Your 2023 Business Strategy

This blog is automatically transcribed using AI and might have typos or grammar errors. It’s not the robot’s fault.

Can you believe it's time to think about 2023?

I'm excited and lost. Where should I begin? What should I focus on? So many thoughts and questions running around in my head.

It's time to start crafting your goals and getting some actions behind them.

It can be a bit overwhelming so I thought it might be nice to have an expert join us.

In this episode, I am joined by Jennifer Drago, Business Strategist/High-Performance Coach to get the conversation started.

We discussed things you should be doing now to prepare for 2023.

📌 Create/update your scorecard
📌 Create a vision narrative (a descriptive portrait of where you want your business to be 3 years from now) 📌 Create metric-driven goals for 2023 that move you toward your vision.

See below the show’s transcription:

Mary Fain Brandt

Can you believe it's October already? I can't believe how fast this year went. You know what that means? I got a question for you. Are you ready? Are you ready for 2023 to be your best year ever? I know it's October and you're like, Mary, I'm trying to get to Halloween and Thanksgiving. But you need to start thinking about your 2023 business goals now like today, folks, I'm so ready to start planning out 2023. And I'm going to be laying out that game plan with my friend and colleague, Jennifer Drago. She's my next guest on 15 Minutes of Fain, which is the show Hi, everyone. I'm Mary Fain Brandt, LinkedIn strategist and career coach and host of 15 Minutes of Fain. From time to time, I like to have a guest on my show. And Jennifer and I were just talking about goal setting and, and how we need to like, really start working on our 2023 game plan and so I thought to myself, hmm, wouldn't it be great to have her on the show and get everyone's mind thinking about what is 2023 going to look like?

Mary Fain Brandt

Now let me introduce Jennifer, her company is called from Peak to Profit. And she's a senior level business strategist, leadership coach who helps corporations, coaches and consultants get laser focus so they can get better results and less time. Sign me up, Jennifer. Today's topic is your 2023 Business Strategy. And Jennifer's going to be covering three bullet points here, you're ready. Create a vision narrative because you gotta have vision before you can create your plan. Create your metric driven goals. So many times we just write down goals, but do we have metric driven goals, and then create or update your scorecard. I guess we're talking about baseball, not really sure, but Jennifer's coined to cue us and what that is all about.

Mary Fain Brandt

Now, if you like the look and feel of this show, you can have a show like this too. I want to give a big shout out to Streamyard, who is the official sponsor of this show, 15 Minutes of Fain, they make it so easy to go live literally hit a button that says go live and hit a button over here that says end broadcast. You can have intro videos out your videos, bring comments on the screen like this one. You can do fun things like that, you can customize everything, you'll see some more of that during the show. So if you like the look and feel of this show, I'm going to drop some links after the show, um, some more affiliate links, I might get enough to make or to buy a cup of coffee. But really, it's just to educate you guys inspire you and give you resources that can help you be better in business. So without further ado, let's bring Jennifer up to the screen or the stage or whatever we call it. Oh, hey, Jennifer, you're muted. Let's unmute you. There we go.

Jennifer

I thought it was so past that. Sorry about that.

Mary Fain Brandt

It's all good. Thank you so much for being on the show today. I've really had a great time. So I don't just throw a dart at someone I see on LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram be like that person. I want to have them on my show. It's usually someone that I've cultivated a relationship with gotten to know and Jennifer and I met online, met at the LinkedIn local event. And then we just have been partnering up in networking this last week or so. It's so nice to have you on the show and to learn more about you and your business. When I saw you speak I think it was two weeks ago that I saw you speak and so that was amazing. Jennifer, I could probably just sit and talk to you about you for 15 minutes. Why don't you give everyone just like a brief snippet of the work that you do and the clients that you work with, then we're going to dive right into the 2023 strategies.

