How to Plan Your Company’s Year

In a recent training seminar some team members were asked about their New Year’s Resolutions. One wag said ‘I stuck to them all day’. Small and even medium sized companies face the risk of being perpetually reactive, which is in fact an issue many of us face personally, at least some of the time.

One of my favorite colleagues and mentors was a combat helicopter airman and this is how he described the average fast-paced business day: “You head out on your mission and you have your strategic objectives. And then you have targets of opportunity. Those are the ones shooting at you, and so they get most of your attention.” It’s easy to get distracted. Here are some ways our CEO has come up with to address that tendency.

Each team convenes an offsite, away from the company, for a day or more depending on scope. So the sales and marketing team takes to a remote office, the HR and Finance departments rent a conference room at a nearby hotel, and all review the previous year’s challenges and opportunities for improvement. The more client-facing areas of our business, customer service and operations, do the same, but it requires a day or few to go through all the issues of the past year and get input from the teams on how to best address them next time.

These meetings therefore take place offsite and the advent of Airbnb has driven us to take houses (like the Quakers we go for a boys’ house and another for the gals.) Operations this year went to Asbury Park and Client Service to Atlantic City, economical in the winter, but with some fun still to be had. The cooking was done by none other than dear leader and is always first rate, ensuring we can focus on the work at hand excepting some team-building breaks, which produce some great memories.

Overcoming past challenges may require new staff roles, new departmental structure, capital investments, and usually all of these and more. All of it is captured on those great white board sized Post-it things you can easily take with you and then recorded for future distillation and use. They provide the foundation for each departments’ year-ahead planning and budgeting.

Finally, we bring it all together in one last management offsite where the senior leadership for each department takes a week to meet and distill the results of the individual offsite meeting. We merge the areas where departments overlap and need to better integrate, plan headcount and structure for the year, and finalize the budget. It may be a lot more planning than many other types of companies need, but there is a danger in ours, and other service industries, of spending all your time reacting, and these offsite events also allow for great team building.

Yes, we do have fun, play games, go to regional attractions, see sporting events, all things we rarely do during the normal year. This is especially true during our busy Q4 when everyone is flat out ensuring our clients’ peak seasons are successful. We come back (and I’m writing this flying back from Belfast) tired, anxious to implement change, but much more confident in the direction of and planning for another year in the life of our company.

The image is from the site of this year’s management offsite, Belfast, and is an art work ‘The Big Fish’ by John Kindness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Fish) based on the ‘Salmon of Knowledge’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_of_Knowledge) which is supposed to impart all worldly knowledge if you kiss it.