#64: Strategic Planning for Women-Led Companies
Here’s the truth: most strategic planning sessions are TERRIBLE.
If you’ve followed any of them, you've sat in a room where everybody looks at numbers on a whiteboard or a flip chart, all thinking differently about the process and full of thoughts that are likely not beneficial to the outcome at all.
But if we’re looking at it honestly, we as women are intuitive.
We need to feel aligned with our work, and are driven very much by the thoughts that we have about what it is we're looking to accomplish. None of which is included in any of the popular strategic planning processes that are regularly used at the multimillion-dollar mark.
Now that I'm scaling up to seven figures again myself, I've been thinking deeply about how I want to do it differently this time.
Want to know what I ended up doing? Be sure to tune in!
Check out my new free new training on www.yournextmillion.me, where several of my seven figure clients and colleagues share what they're doing in the next year to scale their businesses to the multi-million dollar mark and beyond.
Listen to the Show:
Laura (00:00):
We've all sat around in those awful strategic planning sessions that are absolutely terrible. They're so awkward. If you have sat in on any of them, you've been in a room where everybody looks at numbers on a whiteboard or a flip chart, and they're all thinking different things about themselves in this process that are likely not beneficial to the outcome at all, but strategic planning, business planning, whatever system or methodology or framework that you use, they are so painful. And as I've been growing my own team, I've been trying to think to myself, how do we make them so that they're fun and light and enjoyable. And everybody walks away empowered, encouraged, and excited. And as I am now scaling my own business to the multi seven figure Mark, I'm thinking about how to do it differently so that it does come from a place of joy and fulfillment and abundance, and has this great sense of purpose that leaves everybody in the room inspired versus de-motivated. So in this podcast episode, I'm going to share with you some of the approaches that I'm taking with my own team in scaling a business and approaching actually coming up with a business plan and in a different way, a unique way that I think is not often talked about.
(01:20):
So many entrepreneurs dream of living a life of massive impact by creating a mega successful company, but only a tiny percentage of businesses actually scale to that point. And when they do it is so often lacking the very joy and freedom that got them into entrepreneurship in the first place. So on this podcast, we speak authentically on what it actually takes to scale your business in a way that creates freedom and joy that works for you, your team, and the incredible impact that you are meant to make in the world as a visionary entrepreneur. My name is Laura Meyer, and I'm your host. I’m a serial entrepreneur wife, mom, to three. And I love talking all things business, especially digging into what it actually takes to scale joyfully to the multi-million dollar mark and beyond. Let's get started.
(02:10):
So, you know, the drill, you go in the room and everybody looks at the whiteboard or flip chart, and they all have their own ideas and stories about this process and the leader. The facilitator is trying to drag everybody along and get them rallied around these concepts that they are looking to try to get alignment around. And the whole thing is painful. I'll be the first to admit that I've been the one to facilitate some of these painful sessions. I've done them for my own company where I self-implemented some of the well-known frameworks, and I've been a participant for other companies trying to base it off of a system that was honestly built by men. Let's be honest. We, as women are intuitive, we must feel aligned with our work. And we are driven very much by the thoughts that we have about what it is that we're looking to accomplish.
(03:01):
And none of that is included in so many of the popular planning sessions and business, strategic planning processes that are regularly used once you get to that multimillion dollar mark. So now that I'm scaling up again, I've been thinking deeply about how I want to do it differently, this time. Many of you have heard my story about how I built a multi seven figure business in a way that was extremely painful, where I got to a point where I just wanted to blow everything up and walk away. And you know what, at one point I did, I ended up walking away. It was filled with hustle and struggle and just continuing to chase something that never felt aligned. I was doing what it was that I was supposed to do. I was following all the rules that people told me, great CEOs do. And the truth is I hated every second of it. So today I'm going to get really honest about why I think most strategic planning systems are broken for women and what we can do about it.
