how to plan an effective quarter

Summary

quarterly planning is the difference between a year you can describe and a year you can run. here’s the structure I use across every company I’m in.

1. start with one primary goal. usually a revenue goal with a profit target attached. you can hit revenue and lose money, so always pair them. the number is the north star for the quarter.

2. three strategies under the goal. growth. business health. leadership and culture. you need all three. revenue alone burns the company down. business health alone stagnates revenue. neither matters without the team.

3. revenue strategy. marketing, sales, client acquisition, pricing. the offense side. how do new dollars come in this quarter.

4. business health strategy. retention, fulfillment, support, ops. the defense side. how do existing dollars stay in and the customers stay happy.

5. leadership and culture strategy. team development, hiring, standards, your own leadership growth. how does the engine itself get better, not just the output.

6. three tactics per strategy. that’s it. nine tactics total. you can actually execute nine things in a quarter. you cannot execute thirty.

most owners overload the plan, miss everything, and lose faith in planning. simplify. three strategies, three tactics each, one goal above. try harder.

Transcript

intro

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. All right, so we’re at the beginning of a new quarter here. The question for you is simple. What is your goal for the quarter? What’s your plan? How are you going to execute and implement to be able to achieve that goal if you have one?

If you don’t have one, why the hell not? This is the Better Human Business Podcast. I’m Jerred Moon. And today let’s talk about how to plan an effective quarter. And I’m not going to get into the detailed weeds of every single little thing that you can do to plan a quarter, but I will be doing that with some new information I will be publishing this quarter.

do you have a quarterly goal?

It’s actually one of my quarterly goals. I’m going to be putting out more information on how to plan a month, a week, a quarter, a year, all of these things. I’ve actually produced a lot of content internally for people at PT Biz Mastermind. I’ve also done this at Garage Gym Athlete. It’s one of the things I’m actually really passionate about, and I’m about to tell you why.

Before I do, I will be publishing a new video course on this, how to plan these things, and it will be out this quarter. I don’t have an exact date yet. I’ve just started working on everything, but the best way to make sure that you have access to new resources like this that I’m going to be putting out this quarter is to be a part of the newsletter because that is where I will announce it.

You can go to jred.com, J-E-R-R-E-D.com, sign up for the Try Harder newsletter that goes out every Thursday, and when I have this new information ready and available, you’ll be the first to know if you are on the newsletter. Let me take you back to when I was building a business, first trying to build and get some headway, just get some progress in my business.

my early experiences with quarterly planning

What I was doing every single quarter, honestly, I didn’t really function in quarters back then, is I just had all these growth ideas, and all I would do is sit around and try to implement growth ideas over and over again. There wasn’t a lot of structure to it. It was just like, I think this will grow the business.

I’ll do this. I think this will grow the business. I’ll do that, and I just moved all over the place, but my focus wasn’t good enough in any one area to really see any of these ideas through. Even though I’d have a little bit of success, it wasn’t like I was fully stalled out, but even though I’d have some success, it wouldn’t be as good as it could have been, because there wasn’t a concrete plan.

Then I finally started doing some quarterly planning, but here’s what I realized, and the biggest problem I had when I did my quarterly plan, is the first time I really executed a quarterly growth plan, it actually worked really well. What happened was, I picked different strategies and tactics that I wanted to focus on for that quarter, and I’d be like, okay, here are the strategies, here are the tactics, let’s make sure we get all of these things done to grow this quarter.

the biggest problem i faced with my early plans

I would accomplish most of them, we’re talking about the first time I ever did this, I accomplished most of the things on that list, and the business grew. It was awesome. I was really starting to see the power of having a good quarterly growth plan, but then what happened, was things started to fall off.

I wasn’t leading my team how I should, that was falling off. I wasn’t really focused on the back end of the business, making sure customers were taken care of really well, or making sure just back end system and processes were taken care of and being executed on. So I was going growth at all costs, but to the detriment of the business on the back end, on the leadership side, on the administrative side, and just overall system and process side.

That’s when I was like, man, how am I going to juggle all of these things? As I’ve been teaching quarterly planning to business owners for a number of years now, I’ve put out a lot of information on this, like I said, mostly internally. I’ve published planners, I’ve created video courses, I’ve done all these things.

the key to planning an effective quarter

Here’s what I realized, and this has been the biggest implementation on how to plan an effective, biggest thing I’ve implemented to plan an effective quarter that’s worked really well, and it’s also what I teach other business owners to do. And that’s typically you’re going to have one goal for the quarter.

I always recommend that this goal be a revenue goal with a profit target. So I want X amount of revenue, and I want X percent of that revenue to be profit. That way, you’re already on the hook for how much money the business is going to make and how much profit is going to be there. And focusing on both of these numbers means, hey, if I’m making more money, I’m impacting more people.

