I wish I could pinpoint when I finally figured it out. I’m sure it took me much longer than it should have. As I started my company at age 19 while in Business School at the University of Washington, I was probably a bit slow to learn some of the basics that would have come along with attending Real World Corporate Operations 101 before launching into my entrepreneurial career.
Despite the delay, I’ve since learned (and truly believe) that absolutely everything you want to run smoothly has to operate on a schedule. This includes business activities that can be somewhat nebulous, such as “strategic planning.”
Over the years, as a member of various industry-specific and local CEO peer groups, I also learned that companies that are intentional about their growth tend to be much more successful than those that use “hope” as a primary strategy. So in 2018, I built our first “Annual Plan,” which was my best-effort attempt to create some structure around our goals and plans for the year.
It failed miserably.
We had a “Black Swan” event occur in early April of that year that completely threw us for a loop. That would be the first of four “Black Swan” events that we would have to overcome over the next 24 months, with the final one being Covid Lockdowns (which extended off/on in Seattle for the better part of 3 years). So much for “creating a plan!” Great timing, huh?
Well, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again, right?
By early 2021, we were ready to take another crack at the whole planning thing, and while we were limited to doing it on Zoom, it was probably the first time we had some sort of guiding document that we followed successfully. It also turned out to be a great year for us. We grew our revenue by 34%, added some great new clients, and achieved a lot of our goals.
I’m sure some of these things would have happened without the plan, but probably not as many. And I know for sure we wouldn’t have been as focused on what we determined was most important.
So we did it again in 2022. And 2023 and 2024. By 2025, we’ve got a pretty darn good system that I’ll share a few pieces of. Best of all, we’re getting much better at setting and achieving the right goals year after year.
How does your team handle strategic planning? Drop me a line at kevin @ dynamiccomputing.com and let me know!