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- My Annual Strategic Planning Process
Hey đź‘‹ - Brandon here.
Happy Saturday to 1,778 growth-minded accountants.
Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.
Today’s issue takes less than 8 minutes to read.
Today, I’m going to show you Hall CPA’s annual strategic planning framework.
Regardless of your firm’s size, you need to go through a structured annual process of reviewing the past year’s performance to identify changes you need to make. What went well, what should you stop doing, and what should you start doing?
The result of this process is clarity, alignment, and identifying staffing needs ahead of the need.
Let’s get to it:
Members of my community, four15, received a training on this process as well as a goal setting and financial planning template. If you want access, I invite you to Apply Here. I have 10 spots remaining in the community for firm owners doing more than $1M in revenue.
Define Your 10, 3, and 1-Year Vision
First, I want you to figure out why you are doing this.
Why build an accounting firm?
Your “why” has to go beyond money. But it can be very personal and even selfish. If you want to be on the cover of Forbes magazine, write that down.
Don’t hold back, be honest with yourself.
Second, I want you to guesstimate what your 10-year revenue and profit looks like.
What will it take to get there? How does your worldview need to change? What skills to you need to develop that you don’t have today? What does your org chart look like, what talent are you missing?
Your “why” is important here. If you are merely pursuing money, you’ll burn out.
Generally, we underestimate what we can do in ten years and overestimate what we can do in one… so think BIG.
Third, dial in your 3-year vision and what it looks like. Include revenue and profit.
In order to be on track for your 10-year vision, what does your firm need to look like in three years? What competencies do you need to develop? How will the clients you serve change? Do you need to offer additional services or niches?
Fourth, it’s time to develop your next 12 month plan. Again, start with revenue and profit but build a budget and be as accurate as possible.
Do you have the marketing and sales to facilitate your desired growth? Is your team properly staffed? What technology changes do you need to make? How can you tweak your service offerings to retain more clients? What pricing changes need to be made?
After going through this exercise you should have clearly defined 10, 3, and 1-Year financial targets, you’ll know what it takes to get there, and you’ll have your “why” clearly defined.
Now, Develop Strategic Initiatives
Strategic initiatives are “themes” for the year that will align your firm.
It is very important to get these right. We spend almost half of our total strategic planning time nailing down our strategic initiatives. Further, we will clearly define what success/failure look like for each strategic initiatives we develop.
The reason we spend so much time on strategic initiatives is because it’s the foundation for goal setting.
For example, if you need to improve your systems over the next 12 months, then your strategic initiatives might be “prep to scale” and your partners would each set a goal around that initiative.
Your managers would then set goals around the partners’ goals, seniors around the managers’ etc.
This cascading goal setting has the effect of firm-wide alignment and increases the likelihood your vision is realized.
You can set strategic initiatives around marketing, sales, fulfillment, systems, hiring/onboarding, people-ops, technology… you name it.
As an example, here are past strategic initiatives we’ve used at our firm:
Prep to scale (systems, workflow, and automations focused)
Cultivate prestige (create better content and thought leadership, attend conferences, hire highly technical professionals)
Culture of accountability (develop scorecards, quarterly objectives, everyone has job clarity, underperformers have a plan to get back to where we need them)
Each of these would include a short write-up for additional context as well as definitions of success and failure.
Lastly, Create Personal Goals
Once your strategic initiatives are ironed out, it’s time to go through the goal-setting process starting at the leadership level and cascading down. All goals can be assigned bonuses or you can say you must meet x% of your goals to be bonus eligible.
This is where you gain leverage and alignment. Don’t mess this up!
All goals should help:
The person above them acheive their goal
The department achieve it’s goal
The strategic initiative be more successful
If you set a goal that doesn’t help one of those three buckets, then it’s likely a “personal development” goal, which is fine, but not something you comp on.
That's all for this Sunday. See you next week.
Cheers,
Brandon
Ready to grow your firm? Here’s how I can help:
→ Apply to join four15, the community I launched for ambitious firm owners doing $1M+ in revenue (16/30 spots filled)
→ Book a demo to get accurate salary data from B4Transparency so you can always attract top talent by paying top of market (I own a minority stake)
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