But then at the same time, I have a profit margin that I like, that allows me to live the life I want, enjoy my business, and not a zero profit margin where you’re just running your business. And spinning your wheels. So that’s the first thing that we do. Now next, I typically recommend three strategies you select for the quarter.

strategy 1: revenue growth

And underneath each strategy, you have three tactics. But let’s just talk about where the strategies should be. And this is the biggest thing I think that you should implement if you haven’t really been doing quarterly planning like this. The first strategy should be a revenue based growth strategy.

So you have your overall goal. I want to make this much money with this much profit. That’s a cool goal. But now we’re getting to, okay, what’s the strategy to do that? What’s the strategy to increase the revenue that we need by X percent to get to that goal? Or what expenses do we need to cut to make sure that we hit that profit margin?

All of those kind of things. That’s where you get into the strategy of it. And that’s the overall strategy number one. It’s a revenue. It’s a growth strategy. It could be doing more on social media. It could be doing more outreach in your local area. It could be anything. It could be anything that’s going to drive revenue business forward.

strategy 3: business health

And this is what excites most entrepreneurs and most business owners is that side of it, the marketing, the new customers, new client acquisition, all those kind of things. And that’s where we focus a lot of our time and energy, especially because that’s what we have to do in the beginning. But that’s only the first strategy.

Now I’m going to jump to the third strategy I’d normally recommend. And that is what I would deem business health. Okay, so making sure that you have a strategy in place to make sure the health of your business is good. And so that could be tracking customer satisfaction, like with an NPS score or customer client satisfaction surveys, making sure that you’re doing those things, you’re tracking those things and you’re actually taking care of your clients and customers, all things business related that you’re doing all the back end items, you’re sending the weekly newsletter if that’s on your to do list, you’re just knocking off all of the things that keep the business healthy and humming, you’re making sure that none of those things fall off.

And how we actually do it is we have all these checklists to make sure you’re doing all those things. And if you have a poor score, the goal is to actually increase the score. But if we’re talking more generic terms, business health is really just all the back end system process administrative stuff that needs to happen.

strategy 2: leadership and culture

And so you make sure that hey, I have a goal for this, I have a checklist for this, I were making sure that we’re sending the newsletter this many times per month, all of these little things, the social media posts that need to be happening, all those things, you’re putting that now in a strategy for overall business health, making sure that you have a system and a process for all things, but you never focus on more than three tactics.

So it’s not like 100 different things. It’s only one quarter we’re talking about, we’re not trying to conquer the world, we’re just trying to conquer three months. Now the last one I normally recommend, this is strategy two, is having a strategy to improve your leadership and culture inside of your business.

Sometimes people skip this, they want to do the revenue strategy, and maybe I can sell them on the business health strategy, but they’re not doing the leadership and culture. And this goes a long way, but this goes into business health is about the business running and humming. Like I said, you’re all the systems there, the processes are there.

why you need all three strategies

The first one is about the sales, the marketing, getting more customers in the door. Now this one is about actually leading the team. Even if you don’t have a team, how are you leading yourselves? So it’s all about leading, about leading yourself, leading the company, leadership, culture, all of those things.

You can have a goal to read a certain number of leadership books. You can have a goal to improve communication and ways to actually improve communication. You can have ideas to improve or build company culture around your mission, vision and values, things like that. So once I started planning quarters this way, they became way more doable and I felt like nothing was falling off.

I wasn’t playing whack-a-mole with, oh cool, I got the sales and marketing thing like really dialed in this month, boom. But then it’s all crap. I have an unhappy employee over here because I haven’t been paying attention to them. Now I fixed that problem. But I was so focused on that problem, I forgot about sales and marketing the next month.

ready to go deeper?

And then the month after that, I’m like, okay, I got the company. Sales and marketing is doing okay, but then I got this employee over here, but we haven’t sent the newsletter in two weeks, crap. Then you’re solving that problem. You see how when you’re playing whack-a-mole and you’re too focused on growth, you’re not really moving forward.

And to implement a strategy like this, that means you might not be able to implement as many growth strategies as you would want in any one singular quarter, but you have to remember there are other parts of business. You have leadership, culture, business health, system process, all these other things that need to happen.

Eventually when your team’s big enough, you can delegate a lot of these things to just make sure that they’re happening across the company, across departments. But when you’re small, a lot of this is on you. And if you want to get into the weeds, the details of more quarterly planning stuff, like I said, I’m putting together some video coursework.

call to action

You can go to jerred.com, J-E-R-R-E-D.com. And when that comes out here in the next month or two, you’ll be the first to know if you are on the newsletter. So that’s it. That’s what I recommend. Go into your quarter here, quarter two of 2024 and implement not just some revenue growth strategies, sales and marketing.

Those are sexy. That’s what we like. So dive into business health. What systems need to be implemented, created, built, checked, redone? What process needs to be invented? What needs to be documented? And then also, where are you at in the leadership, development of yourself and within your company and overall the culture?

If you don’t want to focus on all of these things, I suggest that you try harder. Thank you.