10 Agenda Items for Annual Planning
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Many companies have calendar-fiscal years. The annual meeting is a quarterly meeting on steroids – adding exercises to build team health as well as revisit the 3-year picture and 1-year plan.
Here are the essential elements of an annual meeting. Each agenda item is designed to move your team through the process:
- Check-in
- What’s Working – What’s Not Working. This is a chance for each member of the leadership team to talk about the great progress of the year – and also “get it off their chest”: describe issues. What or who is ‘pissing you off’…
- Review the Past Quarter
- Quarterly rocks done / not done?
- Did you hit your revenue and profit goals?
- Review the Year
- Goals met / not met?
- Did you hit your revenue and profit goals?
- Team Health Exercise
- Get to know each other better to strengthen the team. A healthy team can communicate issues when they see them. Problems are identified and solved more quickly.
- SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)
- Discover additional issues
- Check the Vision
- Is everyone still on the same page and in agreement?
- Create a New 3-Year Picture
- What are the revenue & profit goals 3 years from now?
- What does the organization look like?
- What is your role that year?
- Create a New 1-Year Plan
- What do you need to accomplish this year to take a step towards the 3-year Picture?
- Revenue? Profit?
- Set Quarterly Rocks
- What needs to happen in the next 90 days to make sure you accomplish your goals for the year?
- Resolve or Compartmentalize Key Issues
- All during the meeting, keep a “parking lot” list of Issues that come up.
- Decide the priority of these issues. Plan when you’ll be able to address them. (Today? This Quarter? After this quarter?)
Having the top minds of the business regularly getting together – using a structure to plan the future is the best investment you can make in your business.
