How To Go From Idea To Plan

TRANSCRIPT AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED [00:00:00] Hey, Hey, well, read that interesting time of year where we're about to roll into Q4. Well, you still have a full quarter left, right? There is still loads of time to do stuff. In 2023. But our brains are slowly starting to shift gear and suddenly we're thinking about 20, 20 full. I need, especially if you've had a really tough 20, 23, which I think a lot of people have felt like it has been a hard year. The idea of like the calendar flipping over and it being a fresh start can be really, really appealing. And I'm seeing this show up in. An abundance of new ideas that people are talking to me about. Maybe it's having come back from some holidays, refreshed and reinvigorated. Maybe it's the lower of that fresh start in 20, 24 calling out to us. But this seems to be a time of year when ideas bubble up. And as entrepreneurs, we are prone to having a lot of ideas. And we are also prone to chasing squirrels. And staring down shiny objects when maybe we should be concentrating on some other things. So, what I want to chat to you about today is how do we actually go from idea to plan? Because it's overwhelmed to be like, these are the 40 exciting things I could be doing in 2024. The reality is. There are some of them that you shouldn't even be doing. They were going to be some of them that are a great idea, but all you're maybe not ready for. There are some that aren't going to make financial sense. And there were some that might be your next big thing. So we really have to find a way to move from the idea to the plan. In a really simple strategic thought out way since we're going to talk about today. So what I mean, when I say planning for that idea is I don't necessarily mean having a full project plan for that idea set up in, click up or a sauna or anything like that. I want you to be able to think about an idea and evaluate whether it should even go into your planning process for 2024. And here's how [00:02:00] we're not going to do that evaluation. We are not going to do that evaluation based on how excited we are about the idea. Based on how cool the idea is based on somebody else doing the idea. And when not going to base it on. How much revenue we think we can make. Now how much revenue we think we can make should definitely be coming into the equation. But it's not the whole equation. And that is one of the biggest planning mistakes I see. As I see people getting super excited by how much money they could potentially make orphan idea. And our planning process becomes, I want to make this much money. And I can solve this widget. For a dollar. So if I sell a billion of them, I can make a billion dollars. We cannot simply have a revenue number as our plan. We also can't have a revenue number, be the deciding factor for what ideas we work on and what ideas we park for later. I want you to think, think about any idea that you have for next year. I don't care. I don't care if it's the most outrageous idea in the world. I just want you to have something in your brain. As I talk through this. I want you to work your way systematically through the business. So you had your idea. Great. Now I want you to put your sales hat on. And I want you to ask yourself, does that price make sense? Could I really move that many of that service? How many calls am I going to need to have to do that? What else am I selling at the same time that I need to think about? Do I need to stack a launches? If I'm selling this, do I need to deprioritize something else? So really want you to think about all the things you can think of around selling this new offer service product. Okay. Now we're still selling the same thing. Now I want you to move into marketing and I want you to think about. The campaign side of things, how much traffic do you need? How many leads do you need to be able to sell that thing? If you're focused on generating those leads, what happens to the leads for the other things that you sell? What are you de prioritizing? Now these two areas [00:04:00] you're probably pretty comfortable with because often that's how we do planning. We go, I want to make this much revenue. So my price points is this match. So I want to make a million. My price point is a thousand, so I need to sell a thousand units. Okay. Now I'll stop talking about sales to sell a thousand units. At a thousand bucks, I need to do a webinar. I need this many people on the webinar, so I need this many people to opt in and I need this many people to see the page. And so I need to. I put it in front of this much of my audience. We're used to this piece of planning. But that's only one part of your business. You now have to think. If I want to make a million dollars and I need to sell a thousand things at a thousand dollars. You need to be thinking through the rest of your business. You need to think. Do I have capacity to deliver that? It's all very well selling a thousand things, but if you can only deliver 50. That's a lot of wasted effort upfront and a lot of angry customers. So, what is your capacity look like? And what does you creating that capacity for this new idea, dues, your capacity in other areas, right? Because often what you see new exciting thing. We put all our focus on it. We start to drop a few balls and maybe our core business areas. Those clients get a bit unhappy. Now, suddenly we're in a world of pain. Cause our nice. A solid baseline revenue starts to vanish. Okay. Then I want you to think about it from a cashflow and a cost perspective. So in order to reach the thousand people, all we going to have to run ads. Do we have a budget for ads? Have we ever run ads before? How much is it going to cost us? When is it gonna cost us? Is it gonna cost us now for ads? And we're only going to see the benefit in three months time. Do we have the cashflow for that? Is there some development phase? Is there a beta phase where costs are going out? And you're only getting paid a really small amount by the people taking part. And then we want to think about what is the impact on your team. And. You have to think bigger than this particular idea. So. You bring in this particular [00:06:00] idea? What are you