Steps to Building a Valuable Future

To ensure our company has a future, we have a planning pyramid. I learned about this through a program called "The Birthing of Giants," led by the founder of YEO (the Young Entrepreneurs' Organization), Verne Harnish. We begin by talking about our values and core business beliefs. We realize when we hire people or do anything in our business, there's some framework of values we have as an organization. We begin by having a very clear understanding of these core values.

But back to the planning process: We have a mission based on an objective. We hold ourselves accountable to that objective. We work backward and ask ourselves the following question: "If that's what we want our business to look like in 20 years, what do we need to look like in five years?" From that, we go back to our one-year set of goals. We have to make our one-year goal equivalent or on the same track as our five-year goal. Then we take a step back from that and ask ourselves, "What do we need to do in the next 90 days that will allow us to achieve what we want to achieve in the next year?"

Tied into the 90-day company goals, we have an overall theme. For example, the theme for Intertech was keeping our numbers up in a market where a lot of our competitors were losing money. To achieve this we put together a collage that's about as big as a person, with faces of all our core competitors on it. Whenever we book a student in the class, we put a big "X" on it, and after this thing has been filled up, we have a group reward we'll all share - we go to the lovely Mall of America here in Minnesota and have drinks and goof around for a day. So we have a theme that's tied to the overall company goals, which then get broken into 90-day key result areas for managers, who will then distribute it to their direct reports - and what that really gives us is alignment.

At our company meetings, held on the second Wednesday of every month, we provide an update on how we're doing this quarter in relation to the big theme as well as those key results we're going to achieve. Our communication people post what we are trying to accomplish on the entrance to our offices. We want everyone to see it.