A SIMPLE MONTHLY PRACTICE THAT CAN MAKE A MASSIVE · A SIMPLE MONTHLY PRACTICE THAT CAN MAKE A MASSIVE DIFFERENCE IN GROWING YOUR BUSINESS FASTER As a business owner and/or entrepreneur

A SIMPLE MONTHLY PRACTICE THAT CAN MAKE A MASSIVE DIFFERENCE IN GROWING YOUR BUSINESS FASTER

As a business owner and/or entrepreneur there are plenty of things you want. For example, you probably want

But finding time to work on those issues, let alone successfully achieve them month after month, is a continual challenge. Isn’t it?

So how can you turn that around? Well one of the tools we use in the WTG Coaching Club that you can use to do just that is called “The 30-Day Challenge” (or The 30-Day Sprint).

• To grow faster

• To generate more profit

• To build a business that runs well with or without you

• To become a better business leader

• To generate more leads

• To close more deals

• To fix some broken systems

• To crush your competitors

The 30 Day Challenge | 1© Bruce D. Johnson and Wired To Grow www.WiredToGrow.com

THE BACKGROUNDIn case you’re not from the technology or software development sector, the idea for a 30-day sprint comes from a project management process known as scrum/agile and it’s the way most software companies develop software these days.

Now, don’t worry, you don’t need to know the whole history of scrum. Nor, do you need to know about scrum masters, daily code builds or scrum retrospectives to take advantage of it.

All you need to know is that there’s a well-developed methodology behind this idea of operating your business on 30-day sprints (you just don’t need to know what it is to use it).

The three main drivers behind choosing to use a 30-day sprint are, from my perspective, speed, focus and excellence.

If you like learning, scrum is a great methodology to study. However, since most businesses aren’t in the software business, I’ve removed all the technology specific ideas behind a 30-day sprint and reframed them so that any business in any industry can use it.

1. How can we get more work done faster?

2. How can we make sure that we’re focused on the right activities that can drive our business forward?

3. How can we get that work done with the highest level of excellence in that time frame?

The 30 Day Challenge | 2

THE RHYTHM Now, to make this process the most effective and efficient for your business, it needs to be in alignment with your strategy and goals. In my coaching club, we organize our businesses around a specific rhythm. Using the language of racing, we develop our plans and execution around

In this way, everything is in alignment. What you do today, should be based on your weekly dash, which should be in alignment with your monthly sprint, which should be based on your 90-day race, which should be in alignment with your annual strategic plan (i.e. your marathon).

The piece that we’re discussing today, the 30-day sprint, is only one part of the whole system. Whatever actions you decide to take in your 30-day challenge should always be in alignment with your 90-day race plan and your yearly marathon.

1. Yearly Marathons

2. 90-Day Races

3. Monthly Sprints

4. Weekly Dashes

5. Daily Meetings


TOOLS YOU’LL NEEDIn order to make the planning part of your 30-day challenge work well, you’ll need a few items. Note: if you’d like some additional visual ideas for what a sprint board looks like, Google “scrum boards” and you’ll see plenty of examples. You’ll also notice that none of them look the same. In other words, there’s no one perfect kind of scrum board or process or set of categories. That said, here are the things I’d recommend that you gather for your planning day (or hour or half-day).

Sounds pretty simple. Just remember, the most powerful things in this world are simple.

1. A wall or white board – someplace you can physically keep your 30-day challenge board visible for the entirety of the challenge. It should also be easily accessible so you and your team can meet in front of it and move around. Note: It is possible that you can do this whole process on paper or electronically using a program like Trello, but nothing beats a wall or whiteboard for sprints.

2. Post it Notes® - Spend the extra money and buy the real ones. The cheap ones rarely stick as well. The regular yellow ones work fine. But you can also use different colors for different people or different projects or different parts of the same project or one color for tasks and another for outcomes (like dollar amounts). It’s up to you.

