Avodah Talk w/ Matt Walton

Strategic Planning with Purpose: Balancing Business Growth and Spiritual Insight with Matt Walton

• Matt Walton • Season 1 • Episode 2

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This podcast episode focuses on creating an integral annual strategic business plan that aligns all departments and improves growth. We discuss the importance of a detailed review from the past year, setting collaborative goals, conducting SWOT analysis, and implementing effective risk management strategies.

• Reviewing the previous year's performance and metrics 
• Defining your mission, vision, values, and principles 
• Conducting a SWOT analysis for internal and external insights 
• Planning for risks and developing contingency strategies 
• Differentiating between strategy and planning 
• Setting measurable goals and tracking KPIs 
• Budgeting based on strategic priorities 
• Involving the leadership team for buy-in 
• Regularly reviewing and adapting the plan 
• Emphasizing the cyclical nature of strategic planning


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strategic planning, business growth, SWOT analysis, KPIs, annual planning, mission vision values, budgeting, team management, leadership, business strategy

Speaker 1:

Today we're gonna jump into how to create an annual strategic business plan. I developed 10 steps in order to do that, so please tune in. What's up, guys? Matt Walton here with Avoda Talk, and I am very excited about this episode today. So, first off, it's the new year, so happy new year to everybody out there. My prayer is that you guys are already killing it, building off of the disciplines that you worked on last year and just building up that compound interest for the goals and the life that you were pursuing. I want to talk about an annual strategic plan, so these are things that are extremely important to do at the end of the year, going into the very beginning of the year, and I want to talk about why it's important, and I want to give you an outline for exactly how I do my annual strategic plan and talk about the progression of it and also talk about the growth that I've seen since I've started doing this. So let's get right into it.

Speaker 1:

I've got a question that I want to ask everybody, and that is how do you view your business? Is it simply a transactional business, where you're transacting, maybe for some goods or for a service and you're getting some money for it and then you're using that money to go live the life that you've always dreamed of living. For example, you get to travel, take vacations, do all of these things which, again, there's nothing wrong with these things but you use your business as a platform to change the world and you exercise the lay gratification, understanding that, yeah, I'm going to be able to live the life in regards to vacations and different things like that that I want to live, but I've got delayed gratification That'll come later. Right now, my main focus is using this business platform to transform this world and to change the way business is done. If that is you, then this is the right podcast for you, because I'm going to get into a bunch of strategy and a bunch of different business tactics that I've used, and I'll talk about the pros and cons of them and what has worked and what hasn't worked.

Speaker 1:

First, I want to tell you that when I started doing this was last year. Last year was actually my first year, and I've been in business for longer than that but I've never done a strategic business plan and last year, I did something called a VTO. This is something that's taken from the book Traction and it's a vision tracker organizer. No, I've never read the book Traction, but I have pulled some things from that book and the VTO was one of them. It was kind of my way into doing.

Speaker 1:

Like this strategic plan, it's something that is not very detailed. You have to go through your rocks and all of your different goals and your vision and all of that, but what I'm about to go over is going to go over much more detail and you're going to be able to get into all the different departments of your business and develop a strategy to be able to accomplish your goals. So let's get right into it. I'm thinking about the importance of doing an annual strategic business plan. There's a few things, so what I do is these are things that I start working on in December. I work on them and I work on them through January as well. So my rollout date for this annual strategic business plan is January 13th.

Speaker 1:

I do Monday morning meetings with my leadership team and right now I'm doing once-a-month leadership meetings because I meet with department heads every single week on Monday. So that's just something that has worked better for me and something that I'm trying going into 2025. This right here will get everybody together. So your goal with this is to get everybody running at the same pace. You're also going to present the vision and go over any developments within the vision and get everybody again running at the same pace. Your goal is to get everybody fired up, go over new roles, new responsibilities, make sure everybody's on the same page, bring people in, make it an inclusive conversation to talk about each individual bullet point that we're about to go over.

Speaker 1:

This is one of the most valuable things that I've added into my business, because it allows for you to take a step back, look at every department individually, develop game plans for them, look at how they're performing, figure out what worked, what didn't work, develop these SWOT analysis and then you're able to develop your game plan and how you're going to attack 2025. One of the things that it starts with is and now I want to get into the actual outline of it, which is what we see over here and I want to talk about the. There's things that I do and really there's things that I would add to it but 10 things that I really focus on when I'm developing my annual strategic business plan. And the first thing is we have to review how previous year happened, so that for me, this is 2025. So how did 2024 happen for you guys? I'm doing that. I'm reviewing all the financials. I'm reviewing every little bitty detail, all the KPIs that I'm tracking all the financial metrics when it comes to accounting, all of the goals that were the previous year goals. Again, going back to my previous year, the VTO, the Vision Tracker Organizer how did we do in comparison to that? And then you're going to develop a summary outside of that Just a brief summary and describe what worked and describe what didn't work within 2024, within the previous year. This is something that when you start looking at sales data, looking at customer feedback, you just start looking at your business as a whole. Developing this summary is a great foundation, a good launching point to where we're about to go next.