Jennifer

You bet thanks so much. So I have worked in corporate strategy, planning and operations for 30 years. And I feel a little old saying that to be honest, but now I'm on my own. I started my company about 14 months ago doing strategy work for small businesses, for still for corporations, entrepreneurs, I really just love to work with folks around creating that vision, creating that strategy to grow their usually to grow or move their business in a different direction, and just help them develop a roadmap to get from A to B. And I have some great tips on how to do it. It's work that I'm passionate about. And you're exactly right now is the best time to be thinking about next year before we get into the holidays and our brain gets filled with many other things.

Mary Fain Brandt

You need time to plan and really think about it instead of just throwing spaghetti at the wall of hey, I want to write a book. Okay, well, what are the 10 steps you have to do to write to write the book, or I want to double my revenue. Great, what do you have to do to double that revenue? So I'm really glad that we're having this conversation today. And hopefully, it inspires other people to start thinking about that. So I know, this is what you do business strategy, goal setting. I love goal setting. Like it's I have posted the large wall size. And I put my 10 goals for the year Tisha Marie and I did that last year. And I'm sure we'll do it again this year. But let's get started with that vision narrative. Let's talk about like, what does that sound like and look like? How do you get started on that?

Jennifer

Sure, you bet. And let me just comment real quick that I love that you said you love goals. And we've had this conversation. So I know that you do indeed love goals. Not everybody loves goals.

Mary Fain Brandt

I'm a person give me a goal. Let me write down plus, you know, I've just learned as a business owner, it's great to say, you know, I'm going to sign on five new clients a month, and I'm going to raise my prices. You don't just do that by saying it, you have to think about it. What does that look like? How are you setting that up? And you have to, you know, I always say you write the goal down? What are the three actions that get you closer to the goal?

Jennifer

Yes, and I love it. And if you're listening to this, and you're not a goals person, hear me out. And I'm going to give you a really easy strategy. We're going to demystify strategy today, and just make it simple. The reality is that, I've seen companies that don't set goals, I've had companies that have a great strategic plan with lots of goals, and it sits in a binder on a shelf. And then I've seen companies that actually execute on their strategic plan. And guess which ones get further faster. We all have business goals, let's make it easier on ourselves than maybe we have in the past. So the first thing is Mary mentioned is a vision narrative. So you've probably heard of a vision statement, which in many businesses, we're taught that you create a mission statement, which is what you do, you create a vision statement, which is an aspirational statement of the business in the future, or the, the the aspirational state that you want your business to impact or to try to work toward, sometimes in the community. I like what's called a vision narrative, or a vision script. And this is a series of six to 10 statements that describe very descriptively very specifically, what you want your business to look like, in three years from now. And you ask yourself a series of questions, to really envision that. And what's really nice about it is when you create this vision, you can say, by 2025, I would like peak, the proper peak to profit will and you create, we will have this much in revenue. This many clients will serve. You know, this many clients per year, we're going to provide this level of services, we're going to donate this much back to the community, we're going to have a team that looks like this, because if we're growing our revenues and growing ourselves, we know that our team needs to grow, we're going to aspire to have a culture and employee culture that has these values. And so you can see by grabbed by making that specific those specific statements and having that portrait, it becomes very inspirational to you as the leader of your business. But then also, it's something that you share with your contractors if you're not yet employing people but you're working with a virtual assistant or contracted social media person. Or if you do have a team of employees even better because it describes for your employees where this business is headed, and they can jump on the train and help move it along on that track. So that's why the vision is so important.

Mary Fain Brandt

I think a lot of times as entrepreneurs when you know if we have a small team You know, maybe you have a VA, maybe you have an accountant, right? A CPA, maybe you only have a team of two or three, that as entreprenuer small business owners, we might not think to share our vision, we might not think it's important right to share that with our virtual assistant. But what I'm hearing is like, I think it helps get their buy in, like, hey, I want to support Mary or Jen, you know, in this growth, like, it's them being part of something bigger.

