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Epic Success with Dr Shannon Irvine
Annual Planning Isn't Failing Because You're Lazy with Dr. Shannon Irvine
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Foreign. Welcome to the Epic Success Podcast. I AM your host, Dr. Shannon Ervin. On the Epic Success podcast, we unpack the neuroscience of success and really help you become a hardwired CEO and also hardwire your business to scale. All right, this is what we're doing here on the Epic Success Podcast. So glad you're here. Annual planning isn't failing because you're lazy. It's failing because your brain is not designed to run on 12 month wish lists or 10 year fantasies. Every December you build the big plan and by February you're back in the firefighting mode. In this video, I'll show you the 90 day scaling system we install with clients. So business keeps growing while you work sane hours. And it's not because you're lazy or undisciplined. It's because your brain isn't built for 12 month wish lists and 10 year fantasies. In this video, I'll show you the scaling system we install with clients. Simple 90 day cycles locked on a few key metrics so your business keeps growing while you work a realistic, sane amount of hours. If we haven't met, My name is Dr. Shannon Ervin, the author of the best selling book 67 Day Year, a 20 year entrepreneur, vet, business owner and a PhD in neuroscience of behavior. I've helped build five eight figure companies, exited three at a 20x multiple, and I advise business owners with revenue north of 1.2 billion using science back scaling systems. Reality is you don't have a discipline problem and your team doesn't have a problem. There's a planning problem. You build a beautiful annual plan and then real life walks in and your brain quietly says cool. Now let's just survive the week, right? Maybe a launch flops or a key hire quits or your kid gets a cold and suddenly that beautiful plan, that annual plan just flies right out the window and back into survival mode. And then at the end of the year, you open up that annual plan just to modify what you wrote in January. And it's so frustrating. I know I had years after years of my planners being there right in front of me, stacked up and I go back and look through them and I would watch the same goal transfer from year to year to year to year. And it's not because we're not smart. It's not because we don't have what it takes. It's just that your brain hates, hates vague and distant goals. It wants clear, immediate wins. Annual plans are too abstract to feel real. So your nervous system defaults back to let's Just survive what's right in front of us. Can you have a 10 year vision? Absolutely. But trying to plan 10 years out when you can't execute 10 days in a row creates shame, not progress. And it's not your fault. The reality is you've built the business to the place where you as the founder are in the center of the business. This is something we call the founder os and we talked about that in the last two videos in the series. Like, what is a founder operating system? Why does the team and revenue and operations, all of it revolve around me? Well, annual planning, the way it's traditionally laid out is literally putting your brain in a tug of war with what it believes is possible. And when your subconscious is in a tug of war with what you want, if you just go on autopilot and do what you've always done, your subconscious will always win, will always default back to that nervous system shifting like what do I need in the moment? Because what that's what built to get you here. See, that's the crazy thing is what got. I hate the statement because it's so overused, but what got your brain here is literally going to be the thing that keeps you in prison from scaling. So to start a business or once you buy a business, to get it started, you have to grind, push. Everything falls on you, Every decision, every thought, every process, which is amazing because it gets you able to get to 100,000, 200,000, a million a year. But here's the key, that same planning, if you looked back at the things you wrote down, I bet I could tell you what it said because it said it on mine. Get my business to X number, totally unrealistic, puts the brain in a fight or flight state, do these incredible things. Now I am not saying to not dream and I'll get to that in a second. But when it comes to truly scaling your business and annual planning and 10 year visions, traditionally done, puts you in a massive tug of war with your subconscious mind that will work against you at every step of the way. And immediate gratification shows like if something's a fire, if something takes urgency, our brain is hardwired as bootstrapping founders to work on that because that feels the most important. But that one fire, that one thing is the very thing that's going to keep you in the spin cycle of the founder OS and never be able to plug in a scaled CEO operating system. So can you have a 10 year vision? Sure. But trying to plan 10 years out when you when execution in the moment just causes shame, doesn't feel