12-Week Years

Hello everyone and welcome to this month's edition of Building Value. Every January, thousands of people set out with big, audacious goals. As business owners, we're no different. Realistically, we often have the biggest, arguably most unrealistic goals of the bunch. Heck, business owners are nothing else if not hopelessly optimistic about their ability to bite off more than they can chew.

Now, unfortunately, after spending time on this beautiful business plan for the year, what happens? We review it in January, often with the team, and generate a lot of excitement, and then we put it in a drawer to collect dust. Now, as a previous victim of this myself, I wanted to share something that has worked very well for me personally as well as within our firm: 12-Week Years, based upon a book of the same name by Brian Moran. The idea is to break your big goals down into 12-week segments.

Now, let me tell you why I love them so much and why I feel like they've had such a huge impact for me. First, it allows you to course correct more quickly. At the end of each week and before the next, you take time to review the prior week as well as lay out your upcoming week. This allows you to effectively reset your scorecard each week, but it also allows you to see more quickly where you may be falling short and why. After all, it doesn't take more than two to three weeks of a failing score to realize something isn't working well.

Additionally, I love these mini course corrections because you can also change or update your goals more quickly as you realize that your focus or your approach to a problem isn't correct. For example, if your goal was to attain five new clients per month, and you originally set out to achieve this by sending 50 cold emails per week, but you have yet to receive any responses, it may be time to evaluate your approach to that goal. Maybe instead of 50, you need to send 500. Or maybe instead of emails, you need to make 50 cold calls instead. Regardless of the action, it allows you to complete honest self-evaluation week over week, as the results and the numbers will not lie, nor will they allow you to hide.

Another great benefit of these plans is the foresight in the planning that begins to take hold. As you begin to look ahead and prepare for the next week, you more intentionally review your calendar: what is upcoming and what may happen? And then, with that in mind, how should I adjust my game plan for this week to remain effective? As a simple example, if your goal is to reach 50 clients per week, but you will be out of the office for two days that week, you know that now, instead of your traditional 10 contacts per day, you have to increase this on a per-day average to hit your goal due to a condensed schedule. The intentionality around this helps keep us exceptionally focused and proactive. And as we all know, we're often more productive when we have less time to fit all that we need to do into a more condensed schedule.

And at the end of each 12-week period, take time to unplug, to reflect, to rebuild. What went well? What didn't? What did I think was important that perhaps truly wasn't? Or where was I distracted? Where did I lose momentum? Take the time to truly evaluate how you use your time and what, if anything, you should do differently in your next 12 weeks. What I found to be most impactful here is not just to evaluate how you use your time and on what, but how you use your time relative to the potential impact of that activity.

Again, the goal here isn't to set out with 10 to 15 medium- to high-impact goals every 12 weeks. The goal is to set out with three to five what I call needle movers, or as Tim Ferriss calls them, the one domino needed to topple all of the other dominoes. If you approach these needle movers with laser-focused efforts, using your 12-week plan to eliminate a lot of the other noise and nonsense, you will be amazed at how much you can achieve quarter over quarter, year over year.

And lastly, if there's one piece of parting guidance I can give here, get yourself an accountability partner. Perhaps it's your business partner, a peer, or a friend, equally as focused, equally as driven. But whoever it is, make sure it's someone who you know will check in with you and hold you accountable if they start to see your scores slip consistently. And if you do need one, I'm here to be that accountability partner for you. Just let me know. Thanks for joining me everyone. Until next month, keep building value. Thanks for joining me everyone. Until next month, keep building value.