How to Translate Goals & Priorities into Year Planning
As we close month 1 of the year(!), I’m excited to round out our new year series with translating your long-term plan and goals, into year planning.
This is such a key thing that may seem obvious to some; but in reality, it’s where most falter. The majority of people who have big ideas take little action. Year planning is the connective tissue between having a goal and realizing it.
How Does Year Planning Relate to Strategy?
“Strategy” is one of those buzzwords that people throw around (“strategic this, strategic that…”). Yet most cannot tell you what strategy actually is. So when we’re talking about strategy in this setting, I think about the description I learned when I started my first strategy job, 13 years ago:
A good strategy has an essential logical structure that I call the kernel. The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action… Coherent actions are feasible coordinated policies, resource commitments, and actions.
–Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt
And when doing year planning, we translate the diagnosis and guiding policy into coherent actions (I love this phrase).
A well-crafted year plan helps you:
- Focus on your highest-impact activities.
- Eliminate distractions and shiny objects.
- Align yourself and others around shared objectives.
Step-by-Step Year Planning Process
Here’s a 3-day framework to translate your goals and priorities into a focused annual strategy… (PS – if you’re thinking, “More away time!?” there’s an invitation for Ellevated Outcomes to help, if you desire).
Day 1: Reflection and Goal Setting
If you’ve already refreshed your long-term plan and goals (as described in the past 2 weeks), you’ve done the bulk of this. But I suggest revisiting. Personally, I’m a woman of many drafts. So I like doing a version 1, version 2, etc, leaving room to marinate, tweak, and evolve.
1. Personal Check-In
Your personal goals and vision are just as critical as your business ones. Reflect on how your business supports the life you want to live. Consider creating a vision board or writing out your goals to clarify your intentions.
2. Revisit Vision, Mission, and Values
Reflect on your business’s mission and vision. What language resonates most with clients, employees, and partners? Identify where your company excelled in embodying its values and where it fell short. Did your business stray from its mission? And when you pause and reflect on the past year, did your business move closer or further away from its lofty vision?
3. Assess Your Current Reality
Evaluate the current state of your business. On a scale from 1-10 (no 7), how is your business doing in each of these areas?
- Client experience
- Current clients
- Marketing
- Target market
- Profitability
- Processes
- Technology
- Diversity, inclusion, & equity
- People
- Culture
- Leadership
- Product
4. Define a 3-Year Vision
Illustrate your 3-year vision. I like to write a 1-2 paragraph narrative. Here’s a prompt to do so:
On [insert specific date, 3 years from now] my business looks, feels, and performs like…
5. Review Last Year’s Goals
Compare last year’s plan to what actually happened. What worked, and what didn’t? Draw 3 columns in a piece of paper with these headings:
- (Original) goal
- What actually happened?
- So What? Lessons learned and adjustments to make for the future.
Then for each goal or plan, fill in what you accomplished and reflect on the “So what?”
Day 2: Develop the Strategy
In the terminology of Richard Rumelt, this is where we really tease out your diagnosis and guiding policies. This is the part where people start to get overwhelmed and paralyzed by what they don’t know is possible. So at the end, I’m going to use Ellevated Outcomes’ 2025 Strategy as an example for you. It’s hot off the press, as we just completed it this week!
1. Turn your 3-Year Vision into an Objective
Break down your high-level 3-year vision into 1 specific objective.
2. Work Back to a 1-Year Objective
Translate your 3-year objective(s) into a single guiding principle (objective) for the next year. Even with objectives, I like to follow the SMART goal framework: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound.
3. Choose Your Priority “Buckets”
Identify (no more than) 3 priorities that will be most impactful to reach your 1-year objective. To streamline and simplify, we typically choose from the 5 Ps in the Ellevated Outcomes Framework™: People, Product, Placement (Marketing), Process, or Profit. For each priority bucket, write a clean, clear description of “complete,” that will be your litmus test for “Did we achieve this?”
Then, within each of these buckets and definitions of success, what are the 3 specific actions to achieve them? You will have a maximum of 3 actions for each of your 3 priorities, so our final year plan will have no more than 9 clearly defined actions.
Day 3: Build Your Action Plan
The prior 2 days (and particularly day 2) are hard work. Really. So, I want to warn you upfront: when you complete day 2, you’ll be tempted to stop. And I understand; it’s right to be pooped. But I implore you to keep going. This final stage makes all the actions of your year planning feel possible. Or to the contrary, it illuminates what’s not possible so that you can simplify. That’s a good outcome too; you want to know what’s realistic upfront.
When we map everything onto a timeline for our clients (and ourselves too!), overwhelm evaporates. You can see how and when the year planning becomes reality.
1. Create a Timeline
Chart your 9 (or fewer) actions onto a timeline. Break them out, quarter by quarter and month by month.
