Amending Processes to Plan for Growth
In the past few years, many accounting firms have been growing by leaps and bounds. Like any business, to be successful in that growth, your internal processes and strategies need to grow with the business. However, the growth of most firms usually does not extend to the marketing department. Thus requiring us to do more and become increasingly more effective with our budgets and time.
My firm has been extremely blessed with great growth in the past few years and our partner group recognized that in order to continue to grow we needed to make some internal adjustments. We needed to tighten up processes and evaluate if we have the right people in the right seats to sustain the growth and succeed. We needed to implement a business operating system.
A business operating system is a standard, firm-wide collection of business processes that include the common structure, principles and practices necessary to drive the organization. My managing partner had some exposure to Stanford’s very mature operating system and another partner had attended a talk on Gino Wickman’s Traction system. This spurred them on to check out other systems and look for one that resonated with our firm culture.
In the end, we turned to Gino Wickman’s books, Traction and Get a Grip, and his Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS). Wickman’s EOS guides an entire organization through an extensive change process. While I recognize not many firms are ready for such a change, there are some fantastic tools us marketers can leverage to run our over taxed departments at a much higher level. I highly recommend reading these books for yourself, but here is a taste of the concepts and how they can apply to your marketing department.
Wickman has six key components to evaluate that will give you and your team more focus, more growth and more enjoyment. The six components are vision, people, data, issues, process and traction.
VISION COMPONENT
Do they see what you’re are saying? When you are presenting a concept or project, make sure the individuals you are speaking with can clearly see your vision. We all know that what is in our heads can sometimes not be what comes out of our mouths. Make sure to clarify your vision with your audience and it will help ensure better decisions by everyone, stronger processes and strategies.
Get the vision for your department down on paper and share it. I know as marketers we are typically working 100 miles an hour and rarely stop to document items. Document this! Doing so will help you guide your department and firm staff to your department’s plan and process. It will help get everyone rowing in the same direction. Just think about how effective you could be if everyone was on the same page.
Answering the Eight Questions. Getting your plan on paper and clearly stating your vision can be done by answering eight simple questions and will only take two pages. You can download a copy of Wickman’s Traction Vision and Traction Organizer template by going to his website or you can make your own. The eight questions will take some real thought to answer and you might want to hold an offsite meeting with your team to work through them.
- What are your core values? (List up to 5)
- What is your core focus? (Set your purpose/cause/passion)
- What is your 10 year target?
- What is your marketing strategy? (List your 3 unique differentiators, your proven process and your guarantee to your client)
- What is your 3 year picture? What do you have to do within the next 3 years to push forward towards that 10 year target? (Set a date, revenue, profit, measurables, and make a list of about 10-12 bullets of what that all looks like)
- Now, what is your 1 year plan? What do you have to do this next year to push forward towards that 3 year plan? (Set a date, revenue, profit, measurables, make a list of up to 7 goals you will need to complete in that year, set your focus/theme, roles and responsibilities, budget, and scorecard)
- Now, what are your quarterly rocks? What are the most important priorities within the next 90 days? Breaking everything down to bite size chucks will help your department stay focused and achieve your goals.
- Finally, what are your issues? What are the obstacles standing in your way to complete your rocks or 1 year plan? Be open and honest with your team about this. The sooner you can accept you have issues, the quicker you can solve them and be more successful.
PEOPLE COMPONENT
Having the right people in the right seats. As a department leader you need to take an honest look at what positions your department needs and if the current people you have are the right people for those seats. Often, marketing departments inherit staff from other places to “make due.” Think about how much more effective your team could be if that position was staffed correctly. Think about the person that is “making due” and how unfair it is that they are not being set up for success. Chances are they are not happy or performing to their fullest due to being in the wrong seat. You need to move that person to the correct seat or let them go.
You might be the only person in your department and wearing many hats. Look at the work you are doing, where your firm needs you to go and what you might be leveraging in out of house services. After pulling all that together you could very well have a strong case to present to your boss that you need another person, either full-time or part-time.