like progress. So, so what do you do instead? So instead of one giant plan that you revise at the end of the year, we run repeated 90 day cycles that your brain and your business and your team can actually execute. And please don't get me wrong, because we're visionaries, we love the idea of cracking into a new journal, sitting down in December or January and thinking. For me it's praying like God, what is it that you want? I still want you to do that. Okay. I still want you to crack open that beautiful new either doc or journal, whatever your plan is, and sit down. You know, whether you're, you're sitting down and just saying this, these are my dreams, or if you're like me, where you're sitting down and you're like, okay, Lord, what do you want for me in the business for the next three to five years? And I'm going to talk about that as a step. Just dream, get excited, write it down. Be as big and bold as humanly possible, because that is your brain's priming of the pump. But if we only set goals that way, then unfortunately the subconscious part of our mind that works on systems looks around for a system to execute. It doesn't see the system is already built and then defaults to what has already been happening. Putting out fires, answering every decision, driving all the revenue, driving the day to day. And that's the only reason why that big we call it epic, audacious goal hasn't come to pass. It's not that you're not smart enough or that you don't have the strategies. There's not a system to execute it. In fact, I remember putting on my big plan that we were going to do $1 million launch, million dollar launch. Now up to that point, our highest Launch was about $400,000 and it nearly killed our team. We didn't have launch systems in place, we didn't have revenue systems in place, delivery systems in place, operational systems in place. We knew how to sell and we knew how to market. And, and by sheer effort and might, we would get to 400k, but the business would collapse in the back end. So you can see the tug of war with me saying, okay, now we want to go not to half a million, but to a million. Because I could see how to get there from one vantage point. But what I didn't have was a system that could make the execution of that launch, the revenue that came in the delivery of that product and how that operated in Our business to run efficiently and without a system, your brain panics. Well, my brain panicked too. So what did I do? In the middle of that next launch, which I was shooting for a million, you better bet your booty that I was driving my team through like pure effort, through pure push. And when things weren't moving, I would push them harder. Why was I pushing them harder? What I didn't know was missing was the system wasn't there. So every amount of effort that we all put in, literally like a funnel, would drain out the bottom of the barrel, so to speak. No human being could have efforted that to a million dollars. What I needed, what I learned about a decade ago and now teach to my scaled CEO clients is it needed a system. We call this now the scaled CEO operating system where you can scale yourself as a CEO, you can scale your team to own the day to day revenue and to own the day to day operations. And a profit scaling system so that you know exactly what where to find the people to come into your world, how to convert them, how to deliver to them, how to operate the business around them, and how to bring profit to the bottom line through key metrics and numbers. This is a system and we started to develop that system and everything started to change. So once I figured out these steps, everything started shifting and we hit our million dollar launch. So number one, I want you to set a simple three year direction. Anchor the cycles, the 90 day cycles without over planning. Here's the thing, I want you to ditch the 10 year goals and allow your brain clarity with something like this. Like in three years we want to be roughly at 4 million with about 30% profit, working about 10 hours a week as the owner, not the operator. Very, very strong. Now we get to build systems out around it. Three to five may be directional numbers to hit. Revenue, profit percentage, owner's hours, maybe one key capacity metric like clients, customers, locations. You get the idea. Here's the thing. Good enough planning is better than perfect planning. The point is to give yourself 90 day cycles of direction, not script every little step. Every 90 days we run the same simple loop. Diagnose, decide, do one constraint, one critical number, three projects, that's it. First in the diagnose, pick the constraint and the critical number. Ask one question, are we really stuck in growth or team or profit or capacity? Then pick one critical number to move this quarter. Choose one primary constraint for this quarter. Pick one critical number for that constraint. You're hearing the repetition of 1. See as visionaries we I want to give you A mental image. It's like imagine you go into the racetrack, right? And there's 10 horses lined up at the gates and you see one solitary jockey