The Blueprint for IT Services Business Success: Quick Guide to a Comprehensive 12-month Plan

0:00Welcome to IT Mastermind Talks your access to insights and experiences from thought leaders in the IT services industry and those that support the industry our podcast features not only the season professionals charting their start to exit Journey but also the key contributors who help ensure the success we delve into the diverse challenges encountered within the IT services realm encompassing both professional hurdles and personal obstacles join us be part of a growing community and engaging the conversation hosted by Ian Markram of growth hi I often get asked why businesses succeed and and other businesses fail people always want to know that one single most important reason why the fail and why they succeed the only thing I can really say after all the coaching been doing for the last nine years close to 130 clients that I've coached is if you don't have a plan you will fail that's probably the important component of why us or reason why I see people fail we have a a process we take people through and that process is quite interesting and you know I'm sharing it today for you folks to to use that process and and help you with your business when we' run this process it's really a 12month process around planning to succeed in your IT services business

1:32The first piece is really around getting the team are behind it making sure the team actually wants to do a plan the hardest thing about a strategy and a plan is people don't want to do it people don't want to Adit to the fact that their business is not going anywhere for the last four to five years maybe or they're starting out it's too daunting but you've got to put an Anor down you've got to put something down on the ground to say hey enough's enough we want to succeed and that's really important I think it's a mind shift so the first thing I always say is trying to bring the team on board making sure that the team is fully aware of what we are trying to achieve around the planning and the planning process and the strategy and I call that really the onboarding day really important in that onboarding day you probably could end up doing a survey okay a survey to talk about what's worked and what's not worked Within the business do a retrospective of the business to where you are at the moment you want to draw that Line in the Sand or is what some people will say you want to start the bridge the one side of the bridge I'll get back to that later it's really important in that survey to make sure that you ask the critical questions are are we hitting the numbers do we have great successful projects delivery and outcomes for our clients are the star or the members that work for us are the happy working for our organization the

3:05Other point is really around looking at probably what we call internally the nine levers the nine levers that make business a complete business and those nine levers you could probably look on our website and get some of that information from there to help you put that information into a form or assessment of some sorts we run an assessment for our clients when they join and we run them through that nine process once you've done that sort of team building to get on board the next thing is around we call is a Clarity day and we run that normally takes about hour to eight hours to go through this process and that process you really want to make sure that we focus on getting the few fundamental things right and the first thing we start off with is the vision and I wanted to talk a bit about that in the next video that'll follow this video is it's important is around the vision straight off that we want to talk about you know what is the plan for year one year two year three hell of important to understand you know what are we going to achieve in year one two and three and is that revenue and and profitability now if you're a business owner or leadership in the leadership team and you're listening to this video that's fantastic but it all comes down to profitability it all comes down to how much money we take away in our back pocket at the end of the day hell of important to really you know make sure the the business owners are actually getting some return on investment because what will happen if you don't is over a period of time the

4:40Fantasy of running an IT services business will start to start to dissolve and you'll end up being trained of energy and you won't be able to make this a sustainable business I've seen a plenty of times where companies have been sold for dirt sheep or virtually nothing because they have just basically collapsed with with no more energy in the leadership team or the business owners okay so it's really important to make sure that you really have an understanding around your profitability and your numbers and a lot of business owners unfortunately don't there a lot of stats out there where they talk about companies that actually not profitable small businesses to midsize businesses are actually not profitable that are business owned and led so we've got to make sure we keep that fundamental in place once you've done that year one two and three it's probably worthwhile getting you know once you put this into probably a spreadsheet or PowerPoint pack there is plenty of software out there to actually do this we recommend a certain company that that basically runs strategy software for our clients so if you would like to hear a bit more about that just ping me a link below or ask me a questions in the comment section and we'll get someone over to to send you the information about that but that strategy software is hell of important the biggest challenge is once you've done a strategy and put something in place is how do you keep yourself accountable what we've noticed in the past around spreadsheets and Powerpoints

6:14And everything else Word documents is that people forget those really quickly you need a tool that brings you back to the Tool to the strategy software to actually make sure that you're using it correctly and make sure that you're living and breathing the actual process with that software we'll talk a bit about you know the rhythms that you want to have in your business making sure that everyone's aligned in the business so once you've got that into this strategy software you know you got to look at things that what else are the big tickets the big rocks in your business and that's what you know we we we'll go through normally with our clients we do a roadmap checklist we go through what every level it takes a client or a business to get through with we have three levels and basically it's the foundation level you know the mid level and then the large level and basically the different sizes of consultancy firm so if you're a 10-man consultancy firm you're probably on the base level if you're a 30 man consultancy firm you're probably at the mid level and if you're 30 and above you're probably at the top level as we call it there are certain actions to go through that there's a lot of information on our websites go and look for the road map the Everest road map it'll help you back gain an insight into things you should do and you shouldn't do and more importantly what is the right Next Step and not to have 500 initiatives or 30 initiatives in your business okay so please make sure that you you have a look at that for the collateral the next

7:47Thing is having a company calendar what you actually doing together as a company The Joint events The Joint get togethers The Joint back to Bases if you're a remote company or or Fair remote you know if you're running company meetings the leadership teams sales meetings make sure everyone knows the rhythm of the business and a company calendar is hell of important to have that in place what we also do on the clarity day is really focus on the pre-loaded calendar trying to fee free up the leadership team from some of those meetings that they shouldn't be attending and they also making sure that they're attending the right meetings and have the right actions out of those meetings there's no point having meetings for the sake of having meetings we've all been there and we realize you're burning so much time and so much energy and your own money if you're the owner attending meetings that aren't driving value back to the business okay so make sure you you look at that pre-loaded calendar we then you know what we normally do is we talk a bit about the process around the boardroom calls okay and then we talk about the monthly check-in making sure you have those things in there as well and the quartly rocks that are going to drive so we want to make sure we understand those things in the clarity day okay and last of all we have a bit of a scorecard you can actually create your five to six kpis that you think you'll need to run your business effectively over the next one two and