3. Title cards – for the main categories (you can start with the ones I’ve listed on page 16 of this guide)

4. Markers – pens produce lines that are too thin and hard to read at a distance (so don’t use them). White board markers are perfect. They’re wide enough and if, by chance, someone happens to write on your white board, they come right off (vs. a permanent marker). Note: this is a dumb tax lesson you don’t need to pay. Perma-nent markers are okay. Just be careful. You are forewarned!

5. Plans - your annual strategic plan and quarterly plan

6. Optional: Some people like to use masking tape (I’ll explain later)


Either at the end of the month or at the beginning of a month, you’ll want to set aside time to work on your 30-day challenge. Note: if you happen to be reading this in the middle of a month, simply extend your first 30-day sprint to the end of the next month (for example, your first sprint could be a 45-day sprint or a 38-day sprint. Or if you’re reading this early in a month, you could have a 23 or 17 day sprint as well). After that, you’ll be on the regular sprint schedule that coincides with the natural rhythm of the monthly calendar.

The first thing you’ll want to do before you start planning is to set up your 30-day sprint board. If you look at page 16 of this guide, you’ll see my recommendation that your sprint board should have four columns.

PLANNING DAY PREP

One of your goals, during your sprint, should be to move as many of the tasks from the left side of your sprint board to the right side of your 30-day sprint board. This is what allows you to see progress and speedier execution.

Note: some scrum board users like to add additional columns like, “Waiting for Approval” or “Backlog.” So feel free to make changes to the four columns. As I hope you’re hearing from me, whatever works for you, works. Don’t feel like there’s one official way to do a 30-day sprint.

1. Hopper – this is where you list all of the tasks for your sprint

2. On Deck – this is where you place all of the items from the Hopper that you’re going to work on this week (note: the word “you” refers to you and your team)

3. Doing – Any task that is in process, moves from On Deck to Doing. This will happen during your daily meeting.

4. Done – Once a task is complete, it gets moved to the fourth column and gets celebrated! Note: some people like to label this last column, “Wins.”


PLANNING DAY PROJECT(S)Once you have your board set up, bring your team together (between 3-9 people) and outline what you want to accomplish during this 30-day challenge. You can sound “smart” by telling them about scrum and software development if you’d like, but the real goal of your challenge is to speed up your execution and quality so you’re achieving better outcomes—as well as ensuring that everyone on your team is focused and working on tasks that are in alignment with your strategy and goals.

So, the first thing you’ll want to discuss is, ‘What’s the big project (or “What are the big projects”) that we need to accomplish over the next 30-days?”

Encourage your team to push themselves to dream big. You can even have different boards for different areas of your business. You could have one for sales. Another for marketing. And another for the company as a whole.

In light of that, what could you and your team do over the next 30-days that would be a challenge and would significantly move your company forward?

To help you generate some ideas, here are a few potential 30-day sprint projects.

• Launch a new product or service

• Hit a new revenue goal

• Open a new market

• Land X number of new clients/customers

• Find, install, and get a new CRM up and running

• Design and implement a new onboarding process for clients (or staff)

• Design and implement a best buyer strategy

• Fix a broken system

• Systematize an entire area of your business

• Develop a better hiring process so you’re only hiring A players

The options are plentiful. The choice is yours.

So what are the one to three key projects you want to focus on for the next 30-days? Once you make your decision, make sure everyone is clear as to what success looks like for that project (i.e. what’s the number of new clients or what’s the revenue goal).


Once everyone is in agreement with your project (or projects), it’s time to brainstorm the tasks that need to be accomplished over the next 30-days to successfully achieve your stated goal.

You don’t want to be too granular when selecting your tasks (like “Edit blog post” “Second edit review”) but you also don’t want to be too large (“Install new CRM”). This part of the process is more art than science but defining your tasks is somewhat Goldilockian where you’re trying to find “the right fit” between two extremes.

A simple “rule” (or heuristic) you might want to adapt is that a task ought to be something that can be completed by one person in less than a day and more than thirty minutes (i.e. “Not too large. Not too small. Just right.”)

For example, when I was creating this guide for you, here were some of the tasks that were in my hopper

None of those were over eight hour tasks, nor were any of them under thirty minute tasks.