walk out onto the track, hop up into the middle horse, grab all 10 reins and then signal to the racetrack to open the gates. Visionaries, we love handling 10, 20, 30 things at once. It gives us life. But the reality is if we are doing that, we will not scale. See, doing 10 things at once was enough inertia to get us up to maybe even a half a million or a million. Pure strength, hustle and grit. But it breaks down. When you want to have a business that is self scaling, a business that only requires you to be the owner, not the operator. It breaks down. Why? Because in that 10 horse riding stage, we don't build systems that can ride the horses for us. Okay, so I want to dive into an example here of what does 111 look like for us? So maybe a sales cycle for 45 days to 21 days or owner delivery from 25 hours a week to 10 hours a week. So Kevin, one of our clients hit last year's sales in three months. Once they focused on one cycle, on shortening the cycle and tightening the dashboards. Three scaling moves, not 37. If it doesn't move the critical number in the business, it doesn't make the 90 day cycle. For that 90 day cycle, I want you to have one critical KPI number and max of three scaling projects or rocks we call in our world that move that first number. Right. Each project must have an owner, have a clear done by definition and be visible on what we call the CEO dashboard. Here's the thing. If it's not in your calendar, your team's weekly rhythm, it's not real projects. They live on dashboards, not in your head. That's a system. All right, so you're going to plug the rocks into a few different areas. Number one in into your CEO calendar. You have to have deep work time so that you can think through how to lead and guide those three things. Not do, lead and guide, not do. Then you're going to definitely need to plug those rocks into the team system who owns it and by when this is owned not by you, by. By a team member of each of those rocks who owns it, when is it due by. Right. And that is the ability for the CEO to be able to look from above the 90 day cycle and see how it's going. And then a weekly meeting agenda where all you're doing is reviewing how far those three rocks have come to create that number, that critical number that we talked about, Everybody, all horses pulling toward the same direction, creates scale. Now if your name is on who owns it and you don't have a by when and it's not in your calendar, this is the system thinking that creates chaos, but doesn't create scale. And the crazy thing is it's the thinking that got you where you are. And that's the hardest thing for us is, is if it pushed us to this place, shouldn't it push us to the next place? The reality is what I had to sadly uncover by myself. Now we say the doctor on my name stands for desperate enough to go get a PhD to figure it out is that the system that got you to a million is. It's just not what's going to get you. Because up here we didn't have a system. It was pure effort. And when we try to apply pure effort to scale, everything crumbles. We want to make sure those three things that it's in your CEO calendar, it's in the team system in a dashboard owned by somebody else and by when. And then your weekly meeting agenda isn't firefighting, it's going through each of the three talking about the critical points and what's green, yellow and red in those particular rocks or projects that you're working on. If you don't know how those work, you can check out the previous videos in the series A CEO system and team system linked below. If you want specific help with diagnosing your biggest constraint in your business, register for the free self Scaling Business Diagnostic workshop in the description below. Research shows it takes about 67 days to wire a new automatic pattern in your brain. That's why we run 67 day execution sprints and inside every 90 day cycle. Super important as we're up leveling as CEOs. So days one through seven we clarify the critical number. We break each project into weekly actions. Days 8 through 67, same core actions, same time blocks every week. No adding, no new ideas. This is the hardest part for us to train our brain with. And then day 68 to 90, we're reviewing, we're stabilizing, we're documenting and we're celebrating. Then we roll in to the next cycle which is based on our CEO dashboard. Again, if you haven't deep dove into that video, those are down below. Make sure you go watch the CEO system because it is the thing that allowed us to get past that block in our business to scale. So your nervous system, it calms down when it Sees that you're doing the same actions at the same time, in the same order for long enough. That's how you stop the launch high crash low and actually become a different CEO. That reminds me of one of our most amazing clients, Melissa Embo. So they own a H vac company that is many, many years in existence. And they were running on what I call the founder os, right? Everything revolving around them, everything circling around them. We sat down a triage, figured out what those holes were in their business, built these