DATA COMPONENT
Scorecard and measurables. We all know that if you want something to improve, you have to measure it. You’ve heard the saying “safety in numbers”? Well that could not be truer than for working with a bunch of accountants! Setting up a scorecard and managing your data will let you stay on the pulse of your department and not manage by assumptions, emotions or ego. Your scorecard will allow you to measure your progress and have a better sense of accomplishment and accountability. Have you ever left the office not feeling like you had accomplished anything that day and feeling very unsatisfied? Imagine having a small set of achievable tasks for the day. You have the list next to you to stay focused. At the end of the day all your tasks are crossed off the list. Wouldn’t that feel great and wouldn’t you leave happier? That’s your scorecard. Now imagine that for your whole department. Think about how that would affect your department’s overall job satisfaction and accountability. So simple, yet so effective.
ISSUES COMPONENT
Creating the issues list and issue solving track. For most, the scariest part of this process is creating the issues list. It’s time to pull your heads out of the sand and address the big issues— even the small naggy stuff. In making a list and tackling each item, you will soon see the direct power and effect to your success. You’ll have a weight lifted off of you and wonder why you didn’t do it sooner. Now, some of the issues might even make you uncomfortable. That’s okay. We have to leave our comfort zone if we want to grow and improve. It’s human nature to put off the hard decisions. As Wickman says, “your ability to succeed is in direct proportion to your ability to solve your problems.”
Create your list. It most often will end up being a living document as you progress down your path, you will find new issues that stand in your way. Add them to the list and the sooner you address them, the easier you can travel down your path.
Solving the problems is where the real progress begins. Wickman has 10 commandments to solving issues that help you work through your list. My favorite is number 7, “Thou Shalt Live with It, End It or Change It.” In life you always have three options. You can decide to live with the problem, make peace with it or stop complaining. If you can no longer live with the issue, then you need to take action. You need to end the issue or change the issue to make it not be an issue anymore. We usually know what the answer is, it’s the taking action part that is the hardest. That leads to Wickman’s number 2, “Thou Shalt Not Be a Weenie.”
PROCESS COMPONENT
Documenting your core processes and have it followed by all. How many times have we been asked to implement a tool before giving adequate thought to the process of using that tool, only to have people blame the tool for failing? For example, implementing a CRM/pipeline system without first defining your sales process and documenting how everyone will all use that tool. Then about 2 or 3 months after implementation everyone grumbles that the tool doesn’t work. Sound familiar?
Write down every process, step-by-step and implement the process before the tool. First, identify all your core processes: sales process, proposal creation process, events process, collateral/content development, training process, external communications process, client –retention, etc. Once you have them all identified and have documented them step-by-step, it is easy for everyone to follow the same process. Nothing gets missed, everything is uniform, there’s accountability, less confusion and everyone is on the same page.
TRACTION COMPONENT
Establishing your rocks. What are the most important priorities within the next 90 days? Make your list and on average you’ll have about 10 to 20 things. Next, debate and discuss the list to determine the priority of each item. You may actually narrow your list down and eliminate a few items that really don’t fit with your overall plan. Now give each item a due date and define each one so the objectives are clear. Then assign them to an owner for clear accountability. Each rock is to be owned by one, and only one, person. There might be a team of folks needed to complete it, but only one person in the end will lead and drive the rock.
Making meetings count. Wickman’s book has three different types of meetings outlined, an annual pulse meeting, a quarterly pulse meeting and a weekly “Level 10” meeting. The first annual pulse meeting is designed as a two-day offsite where you review the past year and plan for the coming year. You revisit your 10 and 3 year plans and build your one year plan for that year. There is also some great team sharing and health building done. The quarterly pulse meeting is an 8 hour offsite reviewing the past quarter and establishing the next quarter’s rocks. You will also tackle key issues and next steps in your plan. The weekly 90-minute “Level 10” meeting is where the real magic happens. You review your scorecard and rocks, do a quick 5 minute client/employee headlines (think, just the facts ma’am), 5 minutes to review your to do list and then 60 minutes digging into your issues list. This is a problem solving meeting to start eliminating the issues in your way. There is much more to the structure and execution of each of these meetings that the books walks you through, like doing a SWAT analysis in your annual meeting and tackling key issues in your quartering meetings and how to keep everyone on track in each meeting without tangents.
This is a high level overview of Gino Wickman’s book Traction. I highly recommend reading Wickman’s books for yourself. There are step-by-step instructions on how to define your vision, analyze your people, set up your individual scorecard and measureables and solve your issues. The book Get a Grip then provides a compelling story to pulling together all the concepts presented in Traction.
While this system was designed for implementation for an entire business, you can most definitely scale it to your marketing department, set an example for your firm and look like an innovative rock star.