Jennifer

100% Mary, and if we don't tell them where it's headed, their expertise that they have can't shine, right. So like you said, they're going to come up with ideas that help us move in that direction, the number one role of a CEO. And if you're an entrepreneur, you're the CEO of your business. But the number one role of us of a leader is to provide vision for their company and for their employees. So that's what this part is all about. And honestly, this is where I try to grab those that don't like goals, do this visioning exercise with me, because it's really exciting when you do it. And I actually will talk about a freebie that I have at the end that asks you all of those questions, so that you can create that for your organization.

Mary Fain Brandt

I love it. And I think that like this is the foundation, you have to start with that vision and know where you want to take your business. Even if you're a party of one, where do you want to take your business in 2023, 2024, 2025? What does that look like? Maybe you want to hire a VA? Maybe you know, so how many clients is that going to take? You know, how many hours are you going to hire them for? So I love that you're starting with that vision. And I love that you have a freebie. It sounds like it's a plug and play. We just have to answer a couple questions. And like it's going to be all worded and laid out for us making it easy peasy to start our own vision narrative. Right? Yep. So then the next step is goals, right? We're talking about our specific goals. And anyone watching, do you write out three steps that you need to do to reach the goal? Or do you just write down, lose weight, make more money, buy a house? Those are like so broad, right? It's like, Great, let's plaster those on the wall and see how they'll stick. So Jennifer, do you want to dive into what metric driven goals are?

Jennifer

Yes. So you can you provide a perfect segue, right. And when we're doing our vision, we know what revenue number we're trying to get to we know how many clients we want, we know if we're, what our services are going to look like. And if we're pivoting if we're creating new things. And so from that vision narrative, those goals just kind of drop right out of there, you can pretty much see the strategic areas that you need to focus on. And I like to tell folks, now we're just taking remember, the vision is where you want to be in three years for now. So we kind of back it up and say, okay, and you're one we have to do this. And you're too we have to do this in year three, we have to do this, but we only set goals around the first year. And I like to say set three or four goals in any year. Don't go don't do more than that. You'll drive yourself crazy. So

Mary Fain Brandt

I shouldn't have my list of 10. No, I don't. And you know what happened, I ended up crossing things off. But, you know, I have like, these are my 10 things that I wanted to do. And I ended up crossing like rearranging them. So I think maybe there was step two, like write down your 10 goals in October, revisit them in November, and kind of pare that down. So yeah, good,

Jennifer

good point, Mary. And you just really want to prioritize the things that are going to move that business forward. Right. If you complete them, you can add more in the middle of the year. I mean, there's nothing to say that you can't. But in the beginning of the year, especially less is more. And you really want to simplify, keep this simple. And then I love what you said, which is put some action underneath them. So you know at least your first three or four action steps to get started and plan some timelines along with them. And we talked about metrics. So in many cases, some of the things I mentioned that might be included in a vision narrative, are metrics driven, right? What are your sales need to be? Well back that up in order to get that many sales? How many prospects do you need to contact? What's your conversion rate? Are you trying to improve that this year? So think about the metrics, what are you going to measure to know that you're having success in the goal area, and then we're going to put those metrics into a scorecard which we'll talk about in principle number three.

Mary Fain Brandt

So I wanted to say hi to Linda and so Linda and says sharing a vision is important, but it is more important to help each employee understand on how they contribute to the accomplishment of that vision. And that's what you were saying, you know, in the vision. And then we talked about how important it is to let your employees whether it's one, two, or 10, or 100, let them be part of that strategy. Let them understand what the vision is, so they can contribute.

Jennifer

Yes, 100%. And I'll just take it one step further, when we're talking about goals, right, especially if you're a bigger organization, if you have more than, you know, 10 employees, or we're talking 100, or several 100, you really want to take your leadership and have them invested in cascading those goals through the organization. So if your goal if your organizational goal is to increase your revenue by 25%, in a year, every single leader in your business is going to have an need to have ownership around that. And it's one thing to say, here's your goal, it's another thing to have that leader, think about, okay, how can I impact this goal? What is my role in increasing the revenue for the organization as an example. And so that's a best practice is to have your leaders participate in setting their own goals, that cascade from the organizational goals.