2. Identify Resources and Dependencies
For each milestone, consider:
- What resources (time, money, people) are required? Do we have them? Do we need to get them? If outside help or money is required, do we have easy access to it?
- What are the risks and dependencies, and what’s your backup plan if something goes awry?
3. Schedule Celebrations
Plan ways to celebrate achievements throughout the year. Recognizing progress can boost morale and keep your team motivated.
Example: Ellevated Outcomes
Vision
Our 15-year vision is to be an optimal and elegant business, that’s 40 people maximum, across 3 businesses that feed and feedback-loop one another. Our Advisory Practice continues to be heart and soul of our business: 4-5 studios of 5 people each, organized by geography, industry, or business specialty. Alongside our day-to-day client intimate work, the Advisory Practice is our market research laboratory, providing R&D to our other businesses.
Our Small Business MBA teaches the curriculum from our Advisory Practice on a wider scale. It reaches people who want our education and a touch of our experience but are happy to DIY. Lastly, our Artificial Intelligence businss is both B2B and B2C, combining the data we’ve been capturing since day 1 of Ellevated Outcomes with Predictive Modeling, to help both small businesses and other strategists/coaches/consultants be more efficient in diagnosis and action.
3-Year Objective
By December 31, 2027 we have launched additional Advisory Practice Studio(s), replicating our tried, true, and tested model. And “we” isn’t the Julie. The torch of that responsibility has been passed, creating capacity for true growth – of the business and of others’ careers.
1-Year Objective
By December 31, 2025 Ellevated Outcomes’ Advisory practice is set to run and grow, independent of Julie.
Editor’s note: lest there be any confusion, I am not leaving the business, my clients, or stepping back. This objective points to me stepping “up,” to (a) focus on other growth initiatives for Ellevated Outcomes (see ambition 15-year vision, ha) and (b) create growth opportunities for our team.
Priorities & Actions
1. People: Eliminate, Streamline, or Delegate managerial & administrative duties.
- Complete BD training for team.
- Define managerial & admin duties, plan for redistribution, and action.
- Hire additional strategist (TBD).
2. Process & Technology: Remove daily friction, to create more capacity.
- Eliminate, automate, and delegate CEO & Client Experience Admin duties.
- Create Manager Dashboard with automated feeds from Strategist Scorecards.
- Prompt engineering professional development + remove client experience admin tasks from Strategists.
3. Client Experience: Increase new business by client referral to 60%.
- Bring back Client Appreciation Event (we missed it in 2024!)
- Introduce territory travel.
- Improve our ecosystem client connections through more focus in Learning Cafe.
Timeline
| Q1 | Q2 | Q3 | Q4 | |
| People | -Complete BD training for team -Define managerial & admin duties, plan for redistribution and action | Hire additional strategist (TBD) | ||
| Process & Technology | -Eliminate, automate, and delegate CEO & Client Experience Admin duties -Create Manager Dashboard with automated feeds from Strategist scorecards -Prompt engineering professional development + remove client experience admin tasks from Strategists | |||
| Client Experience | Improve our ecosystem client connection frequency | Introduce territory travel | Client Appreciation Event |
Dependencies
In our case, this means reallocating money to new hire(s) and ensuring there’s budget set aside for our event. And then from the time perspective (a really important resource to consider), my personal responsibilities to fulfill this plan are very heavy in Q1-2 so ensure that I keep things light and uneventful in my personal life for the next 6 months so that work can be my top priority.
On the dependency front, we brainstormed and came up with some creative backup plans for delegating responsibilities. We’ve also agreed that we won’t hire another Strategist unless we’ve completed the responsibility task.
The Power of Your Strategy in a Year Plan
There’s another definition of strategy that I often cite. It comes from my boss in 2013, Jim Williamson:
Strategy is the allocation of scarce resources to the highest priorities.
Contrary to popular belief, strategy is simple. Definitely not easy, but simple. It’s not a 20 pg. Powerpoint, nor is it business jargon. An elegant strategy solves an important and complex problem, with a simple guiding principle that is actionnable.
This 3-day framework is a guide for how you can do this for your own business, each and every year. But at the same time: please don’t fret or get caught in all-or-nothing thinking. Even for someone with 13 years of strategy experience, it’s taken me 7 years to iterate this process to my most idealized Ellevated Outcomes version. So just focus on adding a little more discipline and improvement, each year.
Alternatively, if you’d like a guide to lead your small business to its next level, I happen to know a great Outsourced Strategy Department ; ) Afterall, this is what we do for a living at Ellevated Outcomes. If you’re a small creative business in design, boutique retail, or high end professional/personal services and are interested in hearing what it would look like to have us lease you through this process, we’d love to see if we can help. Please note: we’re lucky to have a wait list coming into 2025, so we are accepting new clients for Q2 and beyond at the moment.
