the possibility of generating more revenue from better clients.
Is this the year to put aside the old annual plan framework for a news approach that’s biased toward action?
If the answer is “heck, yeah!” or even if this has ignited a spark of curiosity, you might consider joining my upcoming masterclass, The New Business Blueprint. In three 1-hour online sessions, you’ll get the exact framework I use with my 1-to-1 private clients to lead them to repeatable success.
To learn more and register, just click here.