You're listening to the “Truest Fan Podcast”—and now, here’s your host, Rob Brown.
Rob: If you are serious about getting results, if you are serious about turning your dreams and your beliefs and your priorities into action steps, you need to have a game plan.
Hello, folks. This is Rob Brown, host of the Truest Fan Podcast. Welcome to Episode No. 5, where we're going to walk through a process for turning your game plan into action steps, so you get results, so that you have impact, so you live with purpose in business and in your personal life. Let's get started. [00:55.0]
As you may recall, over the last four episodes, I’ve introduced you to what I call the “Truest Fan” effect. It's my system, my lessons and wisdom, for helping you create that purpose and that impact in your life and in your business.
We've talked about dreaming big, really shooting for the stars in everything that you do and everything you want to accomplish, because there's nothing that you cannot accomplish if you put your mind to it. We've talked about creating priorities. We've talked about creating success habits, home-run habits, things that you need to do every day to make your dreams come true.
But the other thing you need is you need a game plan. You need a way to mark out the way that you are going to run your game, the way that you are going to move from one step to the next, from one success to another. [01:55.5]
Unfortunately, as I talk with a lot of people in my personal life who I just get to know in different things that I do, or in my coaching work and I'm talking to potential clients about what they want to do with their businesses, I find that they fall into kind of one of two camps.
One, they don't have a game plan at all, or if they do, it's very shallow. It doesn't go deep. It doesn't walk them through the steps that they need to take to get the things that they really want—or, and this probably happens more often because most of the people that I talk to and work with are highly successful, their game plan is too full. They have too many plays on the plate that they're trying to do all at one time or they're not looking for ways to be able to get their whole team to work on that game plan. [02:54.8]
But one thing I know is that folks who have game plans for having success in their business, for getting to higher and higher levels of success, folks who have game plans for being better at home, being better fathers and better husbands have a game plan, it doesn't happen by accident. They have a process that they work through every single day so that they know where they're headed. They know they're on the right track.
A great example that's happening with one of my clients right now is a client who about a year ago was managing about $30 million and he set out for a big dream, a five-year ambitious goal of reaching $500 million in assets under management. It had taken him several years just to get that first roughly $30 million, but now over the course of just a little bit more than a year, he has added in additional $40 million. He has more than doubled the assets that he oversees. [04:03.5]
When you talk with him about the difference between the length of time that it took to get him up to that first 30 million and where he is now hitting over 70 million on his way to 500 million, he'll tell you it's because he has a game plan, a game plan that really takes three critical components into play.
Number one, it's that big dream that we talked about in Episode 2, really not being afraid to say, Even though I have a lot fewer assets under management than many of my peers, I'm really feeling like I'm just getting started in this investment advisory business. I'm still going to dream big. I still think I can be a $500-million, a half-a-billion-dollar business in five years. And he set that dream squarely in his mind and he shared that dream with his team so that they're all working towards that same long-term goal. [05:05.0]
The second thing that's happening is that we've turned that big dream into a one-year plan. We've said this is what we need to have happen over the course of a year. We've laid out specific activities for marketing, for client care, for teamwork that really all makes sense. We've even included in that making sure that this big goal of reaching $500 million doesn't impact the amount of time that this client wants to spend with his family.
He's being very intentional about his family. In fact, he's getting ready to have a new child, and he's putting that time into his game plan, into that one-year plan. But the most important thing that he’d tell you that he has done, he has taken that one-year plan and broken it up into a series of 12-week sprints, so each 12 weeks, we set very concrete objectives. [06:09.0]
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Listing beside those objectives, the key results that we're looking for and we create action steps and this tends to be a much smaller number of objectives and key results and activities than if we were looking at it for the full 12 months. That allows him and the members of his team to concentrate more on what it is he is trying to accomplish, and they've accomplished a lot. I'm really proud of the work that they're doing and it's because they have a game plan. [07:02.6]
As I said, too many people don't have a game plan or they look at their game plan the wrong way. They try sort of a “more is more” approach—the more stuff I can put in my game plan, the more I’ll get done, the bigger my business will grow and the bigger all the other results that I'm looking for in my personal life or in the things that I am doing as a volunteer and out in the community. More is more. More is more. The more I do, the more I’ll get. The more I do, the more I’ll get.