Mary Fain Brandt

I love that, that that's getting that buy in, which is something that we always talk about in Organizational Leadership and Development is getting everyone's buy in, because you're going to reach success faster, and you're going to have happier, more productive employees. Right when they're part of the process, part of the strategy part of the solution. Shout out to everyone that's joining us over on Facebook and YouTube. Hello, thanks for joining Jen and I today. I know this is 15 minutes of Fain. So we try to wrap up on time, but with guests, I extend the time because we have so much knowledge to drop on y'all. So we have one more area for you guys to think about, and that's creating or updating your scorecard. Now, I gotta be honest, I have no idea what you're talking about Jen, the scoring card like is it baseball season? Am I betting on a team? Like? What is the scorecard? Tell us more about it?

Jennifer

Well, I'd love people to think about the scorecard is helping you to measure your practice throughout the throughout the year, right. So when we talk about our goals of increasing revenue, increasing the number of clients, we even talked about backing up from the client number and thinking about what the pipeline needs to look like and how we're going to measure that. When you develop the metrics, when you're developing your goals, and they're metric driven goals, then you know what your end result is supposed to look like, you know what your goal is supposed to look like? A scorecard is simply a spreadsheet or a Word document that just tracks your numbers, your metrics, month over month. So you can see am I on track to meet that goal, or am I going to fall short, because if you're going to fall short, at any point in the year, you can make some adjustments to try to get that back where it needs to be. So I like to use three types of dashboards in particular, if you simply just had your goals on a on a sheet, and you were tracking your progress, month over month, I'd be very happy. The three that I love to talk about our strategic dashboard, which is doing what I just said, tracking your progress on your goals and you can do this by stoplight color. Are you on track? Is it green? Are you delayed? Is it yellow? Or are you in trouble and not at risk of not meeting that goal that's red. I love operational metrics because all of us operate in some some of those things that we talked about the number of clients, our satisfaction rate, our conversion rate, those kinds of things can become operational metrics. And those can be.

Mary Fain Brandt

Our time off, right. Like we talked about this, like, I don't want to work five days and 40 hours. Like that's a metric. Like for me, it's a four day work week, six hours a day. That's yeah, yes. So for me in my meeting that and there will be seasons when you don't like this week with LinkedIn local happening tonight that you know, today's a 12 hour day.

Jennifer

Yes, I get it, I get it.

Mary Fain Brandt

You have to look at everything money operations, all of that, as entrepreneurs and business owners of our, you know, consultants, like, I think a lot of us, the goal is not to work more, it's to have more flexibility and freedom of our time.

Jennifer

Right. Exactly. And you hit on the third area that I like to track in the scorecard, which is the financial and so yeah, so in one location, think about this about you know, you have a simple set of goals. You have three goals, you have a vision narrative that's inspirational. You want to read that every single day, and you have a scorecard that you can review once a month. Those three things will set you up for success as a business no matter how small or how big you are.

Mary Fain Brandt

I'm gonna throw out there my scorecard for finances is in Dubsado, which is what I use for invoicing and accepting payments, and proposals and contracts. It's like one stop, right. And the reason I like it is it actually has a dashboard. It's called dashboard. And you can see money collected, you can see outstanding, right there. So I'm always like, I tried to have a zero balance sheet, right? No, money's due to me. So I'm like, What's, what's outstanding? Is it an accounting error, or does the client only money and then you can sort those. So I look at that dashboard probably every two weeks just to see how I'm doing. So I think that's really important to have something like that. And as you my my tip to people, like when you're starting off, you think you don't need like an invoice platform you do. It's a CRM, it just helps like, don't wait till you're in year three, and try to start piecing it together, I wish that I had started with a CRM system and an invoice, a nice invoice system, not PayPal, sorry, I'm not a fan of PayPal for business, you know, a real invoicing system and a CRM system.

