Bottleneck Breakthrough Step 1: Create a Strategic Plan

This is the Momentum podcast. This morning, I got a text message from a friend of mine. I actually was sharing yesterday our strategic planning meeting, our one of the meetings that I went through with my team. I just put it on my Instagram Story and he replied back to me and he's like, Alex, we need your help. We are at $12 million a year. We have 55 team members, but our planning is a mess and we are constantly stressed around what we're doing. We're constantly having a hard time with what we're doing and so on. You know, I I realized that so many people and so many entrepreneurs are in this place. I mean, the biggest bottleneck in their business. And when you're at 12 million with 55 people and things feel like they're a mess and the planning isn't clear. It is so overwhelmingly stressful when you're the biggest bottleneck in an enterprise that big. Even if it's a million dollar company, it is overwhelming. It's stressful, it's hard to deal with. It wears us down. It makes us tired. But when you're when you're in a fifty five person business, you start to feel like you are holding everyone back. You start to feel like you're actually affecting all fifty five of those people in a really negative way. So I wanted to jump in and share whether you're in a million dollar business, a $12 million business. This year, we worked with a $50 million business with over 300 employees. The issue is the same. The reason why so many entrepreneurs are the biggest bottleneck in their business is because they don't have a strategic plan. I'm Alex Charfen, and this is the Momentum podcast made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers and creators of all kinds, those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny. We define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority. The few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future. And instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution and we always will be. When I say strategic plan, a lot of people don't understand what I mean, they don't understand, what does he mean by a strategic plan? Well, let me explain it to you. Let me share with you the first step in how to be in the biggest bottleneck in your business, getting the help you need, getting your team out in front of you, making sure everybody's completely productive and moving forward and in momentum this year that you're getting the growth you want without feeling like you have to do it all yourself. Here's how you do this. A strategic plan is a document you create where you have everything that you're doing in your company. And so here's how most of the time we look at what we're doing in our company. We look at what projects are we doing, how many projects are we doing, what are the projects we have out there? You know, we're going to launch a website. We're going to create a new sales script. We're going to run a promotion. But running a business is so much more than just projects. In fact, we delegate to one of four different exits. We have projects which I've already mentioned. We have people. We need to hire people, promote people, train people. What do we need to do with people? We have processes. We need to document processes, improve processes, fix processes and then we have policies. We have policies that we add to our business. We have policies that we share our business on. It is not a boring corporate document in Louisa. In fact, here's what a strategic plan can look like the way that we teach entrepreneurs how to create a strategic plan. You go through a process where you document everything going on the business, all the projects, all the people movements, all the policies that you're enacting, all the processes that are getting fixed, what is happening in the business, you document it and then you give it to your team. Now this should feel like kind of an awakening, because let me just share with you some simple math if your team doesn't know where you're going. You will always be in between the goal and your team. You're going to be in the middle as the bottleneck, always because for your team to get to the goal, they're going to have to go through you. They're going to have to ask you. Questions are going to have to interrupt you. They're going to have to get information from you. Now we can shift this dramatically when we take the goal and we spell it out in a strategic plan. Here's what happens you are stuck behind the strategic plan anymore as fact. You can lead from over here. Your team can get out in front of you. Your team can get over here because they look at the strategic plan they get out in front of you. And here's what happens when people on a team have clarity. Here's what happens when people on the team understand the plan. Here's what happens when people on the team understand the destination, all the things that we want as entrepreneurs. In fact, let me share with you some of the biggest complaints entrepreneurs have about their team. My teams are stepping up. My teams are getting enough done that they're not taking the initiative. We're missing and we're missing the deadlines on projects. We're not making things happen like I want them to. Well, all of those are symptoms of people lacking clarity, people who will not step up if they lack clarity. They won't take initiative. They feel like they're going to do something wrong. They can get things done if they don't know where they're really going. They will miss deadlines if the destination isn't clear from the beginning. So how do you fix all of this? You create a strategic plan, and this is not some boring corporate document like so many content commented, and it's not some ethereal document where it's