Issue #81 It’s that time of year
It’s planning time!
For all of you at our planning summit, you really shouldn’t be reading this.
Especially if I (Jeff) am speaking. Yes, I know a talk on customer profitability can be a bit dry, but I’m trying, and this stuff matters.
If you aren’t with us, well, we love you anyway.
So, we’ve got some planning tips below.
More on that in a second.
First, some updates
📈 Interested in Maximizing MSP Growth, best practices, and strategies? Well, whaddya know, we’ve got a blog post on that: Read it here.
🧠 An updated version of our Mindset for MSP Owners post, always worth a read if you are growing your business, is here.
📣 Podcast, Guide to hiring tech talent, we talk to Robert Goodman about this (in his words): “It’s very easy to find candidates… the problem is for every 20 candidates, there’s one good one.” Sound familiar? Learn more here.
The latest in the community:
📧 We get so many requests for ActiveCampaign tips, tricks, and solutions that we created an Active Campaign forum; the first two posts are about how to pause subscribers in a nurture campaign and how to know if somebody has been active in the last 7 days (complete with copyable automation scripts).
🙋🏽♀️ And we had a great Q&A conversation about how to set prices, whether you should hide your price, and whether you should build AI into your product; check it out here.
This week is all about planning.
So… I encourage you to take a moment to pause and think about your business. Are you happy with where you are and where you’re going?
One of our favorite exercises is to ask yourself these questions:
- Looking back over the last two horizons: What are you proud of, and what do you regret (oh, and if you don’t have any regrets, you aren’t trying hard enough.)?
- Thinking about where your business is today, what are you confident in, and what are you worried about?
- Looking forward to the next two horizons, what excites you and what worries you?
Then, once you’ve thought about these, ask yourself: What must happen over the next two horizons so that I have more pride, confidence, and excitement?
Note the phrasing: these five things must happen.
This doesn’t mean you have to do them, you can delegate or persuade others, but if these five things happen, you will have more pride, confidence, and excitement.
This is usually a big part of the plan. It is a great conversation starter with your team and a great way to course-correct and set objectives for the rest of the year.
Now, we will miss you at the planning summit, but hopefully, you are playing along at home. If so, and you are wondering what a horizon is… well, I explain it here.
I also have a mural template of our StratPlan Canvas that you can copy here. This starts with a SWOT analysis and guides you through exercises that help identify and prioritize your actions.
Enjoy, and we look forward to welcoming you to our planning summit in December.