potentially moving from being the focus and the priority? To like being second place or being put on a back-burner. Who's pet project is that. Who's been working their butt off for six months on the project that you're now de prioritizing. What is that going to do for morale? All you completely changing the direction of the business. All you shutting things down to facilitate this new idea. And what is that doing for the security that your team feels. All your team's skilled enough to deliver. The new idea. Do they need training? Do they need development? So, can you see how interconnected all these parts of your business are? So it's not about having an idea and deciding this is just a really cool, fun idea. That's what you do at the very beginning. Cause you can just work. 40 hour days until it happens. When you have a bigger business. And a team. And other offers in other products in the work. Everything is so interconnected. And moving one of these leavers. Is going to create a ripple of change through the other departments. So it doesn't mean that the idea isn't a great one. But your business might not be set up for it. So what that might look like is saying, this is a really big idea. I think it could be super profitable. I think we know how to market it. But we don't have capacity for it. So we have to put that on the backbone a while we solve the capacity problem. Or it could be, I've had this amazing new idea. But we already launch once a quarter for our core revenue. And we don't know how successful this will be. So. We need to do some more market research before we put that core revenue in jeopardy. So, what we've really done is look at is there a return on the investment or are we going to actually make revenue and profit underlined profit? On this idea. Okay. And then we've also looked at, is it feasible? Can we actually do it not can we sell it? Not can we convince other people that this is a great idea. But can we deliver on that promise? So we've looked [00:08:00] at, is it going to make an impact? If it's going to make enough of an impact, then we go, okay, is it feasible? Can we actually deliver it? And if we can deliver it. Then we can move on to a third. Hurdle or bar that we want to jump. Which is what's the risk associated with doing that idea? So if it's really close to a competitor's idea, Is there a risk that. That competitor might come off to you. If it's a completely new idea, is there a risk that you might've miscalculated the capacity? You can't predict everything, but actually logically thinking through what is the risk and then weighing that against the reward that you've calculated in impact. So the risk could be. Around capacity. The risks could be that you are wrong on the revenue. The risk could be something external. So we've gone. Is it going to make enough of an impact to warrant being on the plan? Can we actually deliver it? And then is it worth the risk? So remember what we're trying to do is evaluate ideas to put into. Our 20, 24 planning process, not our plan, our planning process, because you might have 10 ideas, and you're probably not going to be able to do all of them and definitely not going to be able to do all of them at once. And that's what your planning processes for. So we're looking at, I've got this great idea. But 20, 24. And you can do this. Like every time you have the great idea. You can. Write it down, get it out of your head. So you never going to lose it. And then you can do the mini evaluation. Does it make, is there a good return on the side? Yeah. And we want that returned to be, yes, we want it to make revenue, but really we want it to be profitable. Then we want to say, can I actually deliver this. Do we have capacity? Do we have the financing that we need? Will our team be okay. So finally we want to say does the risk match the reward? Is it worth taking that risk? So while you're in this phase, while you're still working on Q4, I don't want you to take your foot off the gas. I don't want you to stop looking at your goal for the end of Q4, but as you're naturally having [00:10:00] ideas for your business at this time of year. I want you to have somewhere where you're capturing them. So you're not worried about losing them. And then be able to do this quick evaluation that says, what is the impact of this idea? Like how much profit could I potentially make? Then you want to say, can we actually do it? Do I have, do we have capacity in our operations? All we set up to deliver this, can our people handle it? Do we have the cashflow that we need for the setup phase of it? And finally, we want to say, what is the risk associated with it? And does that match the reward? And If it jumps all those hurdles, we're going to put them into the 20, 24 planning process. And for the rest of them, if there are no, you can just delete them. Or this doesn't work right now. Keep it in your ideas book in your parking lot in your spreadsheet and your air table base, wherever you're tracking all of your great ideas. That you can come back and revisit them when things have changed. So the key here is it's not about planning for the idea it's deciding whether or not the idea goes into your planning process to start with. not, if you've been around for a while, you know, that planning is a hundred percent my jam. This time of year is like my Superbowl. So we've looked at our ideas and we're evaluating them in preparation for our planning process. To help you keep this momentum going. I'm going to give you a question each day on a different element of planning. And what these are designed to do is really just get like the gears turning. To help you refine and develop your ideas, but also to start to think about other aspects of your planning process for 2024. So those will be dropping here on coffee and converse one every day. And they'll all be available for 24 hours each. So you get a little planning nugget every day for 30 days that we can sort of build on so that our plan for 2024 gets off to a really well-prepared start. So I'll see you Sunday. 1st of October at 8:00 AM. UK time with the first question. Until then remember idea. Does it give me a return. Can we actually do it? And [00:12:00] finally, is it worth the risk?