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Are you ready to build a strategic plan that actually works, one that transforms chaos into clarity? Well, I'm going to tell you all about the WAVE system and what can do for your business. Strategic planning and business is so, so, so important. And so we had come up with my team and I had come up with a system called wave and I'm going to go over that with you. And it's just basically how to plan for your year. What the wave system does is it helps you completely avoid those reactive cycles in your business because you're responding instead of reacting. Because you've planned well and you've thought through everything well, you're going to be able to have a much smoother ride towards your goals in 2025. Having a structured plan with a path and a roadmap, getting your team and canoes rowing in the same direction will give you a competitive edge like you have never had before. We're going align your vision with operational execution. Here's where you want to go, here's the map to get there, and we're going to create that all today. Welcome to Special Ops podcast. I'm a. Maureen Bill. So the first one is the W that's going to be written vision. We're going to write down what we see for our future ten years from now. I want you to sit down and just journal about that. What do you want your business to be? What do you want your life to be? What do you want your married life to be? Are you married? Are you not married? Do you have children? If you have children, how old are they 10 years from now? How much time you spending with them? How many products does your business have? Are you in an office? Are you guys remote? How many team members do you have? Really? Just sit down and journal about the 10 year target that you're looking to get to. Once you've done that, kind of read through it. Does your personal life and your professional life align? Are you going to take Susie and Jimmy on a bike ride to school every morning and be at dinner every night and at every baseball game, but you're going to 10x your business year over year for the next 10 years. Those things probably don't align very well unless you're going to replace yourself as CEO. So make those two things align. Decide which things you want to sacrifice and then you live a life by design. And so once you've got your 10 years down, I want you to think through your three and five year flash forwards. That's what I like to call them. Fast forward three years from now and then five years from now. And what do you need to accomplish in that timeframe to hit that 10 year picture? So you painted a picture you got for 10 years. What milestones do you need to hit in year three? What milestones do you need to hit in year five? And just kind of bullet point those things out, right? And so if you want 10 products, obviously you're going to need to have one or two launched by the third year and five to six launch by the fifth year. So really walk through that. If you want to have a hundred team members and you only have two today, what do you, what does it look like at three years and what does it look like at five years? Who are those key hires and what are they doing for your business? Really walk through and think about all of that. Once you finish that, we're going to go ahead and move on to the commitment portion. Notice that I did not call it goals. Goals are something that we strive to do, we hope to do. Commitments are something that we absolutely always get done no matter what. So what are the commitments that you're going to make to yourself and your business this year in order to get to that 10 year picture in the future? So are you going to launch a product? Are you going to increase revenue by 10%? Are you going to hire two key executives? What are you going to do this year? Right. Journal about that, Write that down when you're done. Really look at it. Because this is going to be a no excuses game. You've got to be able to do them. That's why they're called commitment. So if you're committed to get them done, think through the resources you need, the milestones, the work it's going to take, the time allocation and if you're cool with that, go ahead and seal those up. Those are going to be your one year commitment. Next we're going to move on to A. A is called absolute focus. We as visionary entrepreneurs, particularly in the direct response and E commerce space, make the same mistake over over again. We see shiny objects everywhere. There's always something else we can be doing, someone we can be working with, some money that we're leaving on the table, which oftentimes leaves us to be dropping the ball on the things that we're trying to accomplish. So we have goals and we have commitments and we have all these things, but we're throwing wrenches at them all the time because we're trying to pick up, we're stepping over dollars to pick up pennies, basically right so we're going to talk about for a moment what you're absolutely focused on. What is your business's purpose, what is the problem it solves, what are you here to do? And write that in a sentence or two. And it should look something like we are here to help all that are willing down a path of mental, physical and emotional well being. If you're a fitness company or health company, if you're an operations company like me, perhaps it's I'm here to help entrepreneurs achieve operational excellence and high profit margins. So once you've got your absolute focus down now we can really sit down and go through the next phase, which is values driven future. Tell me how we spend so much time having our avatar of our customers created, but we never create an avatar for our employees, for the people who are our face, for the people who make decisions on our behalf, for the people who drive our businesses. Let's sit down and kind of make an avatar for them. What are the values that you find that you need that are non negotiable in the people you are with? Different roles are going to have different personality types. Customer service people should be outgoing and extroverts. Tech people are probably not so much on the extrovert side and probably not all that outgoing, but really love data and coding. While operations executive is going to be so interested in solving puzzles and really looking at next steps and problem solving and project management. So this isn't necessarily about that, this is about what is the non negotiables for you. Sit down and write the values or the traits of the top five people you've ever worked with. Were they problem solvers, did they have high integrity, were they really, really creative? Did they have an unbelievable way of communicating and you just really enjoyed working with them because of how well they communicated? What did that all look like? And so once you've got, you know, 20 to 30 of them down, sit down and take a look at them. Anything that means what the other word means. So for example, you can't have integrity and not be honest. So if honest is on the paper, go ahead and cross out honest and keep integrity. Right, because integrity means honesty. But more than that, right, once you get through what's left, Circle the five that are non negotiable for you. For me, non negotiable, proactive problem solver, so important to me, hero mentality. I dislike working with anyone who paints themself the victim we over me mentality, what's best for the team. So once you've got Your, you know, four to six, five is the