(04:02):
I've been looking through old workbooks papers, worksheets, books, trainings, trying to figure out what was it that didn't work. And when I'm looking through them, I see words like data process. That's my man voice, by the way, accountability, reports analyzers meetings, issues, proposals, errors, capacity, and they're important, but having been through so many of these sessions, they simply do not. In my opinion, reflect what makes a women owned business motivating, inspiring, or even what helps it scale as women. We are tribal creatures. We are meant to be in a collective and collaborative. The daily habits and routines and support that takes place around these objectives has to be part of what it is that you're discussing. When you are coming up with a business plan, there needs to be permission to make mistakes, to be frustrated and to learn. And if you create this pressure cooker situation that is highly masculine, that often is forgotten in the strategic planning sessions. Everybody's so concerned and worried about their performance, that they are not showing up as their most authentic and vulnerable self. And I know this because I've done all those strategic planning things in the last 15 years, I've been a paid facilitator for other people's off-sites, I've facilitated my own deem offsites.
(05:29):
I was a participant and other companies offsite, and the truth is they're always terrible and awful. And so we are on point to scale The Advance, and I'm really excited about it. And it's also creating this need for me to be really honest with myself on why I actually have never been part of one that I think worked really well. And so, again, I'm opening up these books, I'm looking at the workbooks and this is, you know, it's, I don't want to get in trouble by actually naming the processes, but it can, it's just so masculine. And the thing is that I know the truth, that this is actually not the reason why a company would succeed or fail. It's not because it has a scorecard. It's not because there's a number on a whiteboard that everybody nodded in agreement to while thinking their own thoughts and having their own beliefs about, I know that is not why a company succeeds or fails it succeeds or fails because the thoughts that the leadership team has about not only the plan, but also their daily habits that are required to support that plan.
(06:35):
And I know from experience having been surprised many times either through a business planning session or watching CEOs get blindsided or surprised that I was going to be in the room and often afterwards find out the real deal about why team members maybe weren't as onboard as I thought they were. And as I'm growing my own company and regular communication with so many of my clients, it is such a common issue. And the whole point is that the team members would have their contributions and then maybe the CEO did or didn't like it. And then there would be this friction and it never felt quite right. And I started thinking about what this annual, quarterly and daily planning exercises that I could lead my team through that is based on a shared vision and mission and have these results around target revenue. But that's all very much nice to have for people to know where the goal line is, right?
(07:37):
They need to know how to win at their job. That's the most important part of this process. People need to know how to win at their job. They need to know where the goalpost is, and they need to know that the goalpost is not changing. And it's important for the leader to make sure that that's communicated to the team. But what if business planning wasn't solely focused on the numbers, right? It's not something to replace, but to compliment the big picture dreams and visions and targets. I am of personal belief that especially when it comes to women, businesses that this is missing. So what I did with my annual planning session is that while I let my team know what the big picture vision is, I spent most of our time asking deep questions around who do we need to be? Who do we need to become?
(08:28):
What does our future self-look like? What about this makes us uncomfortable? How are we going to deal with that discomfort? Who do we need to show up as to produce this result? As I started asking some of these questions of my team, we had really authentic and honest conversations around who we actually needed to be, to produce that result, right? Because we're human beings, not human doings. If we want the business to do at a certain level, we have to first start with who we want to be. A majority of my time was not spent on the goal number. I pretty much made that decision in advance, where my majority of my time was spent on getting really honest about that future self, that we were all working towards. How do we need to think, what are the feelings and thoughts we need to choose every day to produce this result had so many wonderful conversations and some honest, vulnerable moments where I really shared that I am now building a business again. I had some fears that were coming up within me and how they may sometimes see those fears showing up and how to deal with it. And this just means that we're totally normal. It's normal to have fears. It's normal to feel uncomfortable, especially when you're growing and scaling a business.
(09:45):
And I wanted to let them know that all of that was welcome in our conversation, that they were not only welcome to let me know what they're scared of, but I would actually be really glad if they communicated that to me. And when do we want to choose fear instead of making a conscious open heart-centered choice based on love and vulnerability and not based on ego. And that's what I never liked about strategic planning sessions. I felt like they were so ego-driven you put this number up and we're all driving to this number, but why, and not only how are we going to get there, but who do we need to be? And what do we need to think and what do we need to do? What are those actions and decisions that we make every day to produce that result?
