I've asked a lot from you in the last two weeks. Following an intensive meeting with an extensively-compensated CEO - "The Consultant" - I've been handing out little work assignments, interspersed with his profundity. As he said, "Your business is five years old. You have six staff, a few hundred members, and two facilities. NOW comes the hard part." He was right.
Writing down a MISSION and VISION wasn't too hard; it just required some reflection. High-Level Goals were a bit tougher, but it helped to have a clear picture of our Markets and Products. From there, prioritizing which services were most important was a snap: those intersections between markets and products which generated the most revenue stood out clearly. Even if your Box is exclusively CrossFit, this is a worthwile exercise, since your service can be subdivided into smaller offerings (personal training, small-group coaching, big-group coaching, CFK, etc.)
It would appear that the beast is, for the most part, slain. But now comes the dissection.
Strategy is the way you're going to use your best intersections to achieve your High-End Goals. As an example, let's imagine that your High-End Goal #1 is $1,000,000 in gross revenues. Since we've used GROSS revenues for this example, we'll choose the most expensive services that meet the largest market to create the largest GROSS income (note: this may not be the same 'intersection' if your High-Level Goal is a NET-revenue number, since incremental cost may be higher for these services, like Personal Training.)
Step #1: Choose services which will generate the highest GROSS revenue.
Step #2: Working backward from your High-Level Goal ($1,000,000) identify one-year, two-year, and three-year objective targets. For instance, $250,000 GROSS in Year #1; $500,000 GROSS in year #2; $700,000 GROSS in year #3....
Step #3: Continuing to work backward, you can start to identify activities that will result in achieving these annual objective targets. Again, the act of merely writing this stuff down is incredibly helpful. Example: book six local soccer teams in Year #1. GROSS Revenue: $4200.
Step #4: When you've got each activity down to its most basic iteration, assign responsibility. Don't use names yet, use job titles. (Unless you're the only staff member.....in that case, guess whose name goes into the box?)
Step #5: timeline everything. We'll use a Gantt chart. But that's tomorrow's task. For now, here's an example of the activities we'll be doing in the next two years with Ignite!
Missing: a Facilities section. As we're still in the acquisition process for a new facility, we laid out the space and equipment needs for Ignite!, and assigned all the responsibility to me for providing them.
Had we done this work before initiating the huge Ignite program, there would have been an empty box where Tyler's name appears. The responsibilities assigned to that box would then provide a job description for a staff member.
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