So, job number one is to decide what projects/goals you’re going to focus on for the next 30-days and job number two is to get all of your task ideas for how to accomplish that on post it notes (using markers) so everyone can see them.

• Decide on title and topic

• Design cover

• Send cover directions with samples to outsourcer

• Write first draft

• Edit and make changes

• Have 3rd party review and edit

• Prepare final copy

• Send copy to outsourcer with samples

• Review and revise until happy


THE HOPPER

1. Value

2. Sequence

Now that you have a boatload of tasks on post it notes, your next step is to prioritize them. Remember, the Pareto principle is always in play (20% of what you do will drive 80% of your results).

So, how can you decide what the priority tasks should be? Well, I believe the two best measures are

In other words, out of the list of possible tasks, which ones will have the greatest value to your business? Those tasks could be strategic. They could be critical to a project. They could be directly related to revenue (or profitability). Etc.

Sequence means what needs to be done first so that other tasks that come later can be done in as timely a matter as possible. For example, when I was creating this guide for you, the first task was deciding on the title and topic, but the second was designing the cover.

Why? Because working with outsourcers on a design project almost always takes several days to complete. If I had waited until this guide was completely written and edited and then started working on the cover design, it would have elongated this project for several days (and remember, one of the goals of a 30-day sprint is to accelerate execution).

So, as you look at the tasks on your board, how should you reorder them so that the highest value and the first sequenced ideas appear toward the top?


Task 1

Task 2

Task 3

Priority Task:

Task 1

Task 2

Task 3

Priority Task:

PRIORITIZE

Note: If you have more than one project on your board, you may want to use tape horizontally so it’s easier to see the status of each part of the big project for the month. Also, some people like to arrange their boards where each person has a section (separated by tape) so that it’s easy to figure out who’s responsible for what.

Another twist on this is to either put someone’s initials on a task or use different colored dots for each person who’s responsible for a task.

Regardless, at this point, you should now have a sprint board filled with post it notes in a somewhat prioritized fashion.

Also, it’s probably worth noting that during this prioritization phase, eliminating some of the tasks in your Hooper at this point is a smart decision. Not everything will get done in the next 30-days. Nor will every task have a high enough priority level to make it worth keeping on your sprint board.

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ON DECKOnce you’ve completed the Hopper process of creating tasks and prioritizing them, the next step is for you and your team to discuss which tasks from the Hopper need to be completed (or started) this week.

This is where the sprint process begins to get really fun. The physical act of moving something that before this moment simply existed in your head or on a piece of paper somewhere, is actually quite exciting and therapeutic. It feels like real progress is being made … and it is.

Also make sure it’s clear who’s responsible for which tasks on your board because whichever tasks have their name on them, they’re now responsible for getting those tasks done this week.


DOINGFrom your now populated On Deck list, each person should have something that they’ve moved from the On Deck section to the Doing section.

At this point, your meeting can end and action can start taking place … all on day one.

Everyone is now in alignment. Everyone helped design the sprint. And everyone has something that they’re working on this week/right now to make sure your 30-day sprint is a success. How cool is that?

However, before we’re finished, there are two other meetings that are critical to the success of your 30-day challenge (note: I’m assuming you already have a weekly meeting).


1. What did you do yesterday? (DID)

2. What are you going to do today? (DO)

3. Is anything impeding your progress? (IMPEDE)

DAILY MEETINGS

Daily meetings are the secret sauce for making sprints work. Now, before you think, “I can’t add another meeting onto my already crowded schedule,” just realize that tens of thousands of companies already use daily meetings—both large and small—and they work.

You can read more about them in a blog post I wrote simply entitled, “How to Run a Daily Meeting”, but the basic idea is to meet for NO MORE than 15 minutes (10-15 is normal). A daily meeting isn’t a planning meeting or a problem-solving meeting. It’s an accountability and keep things moving forward meeting.

By reducing your cycle times from either monthly or weekly meetings to a daily meeting, you’ll meet 22+ times per month vs. just 1-4 times—and that’s the secret sauce.

