There is something about the approach of a new year that awakens a sense of hope and possibility in even the most cynical among us. So let’s go with that feeling, and see if we can’t generate a thought process that makes a positive difference in the way we approach our planning for the upcoming year.I’ll start with a couple of approaches to planning that you probably don’t want to take:
The Rosy Scenario.
I remember a loan officer – let’s call him “Max” – who consistently fell far short of his production goals. Every year, in a classic triumph of hope over experience, he would take the goals he had failed to reach the year before, and raise them even higher. I would say, “Max, this past year you didn’t even make it halfway to your goals. Now you want to raise them some more? What makes you think that you’ll achieve this new goal when you were nowhere near achieving last year’s? What’s going to make this year any different?”
And Max would say, “Well this year I have no choice – I have to reach this goal because I fell so far behind last year. Failure is not an option.”
But you know what? Failure was an option. And within a few months of the start of the new year, Max was so far behind in the goals he’d set for himself that the very distance -- between what he said he was going to do and what he was actually doing – in reality served to discourage him, instead of acting as an incentive.
Max is doing very well today, but only because he learned the hard way that you can’t con yourself. Setting a lofty goal without a serious examination of what it will take to reach it, followed by a serious commitment to do what it takes every day, is a recipe for failure and disappointment.
The Lesson: It is critical that you set goals that really mean something to you – goals you can get excited about. But also make sure they are realistic and attainable. Past performance is one of the best predictors of future actions. People can and do change, but the changes you make that last are the ones you make incrementally – one step at a time. In your heart of hearts, do you believe you will accomplish this goal? If the answer is no, you need to either do more work on your beliefs, or do more work on your goals.
The Laundry List.
Another loan officer – we’ll call her “Jerry” – was a bit of a seminar junkie who loved to collect marketing ideas from seminars, webinars, chat rooms, forums, websites, etc. Nothing wrong with that – it’s people like her who keep people like me in business! But as her coach, it was my responsibility to encourage this very bright and enthusiastic person to stay at least marginally tethered to the laws of space & time.
At this time of year, she would produce a very long laundry list of all the marketing ideas she wanted to incorporate into her business plan for the upcoming year. Where Max’s problem was that he’s set a very ambitious income goal without thinking through what he’s need to do to make it happen (and being sure he was going to be willing to follow through with all that), Jerry’s problem was almost the opposite. Her focus was on all the good ideas she wanted to implement, without tying them to any measurement of what they would do for her production or her income, other than the general sense that if she did them all, she’d have more business.
So I got her to agree to break each idea down into the action steps that would be needed to bring it to fruition, and to realistically estimate the amount of time and money it would take. About halfway through the process, she began to realize she was well over 40 hours a week (with no time left over for doing any actual production), and well over her marketing budget as well.
So we started over – this time with a clear picture of what she wanted her income to be, and a clear image of how she wanted to be perceived by her clients and prospects. That alone made it easy to discard marketing ideas that didn’t support that image. We narrowed it down to about five ideas that were consistent with both her personality and the image she wanted to project in her marketplace – ideas we could also “make accountable” with expectations of what each program would produce in the way of new leads and new business.
The Lesson: There will always be more good ideas than you can possibly implement (at least at one time). Narrow it down to the ones that best fit your mission and your identity in your market, and make sure you break them down into the discrete, concrete action steps you will need to take on a daily basis if you’re going to bring them to fruition. Make the ideas accountable for producing measurable results.
Next: Part 2 --A simple, but effective process for making your plan for the next year.