Review 2007, Forecast & Plan 2008

Hey Veronica, Happy New Year to you!

Appreciate your feedback and support ;-) Great that you're going to apply the strategies laid out in this video. Let me know how you do with it, ok?

God bless to you and yours! Cheers!

Hello Sherman,

Thank you for your altruistic thoughts and ideas. Kudos to you for your effort.

I appreciate the guidance and plan to give it a go!

Many thanks and God bless.

Happy New Year!

Veronica Silva

Phil, thanks for your feedback. I had to think about your comment that "most guys can't handle any kind of self examination". I can see that being true for some, however you may have a vantage point that I don't yet recognize to see that 'most guys' don't self-examine.

Maybe its because I'm involved with folks who are entrepreneurs, business owners, visionaries and goal-setters that I don't see outside of this lens.

Very interesting observation. If you would like to shed light on your observation, I'd be very interested to learn more about this.

Jeff, you're right! The key is constant reviews, throughout the year to monitor alignment of activities and progress to the end goals. What I've done, in addition to what I've covered in the video, is to create an Excel document that duplicates the grids in the Word document, but lists them in a way that's very organized and easy for review. Here are the column titles from left to right:

Life Area | 2008 Vision | Q1.90 | Jan | Feb | Mar | Outcome | Q2.90 | Apr | May | Jun | Outcome | Q3.90 | Jul | Aug | Sep | Outcome | Q4.90 | Oct | Nov | Dec | Outcome

And under each of the Q*.90 and Month columns, there are 1-2 Quarterly (90 day) goals, with 2 30 days action-step goals for each 90 day goal.

You can easily make sense of it by looking at it in the Excel spreadsheet, and offers convenience for planning and re-alignment if need be.

I've even color coded the individual Business Life Areas (I have approx. 20 sub-areas under 'Business') green, orange, red to signify which ones are most urgent, important, &/or profitable.

Hope this helps further to aid in your planning.

This is great stuff, Sherman. Hats off to Mom.
It's been my experience that most guys can't handle any kind of self examination. This is a super way/reason to get started.
It all goes back to that stuff about how you can't tell when you get there if you didn't have a goal/destination when you started.

Sherman,

Thanks for the great insights in this video. It's all broken down so simply. Just like I need it :). I used to start the year out with a plan, but by the second week in January I was already off the plan. Mainly because I never wrote it down. This year is going to be different. I have this nice simple form to write everything down.

I think you're right on with the reviews. Break everything down into small steps, well after you've laid out the big goals for the year. Usually I just see the big goal and think it's way to big and ambitious what was I thinking, I need to scale it down. But if I make the big goal and then scale it down to quarter goals and then even further to 2 monthly goals per quarter objective, then I've got some small, less intimidating things to measure.

Well, like I said thanks you've cleared away a lot of the fog already, can't wait to get started down the new open road of 2008.

Jeff

Hey Sheila, good morning! Thanks for your value-added feedback - appreciate you.

Will have to look into this 'One Page Strategic Plan' - would also like your feedback on the strengths of Verne's plan - maybe email or call me? Thanks ;-)

Yes, I dropped the ball on the reviews too, so I'm committing to do this in 2008 too.

Much prosperity and blessings to you and yours! Merry Christmas! (I'll share your greetings with my peeps!)

Great Stuff, another reason why you are one of my heros.

Good Saturday morning, Sherman

I heartily agree with this process. Bob and I used to book a B&B on the Sunshine Coast for our annual "Corporate Retreat." We loved the quieter pace and the beautiful views ... so much so that last year we bought a new house here!

Now I guess we'll have to go back to Vancouver for our Corporate Retreat. ;-)

I like to use big white boards and coloured markers as part of our process. And this year I'm returning to Verne Hamish's "One Page Strategic Plan" as the core document for the business planning part of the retreat. (Gazelles.com)

One thing we didn't do last year -- which I am hereby publicly committing to -- is the scheduled reviews. It takes so little time, yet the rewards are great.

Merry Christmas and a Prosperous New Year to you and Sarah and the kids!

Sheila