Effective Quarterly Planning for Your Agency

The agency space is very crowded and non matter what type of agency you own there are most likely hundreds if not thousands of competitors offering similar services.? For this reason it is incredibly important that you spend your time as intelligently as possible and one of the best ways to do this is to ensure that you maximize your output every quarter.? To do this, we recommend at EngineBI that you have a quarterly planning session with your leadership team.

Why it is important

There are several reasons that it is incredibly important to do this on a regular basis.??

Achieve Your Annual Goals:? Once a year you should set your goals for the next coming year. Once this is done, you want to ensure that your team’s time and energy throughout the year is focused on achieving these annual goals.? By taking some time off every 3 months to determine what you need to focus on for the next 90 days will put you in the best position to ensure that you achieve your goals.??

Camaraderie with Leadership Team:? When you are busy with the day to day aspects of running your agency it is difficult to find time for you to get together with your leadership team.? By committing every 3 months to planning for the next 3 months with your leadership team, you have a chance to get together and build a deeper bond with the team. Ideally, you meet in person and go out for dinner and do something fun after each planning session.

Alignment with your team and the company: This is also a great opportunity for your leadership team to agree on the prioritization of the company and where you should focus your time and energy.? It also give you the information necessary for your quarterly state of the agency meeting where you can share the focus to the entire company.

Who Should Attend

In general, we recommend that the direct reports of the CEO attend.? Ideally, there will be representation from Sales & Marketing, Operations & Finance and R&D at the meeting.? The less attendees the better since you will be able to have deeper conversations and you will get to the end result faster.? As you add more people to the meeting, you should plan on extending the times of each meeting.

Mark Your Calendars

Make sure you mark your calendars for each quarterly planning session.? There are generally 5 hours of meetings spent over the day.? So make sure that each member of the leadership team blocks out their calendar.? We additionally recommend that you have the meeting a few weeks after the quarter ends.? You want to make sure the financials from the previous quarter have been closed and that your revised forecast for the year is done.

Day of Focus

When you conduct these meetings it is really important that you have it be a day of focus.? Do the best you can to reduce all distractions including your phone, email and instant messaging.? Also, do everything you can to not schedule any other meetings during this time.? If possible, we also recommend that you do this as an off-site so that employees cannot interrupt you during the meetings.

The 4 Meetings

In order to have an effective quarterly planning session there are actually four crucial meetings that we recommend conducting.

Annual Plan Review:??

• Overview: In this meeting, you will revisit the annual goals that you set for the year and determine how you are doing against those goal and if you want to change any of them.? You should always have four goals (revenue, profit, cash and infrastructure) and each quarter you should have activity towards hitting those goals.? Each quarter there are initiatives that are focused on helping you achieve those goals.? So in this meeting you will start by reviewing how you are doing towards what you originally planned on achieving.? You will also revisit these goals since your revenue, profit, cash and infrastructure goals probably have changed since you originally planned for the year.??
• Duration: 1 Hour
• Preparation for Meeting:?

Last Quarter Deep Dive:

• Overview: In this meeting, you will do a deep dive into the last quarter.? There are four things that you will want to do in this meeting.??
• Duration: 1 Hour
• Preparation for Meeting: The main thing to prepare for this meeting is to have each member of the leadership team complete the “Last Quarterly Deep Dive” Survey.

Next Quarter Prioritization:

• Overview: In this meeting, you will prioritize your quarterly initiatives for the next quarter.? This will entail determining the four major areas you want your business to focus on for the next 90 days.? In addition, you will lock in your revenue, profit and cash goal for this quarter.
• Duration: 1.5 Hours
• Preparation: Each member of the team will complete the “Next Quarter Prioritization” Survey.? In this survey we will want each participant to develop a list of what they believe are the five most important things to focus on for the next 90 days.? This list of items becomes the starting point for the prioritization meeting.

Creating Smart Goals for Next Quarter:

• Overview: The final meeting will be to take the list of quarterly initiatives from the prioritization meeting and turn them into SMART Goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Measurable, Relevant and Time Bond).???
• Duration: 1.5 Hours
• Preparation: There is no preparation necessary for this meeting, but it must come after your prioritization meeting

In conclusion, it is imperative that you get together with your leadership team on a quarterly basis to ensure that you are achieving and improving upon your annual goals, learning from the last quarter and ensuring that you have great focus for the next 90 days.? By doing this, you will put yourself in the best position possible to grow faster while increasing your cash and profits.