Planning and Executing in a Changing Marketplace

What helps us succeed in the ups and downs of business is that we have an extensive planning process. In our planning process, we do SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis, which involves reviewing our strengths and weaknesses as an organization. We find the opportunities and threats that exist. In the marketplace in Minnesota we've had a state worker strike and a budget shutdown. We'll talk about everything that's happening with competitors, customers, and the government, which happens to be one of our clients. We'll talk about our strengths and weaknesses as an organization. We find what we're good at and match those strengths with some good opportunities in the marketplace. Those are the things we'll try to leverage.

Then we look at our risks. What are the things we can do to mitigate or control those risks? We'll factor each risk: If the likelihood of its occurrence is small, and its impact will be small, we won't spend time worrying about it. I would say we avoid risks. We haven't gotten to where we are by taking huge, uncalculated risks. We've gotten here by taking an honest look in the mirror to see where we are. We take honest looks at the market and the overall conditions. We then devise a fairly straightforward plan that we can execute and that can allow us to be successful.

Our planning process reflects our mission - what we're trying to accomplish. For Intertech, our mission is to be number one in America as determined by total profits, the number of workshops we offer, and the number of bookings we have with the people who author books for us. This allows us to have goals. We work backward from our larger goals until we reach our 90-day operational plan for the business. This breaks down into 90-day individual goals. Every quarter we assess what we should be doing. This gives us a fairly simple model to operate within. Operating on a 90-day plan allows us to see our mission clearly. We can see the big picture and how all the changes we go through affect our overall goals. We know if we're going to be successful we will have to make changes. This has been extremely effective for us.

Once we have our plan in place, we do several things to make sure our company executes. One of them has to do with our 90-day goals. These goals are distributed down to the managers. Each manager is responsible for different things. For example, let's say I am the vice president of sales. I am the one who is accountable for sales. I will take my 90-day goal and break it down to key result areas and distribute it to my direct reports.

The second thing we do is to hold weekly hour-long meetings to talk about our progress toward our goal. Tied into those key result areas are work plans. So if I've said I'll have something done this week, before we get together on Monday, I'll say whether it's done according to plan. If not, I'll try to verbalize the problems I'm having and pinpoint the areas in which I need help.

The third aspect of our executing process is huddles, where every day for 15 minutes everyone dials into a conferencing system, including me, and we give updates. If I'm a new salesperson and my 90-day goal is to make 100 contacts per week, when I dial into my daily huddle, one thing I am going to share is that I made 21 contacts. For me and for the business, this is wonderful. We know we're meeting our objectives, right down to how many contacts each salesperson is making, and we're measuring that on a daily basis.

Daily huddles allow us to see if we are not executing. The definition of non-executing is having six consecutive data points going in the wrong direction - for example, 20 contacts that go to 18 to 16 to 14 to 12 to 10. If we have six of those lining up in a row, we have a trend. This hinders execution. And by sampling that often, we're able to correct problems quickly. If we were sampling weekly, we'd find out in about a month what was happening. And if we were sampling monthly, it would take half a year before we'd be able to figure out we weren't executing the way we should be. The efficiency of this process helps us execute successfully.