systems that I've been breaking down, CEO system and the team system and the scaling system. And in that first 90 day cycle they hit, I just got the message like a week ago, they hit their epic audacious goal, like the big one that they dreamed about in the first 90 day cycle. So that's where your brain really gets to go to work for you. They are now working about 10 hours a week compared to 50 hours a week when we started. They're running through a dashboard where they can see specifically which items are red. That most red area is where we created a 90 day cycle around. And they did a 67 day sprint within it and dropped their hours and their revenue spiked quite a bit. Because why? Because. Because the team weren't pulling in a whole bunch of different directions. They were able to create the system that all the team plugged into and started rowing in the same place without the energy and the effort and the muscle being them as founders. Really, really powerful. 10 hours from 50 down to 10, pretty powerful. And to have revenue increase by a good 5x in that time maybe made them believers. And now they're all in on building systems throughout and we're helping them with that. Pretty incredible when you realize that they went a decade on the founder OS and in such a short period of time, us helping them put in the scaled CEO operating system, the system for, for revenue, for delivery, for profit, for team, really enabled them to get that time, start running it like a CEO, get their time back and their nervous system calm. So they're guiding it from above, not from within. How the scaling system snaps into the CEO and the team systems. Is this your scaling system? It's a number system. It's numbers and names like three to five quarterly metrics and one critical number on a dashboard and a name next to every rock. Now your CEO system, your dashboard, it holds the three to five quarterly numbers and, and your critical number, your weekly rhythm is there and it's where you check in with them. The team system, each rock has its owner Their scorecard includes at least one metric tied to the cycle. In the weekly meeting, you're asking the question what did we do for the critical number this week? They're telling you, you're not telling them. This is what scaled CEO systems do. The same simple moves every 90 days, compounding. No more New year, new you panic planning, right? So I want you to stop pretending your brain runs on annual wish lists and give it a three year direction, a critical number and a 67 day sprint inside every 90 day cycle. You don't scale by grinding harder, you scale by running better systems and cycles. And if you want help Designing your next 90 days self scaling cycle, picking the right critical number and mapping the exact projects for your team, that's what we do inside the diagnostics. So link is below and I'll show you where your current cycles are breaking. What to fix in the next 90 days. Okay, so over the last videos in this series, we broke down the three key systems that are inside the scaled CEO operating system. Here's what I need you to know. Every 10 million, 20 million $50 million CEO, no matter the industry, has these three systems dialed in. And that is why they're able to scale. That is how they're able to be the CEO running the business from above. Some of them having 10 businesses, it's not magic or voodoo, it's systems. And specifically the scaled CEO operating system. And I broke down the CEO system. Exactly what a CEO at 10, 20 and $50 million levels do and and how they run that video is linked below. I also have the team system that we hardwire to get to 10, 20 and 30. How to get people, team members, a players to own the day to day revenue generation and the day to day operations. That's broken down in that second video around the team system. And then of course today's video all around the scaling system. How when we scale systematically and no longer go on our nervous system, brute force and caffeine to make it happen. Because to be honest with you, and I know you feel this to the core, you can't sustain another year operating that way. I couldn't a decade ago I almost broke and it led me to really unpacking what, what does CEOs high level at those 10, 20, $30 million mark. I wasn't there yet back then and it was all these three systems. That's what we break down inside the scaled CEO. That's what our clients do with us. But here's the thing. I just broke down all three systems for you in this video series. I hope it's helpful. I'll see you next time here on the Scaled CEO. Bye for now. Thanks again for listening to the Epic Success Podcast. If you loved the podcast this week, do me a favor, would you give us a five star review? And over in Instagram, please share with me in the DMs. What was it that you loved about it? How did it resonate? And I always say for podcasters, those reviews are our big warm hug. And of course, if you want to go deeper or see this on video, please follow my YouTube channel at Dr. Shannon Irvin on YouTube. I cannot wait to see you next week on the Epic Success Podcast. Bye for now.