Episode Transcript

What’s up? What’s up? What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to THE a.m guys. Welcome back to five minute rants. I’m your host, Michael Abernathy. And welcome back to the show predicated on the journey of life and business, I hope you’re doing well hope life is treating you guys good. I, today, I actually want to talk about something that Andrew and I learned a lot later on in our business journey. I want to talk about strategy I want to talk about it’s important, but I really kind of want to talk about how to actually create a strategy or plan from a high level about how you’re going to accomplish your objectives.

I think it’s really important because oftentimes, we get lost in the work. And really quick, I’m going to back up, there are two types of work primarily in terms of execution, one, there’s grinding, actually doing the actual work. And then there’s planning, right, you actually have to plan out why you’re going to do What you’re doing, what’s the purpose of What you’re doing, how you’re going to accomplish it, and then how it actually feeds into the overall plan and vision and objective.

And we didn’t learn how to create a strategy, we didn’t even know about those two types of work, Andrew and I were both just very, like, cool, we’re gonna work hard. And so we did we work stupid, hard for a lot of things. But there wasn’t a oftentimes a plan driving it we did a lot of short term work driven by short term work, did a lot of reactionary work, but we weren’t driven by something longer and greater, then within a couple of months to a year out. And so I want to talk about a strategy and how to build one.

So there are five steps to really creating a strategy or a plan. First, you have to have an objective, you got to know What you want to accomplish. Second step is What I call the intelligence step, or the information stage. Third is planning, you’re actually going to create a plan of how you’re going to get to your objective, how you’re going to accomplish it. Four is communication, you actually have to be able to communicate this to your team and to your people, if they are part of this. And then five is execution, you actually have to do the work. If you don’t do the work, the plan is not going to accomplish itself, the strategy is not going to work at all. And you’ll be in the same place you are today in the next six months to a year. So I’m going to walk through these real quick step by step because I think they’re very important.

So first objective. So you have to define What winning looks like you have to define the objective, What you’re trying to accomplish. Six months from now, a year from now, five years from now you have to define that objective. What does it look like? What does it look like when you have accomplished the thing you’ve set out to do? And you’ve got to write that down. And that’s step one. And then step two, is you actually have to go into this intelligence phase, which is, Let me gather all the information about where I’m currently at What we call What we tend internally to call the starting line, my starting point. Let me gather all the intelligence about that. Where am I at? What is What am I bad at What needs work? What am I currently doing well, and What is positive and then What is just okay, and neutral? What are my obstacles, and you have to draft all of that out, you’ve also got to draft out, Hey, this is What winning looks like in a really drilled down into find that in detail like, this is What is going to happen, this will be able to be accomplished. This will have finished we’ll have a team of this and all these pieces. And you’ll drill down and plan all excuse me list all of those items out in the intelligence phase, you’re going to list out all your resources, What do you actually have available to you? The intelligence is step two, intelligence and getting actual information is going to be your biggest step. Right.

And then step three, after you got all your information and everything you need to know, you’re going to plan it out. So you’re going to break down everything for how it looks, okay, I’m going to build a company awesome. Here’s all the offerings I need to build. Here’s the products that we’re going to serve. Here’s our target audience and customer here is our this, Here’s the marketing, Here’s this, Here’s every piece that we need to work, work on. And then after that, after you take the after you’ve actually built the plan and drafted everything out and you’ve gone from a high level to a mid level, to a very technical level, you’re going to communicate this to your team, it has to be written out and it has to be communicated with people that are actually going to be executing the work. If you have a team. If it’s just you cool, you’re done. You don’t you go straight on Step five, which is actually do What you’re planned out to do. Okay? If it’s not step five, and you got a team of people, you got to communicate to them. So everything’s got to be listed out and drafted out to communicate. And so

after you’re done communicating, you actually got to get down to do the work in every plan. And every strategy should have a measure in there like measurement in there of how you’re going to assess that you’ve accomplished each piece. And that in that way it actually allows you to create a list of work that needs to be done and you’ll have a finish line for the work. And then after everything’s said and done, you’ll watch yourself accomplish the objective.

Anyways guys, I’m out of time. And so I’ll catch y’all later. Peace.