After you have a blueprint, it’s time to build the plan. What are the things you can have in a plan that actually works? Here are Bradley’s 5 steps to building a plan that actually works for your business.

east asian woman working on laptop with coffee

REMINDER: Why You Need a Plan to Go With Your Blueprint

Last week, Bradley shared his principle of having a Blueprint for your business.  However, you need to build the plan for your blueprint if you want to see any measurable results.  Here’s a quick refresh on why: the When you want to build a house, you usually go to an architect with all your ideas and discuss what you want. Then the architect will draw up a sketch of the home, and you’ll work with them to modify it until it is the exact vision. This becomes your blueprint.

But if you handed that blueprint as-is to a general contractor, they would not be able to immediately build a home. They need plans for HVAC, water, electricity, and all the elements that go into a home.

This is similar to having a blueprint and a plan in your business.

builder writing a plan over blueprint

Bradley’s Interpretation of The Plan

Building the plan for your business is not a new idea – nearly every entrepreneur, CEO, and coach talks about it.  But many times a plan becomes a hope or ideal instead of something actionable.  Bradley has drawn from books like Execution: Getting Things Done and The 4 Disciplines of Execution, as well as ideas from thought leaders like Michael Hyatt to develop this model of an actionable plan to achieve your desired results.  Here are his 5 steps to build a plan that works.

two women working on whiteboard with business plan, KRAs, and stats

5 Steps to Building The Plan

Let’s use our goal of growing the leadership podcast and a business as an example for these 5 steps.

Step One: The How

The “how” in your plan is specifically the strategy to make it happen.  Our plan is to grow the podcast and Business Growth Curator.  The strategy for this plan is to book Bradley as a guest on other people’s podcasts.  It allows him to reach people who already listen to podcasts with the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.  It also gets him in front of other business owners who may be interested in his coaching services.

Step Two: The What

The “what” is comprised of activities that yield your Key Result (KR).  For our plan, these activities include researching podcasts that have had the same guests as the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.  Then, the team makes a list of podcast details and contact info.  Finally, we reach out via email to these podcasts to see if they would like to have Bradley on as a guest.

man and woman discussing data on desktop computer

Step Three: Performance Standards

This step is key because without a standard of performance, you’ll have nothing to measure your KRAs by.  For our plan, we are sending a minimum of 5 emails weekly.  Our expected booking conversion rate is 20%, totaling about 60 podcasts booked in 12 months.

Step Four: Cadence of Measurement and Reporting

How often do we measure activities and report results to the team?  For this plan, we measure and report results each week.  This is fairly typical for most goals, however you may want to report more or less frequently depending on the plan.

Step Five: Who Owns The Outcome?

As a business owner, the default is that you own every outcome.  However, the more you can shift ownership of specific outcomes to a team member, the better it is for your business.  For our example, our team member Courtney is reaching out via email and owns this outcome.

man and woman in office talking

What’s Your Plan?

Using these five steps, you can build the plan for your business.  Take time to think about each of the steps, desired outcomes, and team members who can be a part of the plan.  Good luck!

Grow Your Leadership

Bradley has many resources to grow your leadership in the area of vision and priorities.  Check out a few of them:

bradley smiling with text "blueprint{

As we begin 2023, do you know where you want to be at the end of the year? Here’s why you need a blueprint for your business, and how to make one. Keep reading…

Bradley talking with text "2022 log of lessons learned"

Watch this quick video to learn Bradley’s top 8 takeaways from ownership, entrepreneurship, and leadership this year. Keep reading…

it's time to solve the rainmaker's dilemma

It’s difficult to get to your destination if you aren’t sure where you currently are!  After all, the path from Minnesota to Canada is very different than the path from Mexico to Canada.  If you aren’t certain where you’re at today in business, you need to take the Rainmaker to Architect assessment.  It will gauge your strengths and weaknesses as a leader and in your business.  Then, you’ll get detailed, specific suggestions for improvement.  Take the assessment here.