No one can forget or get away from your 30-Day Challenge because they have to deal with it every day they’re at work. No escape!

So, what do you do during these daily 15 minute meetings? You simply ask everyone three questions (and everyone has to answer briefly for you to get through everyone’s response in under 15 minutes).

Note: the caps above are simply there to help you remember the three questions (DID, DO, IMPEDE).


Did:Do:

Impede:

If one of the DID tasks someone mentioned is in the Doing section of your board, it should be moved to the Done section. And if one of the DO items mentioned is currently sitting in the On Deck section, it should be moved to the Doing section. This way, every day, you should be seeing tasks move from the left side of the board to the right. Movement is critical!

Note: if during any meeting it becomes obvious that a new task needs to be added to your sprint board for this month/week, it should be added to the board as well.

Hopefully, by now, you’ve caught a vision for why using monthly 30-day sprints can be so immensely helpful for accelerating the speed of your business. Can you just imagine the kind of impact a process like this could have on your business if every 30-days you designed a sprint and then every work day you and your team discussed the progress you’re making on that 30-day challenge? It would be massive. This is why I can confidently state that you’ll accomplish more in 30-days than most will in 90.

But there’s one last step.

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1. What worked?

2. What didn’t?

3. What did we learn?

4. What could we do differently?

5. What will we do differently moving forward?

30-DAY REVIEW MEETINGSThe last part of the 30-Day Challenge process is to do an evaluation (which the military refers to as an AAR—After Action Review).

In the Wired To Grow world, we use five questions to evaluate (i.e. this is our version of the AAR).

My favorite question is the third one, “What did we learn?” Most people skip it. I think it’s the most critical.

Every day, every week, every month you and your team should be learning. This gives you and your team a chance to reflect back and discover what you learned based on what worked and what didn’t, as well as any research and reflection anyone on your team did.

It’s tempting to skip the 30-day review meeting and just jump back into planning and execution. But if you want to scale your business faster, you have to take time to evaluate. You’ll actually get where you want to go much faster by taking the time to slow down and review the past 30 days before heading out on your next 30-day sprint.

Once you get the hang of running30-day challenges, you won’t ever want to go back to the old way.

So, don’t waste any time thinking about whether to do or not do a 30-day challenge, get started on your first 30-day Challenge right away. You won’t regret it!


NEXT STEPSSince you’re now part of the Wired To Grow family, I’ll be sending you some additional information in the next few weeks, as well as my regular blog posts. All of this is free. So take advantage of it. You can find more than 10 books worth of free content for you on my website at

www.WiredToGrow.com

Also, if you want to scale your small business, make sure you keep your eyes open for announcements concerning any webinars I might be holding on becoming scalable.

And finally, if you’re leading a small business with between $500K to $5M in revenue and 2-29 employees, make sure you read about the WTG Coaching Club on my website. If you’re interested, we’ll schedule a quick 10-minute FIT call to see if I can help you scale your business or not. To find out more, go to

www.WiredToGrow.com/cc

To your accelerated success!

Bruce


On Deck (This Week’s To Do’s) Doing (To Do’s in Progress) Done (Completed Tasks)

30-DAY SPRINT BOARD

Project: Goal:

© Bruce D. Johnson and Wired To Grow www.WiredToGrow.com

Finish Date :

Hopper (All Project Tasks)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hi,

Bruce Johnson here. I’m the founder of Wired to Grow and a business growth strategist and coach.

I help business owners and entrepreneurs build more scalable and successful businesses so they grow faster, generate more profit and run well with or without them.

The tool you’ve just read is one of the tools I use in my WTG Coaching Club so that business owners like you can get more done faster.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it. But more importantly, I hope you’ll use it to generate some massive results.

To your accelerated success!

Bruce

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A SIMPLE MONTHLY PRACTICE THAT CAN MAKE A MASSIVE · A SIMPLE MONTHLY PRACTICE THAT CAN MAKE A MASSIVE DIFFERENCE IN GROWING YOUR BUSINESS FASTER As a business owner and/or entrepreneur