9:19Three years once we done the clarity day it's a bit of a workshop mode you probably could take those actions away and then you know might be a couple of sessions after that that you actually formalize the plan itself and the strategy and how you will take your business and grow your business okay now a lot of people come to me and and they say look they want to grow the business you know 50 60% year on year and and that's quite difficult in the services environment unless you got scalability offshoring or you got a manage services environment where you can actually have a lot of that stuff that's you can scale with it's quite ult so just make sure a little bit of a point I always say is 20 to 30% of sustainable growth is normally what we're try to help our clients grow every year on year because you want to have fun while you're doing this and you want to keep on making sure that you don't burn your staff out and yourself as you go through this amazing journey with your business we we do is we try and formalize certain things when we work with our clients and something you could take away from this call of the session is really around you know having a weekly a boardroom call and you just got to really talk about that with your team your leadership team or even if it's one or two people get them together in the company and talk about the wins what issues that you've currently you know G on on the on on the actual agenda for the moment or coming up for the week what projects are

10:52On track internal and external and also more importantly keep an eye on sales I I when I do a retrospect on clients and or they fo me out of the blue or someone gives me a call and say you know we need your help I I I tend to ask you know is it sales and then and normally they do say it's sales so it's either you know sales on going well lack of hiring the people that are quality deliveries or up for sale or basically they're having a dispute with internal Partners of the company or they're not getting the Rhythm or alignment within the part the parties that run the company so just make sure that these things are part of your Rhythm that you're covering those five or six points that I've just me mentioned and making sure that you actually keep those in front of mine at all time we then talk about the you know from the weekly we talk about the check-ins you want to have a team Health survey you've got a lot of that stuff out there you can scrape with the net if you not part of our load loading growth community and those team surveys are really important to see how you know healthy you are as a team or as a company and then once again with the monthly and the weekly you go back to that strategy you go back to understanding what are the Rocks you're trying to achieve and how you're moving that needle in your business and that strategy software you'll have as is mentioned in the weekly and the monthly checkings as well okay and you retro

12:26Do a retro every time find out what's working and not working and you tweak it and you just keep on refining that strategy and that strategy software all right then the last piece we take our clients through you know when they join us is about you know the way we measure so we have quartly business reviews and if you're running this by yourself I would say you know have a 4-Hour quarterly Business Review that's different agenda to what we've just mentioned in the weeklys and monthly calls okay the the qbrs as we call them the quarterly business reviews hell of important you'll do three of those a year it depends on how big your business is but you'll probably find a 4 hours is enough if you get the right routine and right agenda set up do those religiously book them up in your company calendar and make sure they locked in so basically there's no excuses that you're too busy to not to do them because I see that all the time humans we La generally and we default back to chaos and chaos is our our worst enemy and if we do not have a structure to set us free then we'll go back to chaos and we'll miss the opportunities to 10x our organization to really make a m a fundamental shift and as business owners and leaders in our organizations we got to make sure that we're doing 10x items not 2x I'll I'll cover that next as well the next video probably once you've done the the qbrs we you you you probably want to have a board meeting straight after that

13:59And make sure they officially take things off sign any paperwork away if you need to hell of important and then the the fourth session obviously you do the three qbrs the fourth session is the annual planning session I normally tend to tell clients do that two to three months out before the new Financial year it takes you a while to think about what you got to do takes a while to understand what didn't work the year before so please do you know take the time set aside and actually get in everyone involved in this process is to see that there is a future in your business to see that things that you did wrong last year are going to be set or hopefully adjusted for the following year okay so you know make sure that you got a another you know agenda similar to the QB agenda you can have that for annual planning agenda and do a road map review against our road map make sure you got those quarterly rocks sorted out reset realign as organization keep everyone aligned and make sure sure you got the vision repurposed the revision again the vision and making sure that you really understand that vision is really important to keep that that alignment when I had a consultancy firm of 115 people what we used to do all the time as every quarter we would actually get together in a remote location and actually get the leadership team together to go through a realignment to make sure that we were still on the same page now alignment is hell of important if you're married or you got a partner you know you get

15:32Together every now and then you're probably realigning on a on a consistent basis but you don't really even talk about it in the in the in the real world of business you're always out of alignment okay so you got to take that time on a quarterly basis to spend each other time with each other quality time to realign and make sure that you guys as a team are focused on the the major nuggets the rocks that going to drive your business forward okay okay so hell of important to do that realignment and it'll help you you know everyone's going in the right direction but they're disigned and that could cause conflict and small small pebbles in your shoes end up being big issues big rocks that you can't get over as a company so please bear that in mind okay I hopefully that gives you a bit of insight in how we onboard our clients and take them through the road mapap process of of building out a business plan and and using strategy around that really enforces everything as usual you know the strategy software that we recommend is really the foundation component the platform but all those Bo blocks and pieces have got to be in place to make sure that you're actually executed and there's no point having a great plan if you don't do it and that's the hardest thing until next time thanks very much bye thanks for joining us on IT Mastermind Talks don't miss out on our next episode hit the follow button and stay updated want to be our next podcast guests contact us and share your expertise with our

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