(10:28):
How are we going to take care of ourselves? When do we work out? When do we meditate? When do we prioritize self-care? How do we work? How are we going to spend our time? What's the relationship that we're going to have with ourselves every day as we work towards this goal, what are we going to do? When we wake up in the morning, when do we journal? How do we communicate with each other? What is this doing? Look like after we've chosen who we want to be, because again, we're human beings and strategic planning sessions or business planning sessions, traditionally are all so focused on the doing. And then the disappointment and sues people are frustrated. They're upset. They don't feel seen. They don't feel heard. They get defensive, sometimes blaming finger pointing, because again, that masculine strategic planning process operates from this principle that we're working towards the goal for the sake of the goal. And I fundamentally disagree with this as a woman leader, leaning into my feminine.
(11:27):
I believe that we work towards a goal because of who we get to be on the way there. We can also take our team with us and celebrate who they get to be on the way there, what they get to think, the new thoughts they get to choose the skills they get to develop what they do on a daily basis. That helps us all achieve what feels like an impossible goal.
(11:51):
It's when that feeling is aligned, the vision that it catapults us forward in our team's momentum is expedited towards reaching those goals. It was really interesting to watch this all unfold. As I tested it out, I let them know, hey, here's the scorecard, here's the metrics we're aiming towards. This is what I've based. The budget off of this is when we make decisions around what we can invest in at this time or what we need to wait on. It's all coming back to these numbers and I'm going to put them down here, because I think it's important for you to know everything that I'm dreaming about with this business. But it's really important for me to talk about the real deal when it comes to scaling, because scaling can make us very uncomfortable when we're doing it correctly, growth doesn't make us that uncomfortable. We just keep adding things onto our plate until we burnt out.
(12:46):
That's what growth is, right? And it's not that uncomfortable because we often are very comfortable just doing, doing, doing scaling makes us uncomfortable because it challenges us to be somebody new at every inflection point. I've heard a study once that businesses break at ones, threes and tens, and I've a hundred percent seen this myself, a hundred thousand, 300,000, 1 million, 3 million, 10 million and so on. And what I find is it's not that the business is breaking, but that the people in the business are required to work differently, think differently. And if they keep just doing you'll have growth for the sake of growth, but nobody in the company will be happy. Scaling creates freedom. Scaling allows us to create processes and develop teams and leaders underneath us. And it was a super powerful conversation. It was the first time I left a business planning session, feeling a little vulnerable feeling like, gosh, I hope they still see me in the same way as the leader, because I let them know what I think I might be struggling with as we continue to grow this company.
(14:03):
But in comparison to when I used to only cover the processes, the numbers, the metrics, the targets, I settled into a place of peace in this new way of strategic planning. I felt so good. And so connected to my team that intuitively I knew not only that I was on the right path, but that I had to share it with you. So those are some of the steps that I took to plan differently, to think differently and tap into what I think makes us so incredible as women leaders, if you've listened to this podcast and it resonated with you, I'd love to hear from you. I'd also love to hear how you have planned in the past and what the result was. Did you achieve your goal, but maybe you didn't like how you went about achieving it. Did you miss the goal? Was the team aligned or afterwards, did you find out the real deal? I am so curious to hear if your experience was much like mine, and if these principles may be useful to you, as you think about your next strategic planning session.
(15:06):
Hey there: before you head out, I want to let you know about a free new training I have right on a brand new website called yournextmillion.me. It's yournextmillion.me, where several of my seven figure clients and colleagues share what they're doing in the next year to scale their businesses, to the multi-million dollar mark and beyond. And I have to tell you, it is not what you think. So check it out at yournextmillion.me. And if you loved this show, will you subscribe to it and share it with a friend or just say something nice about it to someone, you know? I’d really appreciate it so much. Thanks so much for being here and I'll see you next time.
The Scale with Joy podcast dives into the mindset and strategies of scaling your company to the million dollar mark and beyond. Each week, we follow the journeys of innovators, disruptors, experts and leaders - sharing behind the scenes stories of their most challenging moments and greatest lessons learned-all while building their multi-million dollar empires.