That's impossible. You can't do it. There's a limit to how much you can do. In fact our motto in the work that we're doing with this particular client is slowing down to speed up. We're looking for ways to break things down into those 12-week sprints that are very measurable, very actionable, very achievable, over short periods of time. That allows us to focus on what is really most important. [08:00.8]
One of the ways that I like to think about this is the way that many people do their business planning is they throw together a big 12-month plan. Maybe it's 27 pages long, full of all sorts of details. They say, This is my game plan. These are the things that I'm going to do to get to my goals or to overcome my challenges this year. They put that plan into place early in the year or in a new year of planning if they're sort of establishing a new initiative.
As I talk to folks who do that, and we go back and we look at what they've accomplished, oftentimes what we find is that they get to the end of the first 12 weeks, the end of the first quarter, and they say, I haven't accomplished a quarter of what I wanted to accomplish. I'm not on track yet for those yearlong goals, but no worries, I've got nine months to go. [09:00.0]
Then three more months later, another quarter later, they look at their goals. They track the assets that they're managing, the revenues that they're growing, the income that they're making, the time they're actually spending with their family or with causes they care about, and they go, I haven't gotten quite halfway there yet. In fact, if I really am being honest, I'm not close to halfway there, but it's okay. I still have six more months to go.
I don’t know, I don't have to tell you what can oftentimes happen at the end of the third quarter. But at the end of the year, what happens way more often than it should is they haven't gotten close to their goals because the game plan that they thought they established with that yearlong business plan was never really put into place. Because they tried to do too much all at one time, so they ended up doing very little. They kept putting things off and putting things off and saying, “I’ve got more time. I've got more time. I don't have to rush. I don't have to hurry.” [10:07.3]
That's why when I talk about creating a game plan, sure, I want to talk about the big dreams. Where do you want to be in five and 10 years with your business, with your family, with the things you're doing as you volunteer? Where do you want to be? What kind of impact would you like to have? What will things look like? Who will you be around? But then I also want to dial that back and say, Okay, what does that mean this year? What's the first step, if this is a progression of years towards where you want to go?
But then the third step, the thing that's most important is we look at—what are we going to do over the next 12 weeks? What are we going to do in this next sprint period of time, where we're going to set very concrete objectives, we're going to set very specific key results that you're trying to achieve? What are you going to do in terms of the actions? What are the actions you're going to take towards those key results and objectives? [11:05.7]
That 12-week period of time has a magical way of helping your results compound quarter after quarter after quarter, and most clients who do that when we're working together, find that they accomplished their one-year goals much faster than they thought they would, because they're able to operate under a game plan that really helps them get things done, and you can apply this to all aspects of life.
I want to encourage you. If you are thinking about your game plan, how are you going to accomplish those things that are most important to you, looking out to the long-term, looking out for the next 12 months? What are you going to do for the next 12 weeks? What does that plan look like? [11:50.8]
If you have an interest in learning more about that type of planning, shoot me an email at robb@truestfan.com. That’s “Rob”, R-O-B-B, [at] “Truest Fan” [dot] com. Just put “impact planning” in the subject line. That's “impact planning”, and I will send you a free copy of my “Impact Planning Worksheet”, which allows you to go through those three steps to create that 12-week sprint that gives you a solid game plan and a head starts, actually, maybe even an unfair advantage in getting the things done that you want to get done that will lead to you achieving your biggest dreams and your biggest goals.
Thanks for listening. That's it for this episode. I can't wait to hear from you. This is Rob Brown, signing out. Take care. [12:47.3]
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