Annual Business Goal Setting: Clockwork Program Insights - Part 2

As most of you know, September is a planning month for me. In my last blog post and newsletter I shared my process for planning the financial aspects of my business. This time I’d like to go into the other types of goals I have for my business. Again, I hope this motivates you into doing your own planning moment. I’m always looking for new and innovative ideas, so please share with me your planning process.

Many of you may remember that I went through Mike Michalowicz’s Clock Work program last year. So, the natural thing to include in my planning process is a review of where we are in the Clock Work program and set some goals for 2021 around this wonderful program.

As with all programs and incentives, when you start out everyone is on-board and ready to make the changes. It’s exciting and wonderful … and then… work starts coming at you and you revert to some old ways of doing things. That’s exactly what happened to us. I didn’t really notice it at first; however, looking back I can see we started to lose momentum in September 2019 and I didn’t really see what was happening until March for 2020. You guess it – that’s our busy season. Getting businesses ready to go through tax season is a challenging but rewarding thing.

In March, I went in and started filling in the holes in our dashboard and that’s when I knew we were straying from this very wonderful system. I struggled a little bit on how to navigate back to the path.

The path took me too – I didn’t have the right people doing the right thing at the right time. It was uncomfortable to think about. I knew that it would mean that I would need to make unpopular changes in my company. However, I persevered through the process and in July hired a Controller/Manager.

One of the first things I had her do was to read Clock Works. She came back and told me this is the book she always wanted to write herself, just didn’t have the time to do so.

So, now we are working our way back into the program. She took us all the way back to the first step –Analyze your company’s time. She’s also working on making sure the new hires understand the QBR (the Queen Bee Role) – you know that one thing that if it get’s missed the whole mission of the company is in jeopardy. Our QBR is clarity. We work hard to bring our clients clarity to their financials.

She took a through analysis of the systems we’ve captured and what still needs to be done. She now has a list of the systems still not document and has assigned them to a team member. They meet each week to determine the progress being made on their client work, their ability to protect the QBR and if their meeting their target hours.

Now I’m free to working on the next step of knowing who we serve. I’m doing an analysis of that and making sure we’ve been taking on clients that we can serve well. I’m also getting back to updating our company dashboard with pertain information and making sure we are in alignment.

I now know where I am which means I can make goals on where I want the company to be in 2021.

I share this with you to encourage you that all of us get off track once in a while; however, we can all take action to get the business back on track.

What programs are you thinking of implementing in 2021? I’d love to hear.