Jennifer

And Mary, the other thing I want to point out is that having those dashboards or scorecards, whatever you call them, also, when you have a team, when you have employees and leaders, sharing that information with them on a regular basis, allows them to do their job better, because they know where they're hitting the mark, they know where they're missing the mark, and coming out of corporate for, you know, 30 years, I can tell you that, as a leader, much of the time I was missing more information than I had, I had to go seek it in order to, you know, to truly have the data needed to do my job. And so let's make it easy and just have a dashboard that we all share and talk about.

Mary Fain Brandt

Yeah, so it's just about getting things lined up understanding your vision. So to recap, Jennifer's amazing. But to recap on the strategies, I'm just gonna go back to my notes, it's creating that vision, creating metric driven goals and updating your scorecard. So basically, it's a report card are you give, how are you doing every month? Are you hitting your goals? Do you need to adjust? So actually, it's pretty simple, Jennifer, it's just about putting it into action. Yeah. And it doesn't matter where you're at in your business, right, starting off or five years in or 10 years. And it's never too late to start applying the strategies to have higher performance, better outcomes and peace of mind, right?

Jennifer

Yes, yes. And I do really want to emphasize how simple this is, by the time you complete your vision narrative and your goals, you're talking about two pieces of paper that you can review every single day, at the start of your business day, or at least once a week, I can't tell you as a strategist, how many times I came upon three inch binders that sat on a shelf, it's not really strategy, it doesn't help you day to day. But if you make this simple, and you just follow a few steps, it's gonna get you so much further faster.

Mary Fain Brandt

I love it. Thank you so much for your time today. And I'll see you at LinkedIn Local Phoenix in just a few hours. So you guys, if you're watching this, you know, I'm the host of LinkedIn Local Phoenix tonight is our last event. I think we have one ticket spot open, we've sold out again. But if you're interested, if you're local to Arizona, and you want to get involved, if you want to be a sponsor, or you have a venue just hit me up. As a matter of fact, Jen donated a coaching session tonight. And when I shared that, you know, online, I was like, Is it wrong that I want to put my ticket, it my name, my raffle ticket in Jennifer's bucket that we're going to have because Hello, who doesn't need more strategy in their life? And I just gotta give a shout out to my girl Linda Hill who is traveling. I don't know if she's hit California yet. Or if she's traveling out to California. I'll see her next week. Hi, Linda. So Jennifer, what is this freebie? Can you drop a link in maybe during or after the show?

Jennifer

Yeah, we'll put it in for sure after the show, but I'll just tell you what it is. It's right on my website. It's peaktoprofit.com/F/vision. That's that easy. So it's the vision narrative. Yeah, and it's a workbook. It's a 12 page workbook, which you know, it's just 12 pages because you have places to enter your own information. It's a fillable PDF, really easy to do.

Mary Fain Brandt

Awesome. I love it. Thank you so much, again, for these simple strategy tips that can really get us thinking more in line like, you know, a corporation or a bigger organization getting as clear on our goals and how to measure them because writing them down is only step one, when you're creating your goals for 2023 or any year. So Jennifer, thank you. I will We'll see you in a couple hours. I have to leave and go get the cookies. I'm so excited. You guys, please connect with Jennifer Drago on LinkedIn, check out her website, grab that freebie. I'm sure that we're going to be collaborating together we've kind of already started brainstorming so you definitely want to ring our bells on LinkedIn and get notified. And you guys if you are ready to go from boring to badass on your LinkedIn profile, right here, I've got two more spots open for October so hit me up. Book a VIP intensive and we will get you packaged and positioned as the expert you are so you can get known get found and get clients, everyone I'm Mary Fain Brandt, this is 15 minutes of Fain. Thank you for joining us. And did I do it? Right, Jen Drago, thank you so much for your time, and we will see you next week. I don't know what the topic is yet. What do you guys want to learn? Let me know. And maybe I'll do that or it'll be an Ask Mary anything show. Take care.

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