a bunch of strategy and it's high level and it doesn't really get down to the tactical level. This is literally a plan where you check off each thing that's getting done in the company and you have clarity behind it. And so if you, as an entrepreneur, are ready to stop being the biggest bottleneck, if you're ready for your team to give you all the productivity they can, if you're ready for your team to be able to step up and make things happen for you, you have to have a strategic planning your business. And now here's what makes it real. Sometimes I'll ask somebody, do you have a specific plan or business? And I'll say, Yeah, and it's a great show it to me. They'll say, Well, it's kind of in my head that's just as bad as not having a plan. Here's how you make your strategic plan real. Number one, it's in writing, and it's easy to understand, impossible to misunderstand. So everyone on the team can understand what's there. Number two is distributed to every member of the team, so everybody gets it. Everybody gets to see it. And number three, you reinforce that plan by answering questions, by presenting it to the team, by making sure everyone knows where you're going. When you do this with a strategic plan, you as the operator, sorry, you as the entrepreneur who works with an operator, hopefully can step out of the way. You no longer have to be the biggest bottleneck you want to no longer all that are the conduit through which everybody understands what they should do next. I know this sounds simple and I know this sounds. It sounds a little too easy, maybe. Or it sounds like how do you really do this? Well, we've shown hundreds of entrepreneurs how to create a simple strategic plan that unlocks their team's potential, allows them to take initiative and go forward, actually get out in front of the entrepreneurs so that we can call our shots and make things happen. You know, with that small percentage of the population that gets up every morning, goes into the future, creates a new reality, comes back to the president and demands it becomes real. And we put up with all the vulnerability and the pressure and the pain to do that. And if we have a strategic plan, here's what we're literally doing. We're going into the future, coming back to the present with that new reality and then we're spelling it out. We're actually. Making it real in writing, we're showing everyone around us what we want. You know, lot I know a lot of members of this group, like me, believe the manifestation and maybe a little magic create some momentum in our lives. The power of attraction, the power of positive thinking, the power of a really looking at what we want and then bringing it home. Well, there is no greater manifestation to a no greater manifestation to help in a business with a team than creating a coordinated strategic plan where everybody can get their energetics and energy behind it, where everybody can get excited about it, where everybody can start dreaming about it, where people can get so, so excited about what you're doing, that you actually get their discretionary time. When human beings have clarity about the destination, especially in a small entrepreneurial business, they'll start thinking about what they're doing in the shower. They're still drinking and thinking about what they're doing for you when they're driving. You actually start getting discretionary effort, discretionary time. Why? Because when we have clarity as to the destination that is the first ingredient for us to be in momentum as human beings. And so you, as a business owner, have this massive opportunity to create a strategic plan that gives everybody on your team clarity. And here's what that does. That puts them into momentum. And when we are in momentum, you know how it feels. When we're in momentum, it feels like everything gets easier. It feels like we're going on a downhill slope. It feels like we're we're just crushing it. We're making things happen. You know, when I ask a roomful of entrepreneurs and their teams, what does it feel like to be in momentum? They say things like, It's exhilarating, it's exciting. It's incredible. It feels like you're high. It feels like you're on in another world. It feels like you're soaring above the clouds. And then somebody will eventually say it feels like you're alive. That's the definition. I agree with most people like us and the members of our team. When we are in momentum, we feel most alive. If you want your team to come alive this year, if you want them to support you in a way they never have before. If you want to be able to step out of being the biggest bottleneck and be able to being able to conduct and direct the success of your team, being able to call your shots, get your team out in front of you and have them get you there. The first step is a strategic plan. Now, if you're ready to create a strategic plan, if you're ready to understand the systems and processes in the structure that will help you grow your business this year without having to do it all yourself, make a comment below and let me know and I will send you links to that. You can set up a call with my team and we can get you there, and I would love to be able to connect with you. Show you how we can help you. Help you put your first strategic plan in place and feel the relief of having a document that gets you out of being the biggest bottleneck and then having a system through which you can renew that document with your team and create massive momentum on a monthly basis. I look forward to hearing from you if you're not going to be the biggest bottleneck, you have to have a strategic plan so your team knows where you're going, and you and everyone on your team gets in the momentum. Thanks for being here.