I saw a Facebook post about a new bar that is having a Christmas party every Friday for the remaining 14 Fridays in 2017. The FB ad title was “14 Fridays left in the year.”
My heart sunk. My intellect went to immediately running through the financial lists: Thanksgiving, Christmas gifts, employee bonuses, year-end goals, 2018 planning and taxes. And what about all those goals I set just 37 Fridays ago at the start of January? The “new year” clearly is swan-diving into “year end.”
As entrepreneurs, we have three immediate choices of what to do with this information: ignore it and pretend it was all about Christmas parties, start cracking the whip with your team from a place of fear and panic, or pause and examine.
As no surprise, I lobby hard for pause and examine, which I call “2017 reflection.”
Here’s how this will go:
1. Block out 90 minutes: Ideally this will be with an employee/team member you trust and who knows the ins and outs of your business from a calendaring, production and workflow perspective. As your intrapreneur, they have a pulse on your average day and will be honest with you on all fronts. If you do NOT have that person in your office, hire a business coach consultant for two sessions. Trust me, they will be fully, wholly honest with you. And there’s something to having to write a check for this; your intentionality and commitment to getting to the raw core will be there like never before (because you’re paying for it).
2. Review EVERYTHING. Go back to Jan. 1 and count (literally count) how many hours you had scheduled for the following areas, then count how many you actually showed up for. Rate yourself in each area on a scale of 1-10, 10 being highest:
a. Future/growth
b. Dedicated weekly FULL Board of Directors meetings
c. Dedicated weekly production meetings
d. Dedicated weekly marketing meetings
3. Year-end sprint: Schedule a weekly one-hour meeting with your entire time (ideally Mondays or Fridays) for “year-end sprint” time. In preparation, have a pre-meeting with your key team member or coach. And get really clear on what stopped you and why you haven’t (yet) achieved what you set out to do when you were bright eyed and bushy tailed at the beginning of the year. Then get really clear on what you DO still want for your year-end sprint to goal for this year. Once you are clear it will be much easier to enroll your team in your first year-end sprint meeting.
ALL success is fully dependent upon steadfast discipline, accountability and intentionality. If you plan your work and work your plan, guess what? You will meet goal – not by luck, not by accident and not because you are really good at what you do.
I cannot tell you how many times I have received calls like, “We are screwed if we don’t bring in X amount of money in the next 30 days. I don’t know how this happened, but we need a miracle right now.”
On August 15th I received this very type of call: “We need $51,000 by end of month in the door or I can’t cover overhead and pay my people.” By August 31st we had $62,378 in the door. And those clients will never, ever go back to that panic place. They refuse too, because they are committed to living every week like “There are 14 Fridays left in the year,” even in January.
There is still time; you have 14 weeks to course correct and have absolutely everything you wanted, still want and need – but not without unwavering dedicated time. Take a few minutes now, look at your next 13 Fridays and schedule weekly 90-minute growth/future time to look at your goals and projects, and pick four of them to work on every Friday between now and the end of the year to reach goal.
And if you never set any goals to begin with, there is absolutely time for a year-end sprint and to interact with this like the two-minute warning. It ain’t over. In fact, it may have just begun for some.
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Molly Hall
