We’ve successfully moved through the first three quarters of the year. Fall, the season of change, brings vibrantly colored leaves, smells of pumpkin spice, and the tingle of crisp, morning air. To business owners, Fall also signals the passage into Q4 – the season of planning.

As an entrepreneur, marketer, and a Capricorn to boot, I’m wired to be a planner. I suppose that’s a good thing since our business revolves around the art of planning and execution. After working with countless companies, I’ve learned that to be both enduring and agile, planning must be a seasonal occurrence – not just an annual event – where businesses make decisions by looking through a bifocal lens, at both the big picture and the smaller details.

The Big Picture

The Fall planning season is the most intensive because businesses are typically preparing for a full year. Companies, small and large, spend time thinking big and looking at all twelve months of the coming year. Here are some big picture points your business should focus on in the Fall planning season:

  1. Vision and Mission – Review the overall reason for your company’s existence. It’s your “why.” While you may have started your business in response to market demand or to monetize a skillset, identify the ultimate, intentional purpose that has evolved for your business, to which your internal and external customers can connect. Ask yourself: Why do we do what we do? What are we passionate about? Why do our customers choose to work with us over our competition? Why are we doing this work instead of something else? The answer to these questions will clarify your vision and mission statements.
  2. Values – How your company walks through the journey ahead is as critical as your mission since the values you hold internally are expressed externally. They define your culture and your brand. Values aren’t created overnight, yet when they remain at the forefront of your strategic planning and reviews, can better stay aligned with your mission. Ask yourself: What do we value as a company? How do we want to be known in the market? What makes us different? Writing a succinct culture statement and value proposition can help you answer these questions and begin to drill down into how you communicate them to internal and external audiences.
  3. Strategic Objectives – The areas you’ll want to focus on over the next year should be defined by how you want to fulfill your company’s mission and vision. These objectives typically relate to growth, including revenue, number of customers, and who is on your payroll. Ask yourself: What is our revenue goal for next year? How many customers do we need to achieve that goal? What kinds of people do we need on our team to support our customers? Then the big one: What are the three things we can do in the coming year that will have the most impact on our overall growth? The answers to these questions become your strategic objectives for the next year – the three things you’ll be focused on achieving and/or solving.
  4. Projects and KPIs – Next, drill down even deeper by developing the specific tasks you need to accomplish in the next year to achieve your top three strategic objectives. Your project list may be long as you dive into your annual planning season. That’s okay – you want to think big. Each quarter, determine which specific projects you’ll tackle, based on priority and ability to get them done. Ask yourself: For each individual objective, what do we need to do to achieve that goal? How will we measure success? The answers will guide your tactical plan for the year and define your guideposts for quarterly reviews and plans.

The Smaller Details

Now that you’ve painted the bigger picture, successful navigation through the year depends on your attention to the smaller details. To stay on course, fine-tune assumptions made during annual planning and position yourself to be responsive to market changes. To stay on course, put these recurring meetings on your strategic team’s schedule:

  1. Monthly Project Review – At the beginning of each month, review the status of the projects designated to achieve your quarterly objectives and make decisions that will keep those goals on track.
  2. Quarterly Strategic Objective Review – At the end of each quarter, meet with your strategic team (or top employees if you’re a smaller business) to review your progress around the last quarter’s objectives and refine them for the coming quarter. Your quarterly plan should prioritize the projects that must be completed over the next three months to achieve those objectives. Kick off these meetings with a review of your vision, mission, values, and KPIs to ensure that your objectives and projects are aligned with critical details while keeping the long view in mind.

By having a bifocal lens and perspective – the big picture and detailed focus – as well as recurring meetings to shift perspective, your annual plan will not be a laborious one-off event. Quarter by quarter, your company will have a clear view of big picture objectives while staying focused on the details that will make them happen.

Planners by nature and through decades of experience, the team at 5280 Accelerator helps growth-oriented companies create strategic marketing plans for success. We’d be honored to walk with you on your journey and help bring your objectives to fruition.