sweet spot. Now we're ready to move on to the execution plan. And this is by far the most important part. Because if we did all this work and created all these different commitments but don't have a way to get them done, then it's kind of all useless, right? So the execution plan is the path in which we utilize to get those commitments done. First things first, we're going to start meeting once a week or once every other week, depending on your team size and how many commitments you have, you may be able to get away with twice a week. But if you have a larger team and things are moving quickly, you probably want to go ahead and meet weekly. What you want to do is you want to take and you want to create quarterly goals out of those commitments. Each person on your executive team, your management team, your key players, each person should have a goal that in some way relates to one of the commitments. So if you need to, let's say, launch a product, this person's goal should be X person's goal for this quarter should be product creation, R and D, sourcing sales to delivery process. And so that may be their goal. And Maybe there are 10 people that are going to be involved in this, but only one person owns it because it's their job to get it done. And you'll go through each of your commitments and you'll make sure everything you need to do in Q1 is identified for your one year commitments. And then once you have one person that owns each one, and maybe one person has three different goals, maybe they only have one, maybe there are people on the team that don't have a goal because they're assisting in so many other goals that other people own. But once you have all of those divvied out now we need to keep track of them. So you're going to get on that once a week meeting, possibly once every other week if you have a smaller team and things don't move quite so quickly. So on your meetings, we call them breakers. This is a break from working in your business to on your business. You and your key players are going to meet and you're going to talk about a couple of things. Going to be about a 90 minute meeting. First thing, you're going to review all the headlines of the week. What has everybody been up to? What has everybody been working on? This isn't a challenge session. This is just the things that you need to know that I've been working on. That helpful for customer service to Know that marketing is working on a Black Friday initiative. It's important for operations to know that. The customer service team has been getting a lot of calls because products haven't been being shipped. So there's clearly a fulfillment issue. And so this is just rapid fire. There's not a lot of conversations. Just, you know, what are we working on next? We're going to review our goals. We're going to look at all of our goals, and our goals are going to be an update of what we did this week to get further down the line and get the goal done. So perhaps if I'm launching that product, I'm getting that product created. Perhaps I completed the R and D and the R and D report is presented as part of the update for that goal. Once we get past that, we're going to go to movers. Movers section is going to be the to do list that you created that moves us from this week to next week and closer to that goal. Very similar to what a sprint is. So if we're on the call and we decide that the next step, when we've got R and D, we're good. Now it's time to source the mover will be to source the raws for the product or the product itself. So that'll be the mover for next week. So we're just going to review movers. But there shouldn't be any movers to review because they should all be done. We're only looking for things that are stopping us from getting the goal done. So, for example, if R D report, if the R and D report came back and it wasn't completed, and it wasn't completed because there wasn't enough market research out there, then we would have the mover there. We would talk about as a team why it didn't get done. And now we go to our last section, which is called signals. The movers move over to the signals list. Why do I call it the signals list? Because I don't like negative words. I don't like things like problems or issues. I have signals. This is a. This is something everybody needs to be signaled to. I need everybody to pay attention to this thing here because it could be a problem. I need everybody to pay attention to this thing here because it could turn into a problem. So there wasn't enough market research. We can talk as a team about what we do next. Is there another place to look? Should we look for a similar product or do we just decide to move forward or to not move forward together? And we are going to have everyone submit their signals prior to the call. Some things are going to get added during the call as we get updates on goals, as we get updates on movers, they're going to move over to the signals list. But for the most part, the signals list is created prior to the call. We're going to have the whole signals list right there. We're going to work through them for the rest of the meeting and we're going to end on time. I don't like to hold my meetings longer than 90 minutes. Once you get in the groove, you'll actually finish ahead of time. So that's your execution plan and that completes your wave written vision, absolute focus, values driven, future and execute. So now I'd like to just talk about what are the most common mistakes I see when working through the wave process. So number one, not setting realistic goals, deciding that with minimal resources, you're going to launch five products which are very costly. You're going to hire two people that you can't afford and you're going to be able to do all of this with very few resources available. So making sure that you're absolutely honest with yourself on time commitment, time allocation is probably one of the bigger ones. But also what are you going to need resource wise money to get this project done? Is it going to be possible? And do you have enough people on your team? Are you just going to burn them out? Make sure you're thinking through the day to day that they're already doing before expecting them to do a goal that possibly could be a full time job for three months. You need to get really, really honest with yourself and you have to ask your team for feedb. Your team knows better than anybody where their time is being spent and how their time is being spent. So just ask them, do you guys have bandwidth for this? Do you agree that you can get this done? I actually have my team sign a form saying that they have the bandwidth for it, we have the resources for it, and they are absolutely sure that they can get it done in the time period and they sign off on that. And there's something about that ownership and that responsibility that they really enjoy and, and come hell or high water, they're going to get their goal done. I'm going to share with you all in our Visionary Vault, which is our free membership, a checklist on how you can create your own wave to set you up for success. So go ahead and head to www.specialopspodcast.com, head over to our Visionary Vault, sign up and grab your free checklist today. Remember, having a strategic plan for 2025 is really going to get you to your goals. So go ahead and take the time and make it today. Make sure you avoid unrealistic or unactionable goals. Your business deserves a plan that works, so let's make it happen. See you next time.