Speaker 1:

So the next thing on the list is is your MVVP? So different businesses will do will title this differently, but mine is mission, vision, value and principles. So it's what this business stands on. What is the vision? Again, this is what. When I'm going over this with my leadership team, I'm presenting the vision in order to get us all running together, running at the same pace, running on the same race, and my mission, vision, value and principles is what we can analyze everything. So, did this decision over here? Or if you had to let somebody go, or you brought somebody on, or you maybe enter a counseling session or a discipline session with somebody, are you aligning everything within your business with your mission, vision, value and principles? So that's something that's extremely important. If you don't have that, like if a new business that is getting going, you don't have to have that on day one. Don't get caught up on. Okay, I have to have this done before I can go out and start my business, before I can get rocking and rolling. I started mine, or I did mine, within the first year of my business, but it has changed since then. There's been a few changes to it since then, so just be aware of that. You're going to develop this. It's not something that I would recommend setting and forgetting, but rather review it every single year and make sure that it still aligns with where you're headed within your business.

Speaker 1:

The next thing and this is probably one of the most important things to do is develop your SWOT analysis. So, for those of you that don't know, swot analysis is strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. So one of the things to understand is you're looking internally and you're looking externally when you're doing a SWOT analysis. So your review is going to be your strengths and weaknesses and then your external review is going to be opportunities or threats. So, as an example, when looking at O and T opportunities and threats, I'm looking at like for me, I manufacture pools as one of my products out of shipping containers and one of the opportunities is Las Vegas just released these new water restriction laws, so your pools can't be over a certain square footage and mine just so happens to fit within that, so that is a great opportunity to exploit that within the market. Threats would be like the global economy, you know, or maybe some political stuff or other things as well can also go into some threats. So these are important to analyze these things because whenever you start to develop your plan, you're going to develop these contingency plans for worst case scenarios If this happened. Here's our way out. So SWOT analysis is one of the most important things that you will do when you're doing your annual strategic business plan.

Speaker 1:

The next thing is we want to plan for risks and contingencies. So again, this is something where a lot of times I'll go in and I will combine these two. I'm doing this for two businesses right now and both of them, these two things are going to be combined. So I'm going to take my opportunities and threats and I'm going to review those, as well as my strengths and weaknesses, and I'm going to see what the risks are and I'm going to develop contingency plans for those. So, again going back, these two things right here go hand in hand. But it's critical because we always, if you're entering into a partnership with somebody, or maybe you're bringing on somebody different to do like media, you always want to have an out, you always want to have a game plan of how you're going to get out, because if you don't, you're going to get trapped every single time. That was some advice that I was given years ago and that has been very valuable to me.

Speaker 1:

Next thing is and sorry if y'all see me looking down, I'm looking at my computer, but the next thing I want to get into, the next, these things, these the reason I have these dots here and this separating it kind of, because these go hand in hand. So what I wrote here was these next three are an important loop for productivity and it's important to define the differences. The strategy and plans are different. So a lot of people may view their strategy as being their plan, but those two things are dramatically different. So when you're going through, you want to make sure that you accurately define the vision, the strategy, the goals, which can also go with the strategy and sometimes can go before the strategy. And then you want to develop your plan outside of that and I'll break that down more as we progress on this. But you also want to track all your KPIs, which we're about to get into.

Speaker 1:

So first have your vision. If you don't have a vision for your business, I'm going to kind of go off of this for a little while. But if you don't have a vision, then I encourage you to get one. And I mean Habakkuk 2-3 talks about those without vision will perish. So write the vision down and make it plain so that those who read it will run. And actually Habakkuk 2 through 3 does not talk about those that will perish, but it is talk about those that write your vision down so that those that will read it will be able to run.

Speaker 1:

So it's the same thing. We want to write our vision down for our businesses so that when we're presenting things or whenever we're meeting with our department heads or with our leadership committee, we want to be able to present that vision. Every single meeting, like literally every time, I'm presenting my vision. Just about, I would say, every leader meeting, I'm presenting my vision. All the different department head meetings, I would say it's probably 50-50. There's times where I do and there's times where I don't, but there's a purpose behind all of it. Every single thing is intentional.

Speaker 1:

So I'll give you an example. When we're developing a strategy, like for one of my businesses, it would be I want to be the number one pool manufacturer in the country. Or maybe I want to be the number one customer service rating for anybody within my industry, and then here's how I'm going to accomplish these things. So, as an example, we'll go off of the number one I want to be the number one shipping container manufacturer in the country, and here's how I'm going to accomplish this. And then I detail the plan of how I'm going to accomplish this, and then that sets us up perfectly to set our goals, kpis, objectives and then get into our plan of how we're going to achieve that. So now, as we move from our strategy and we've thought about okay, I want to do this, this is how I want to be and here's how I'm going to accomplish this.

Speaker 1:

We have to move to our goals KPIs, objectives. So objectives and goals really are the same thing. It's a different word for the same exact thing. So KPIs are things that go hand in hand with all of your goals. So, in order to achieve the above meaning, in order to achieve the strategy and how you're going to accomplish that strategy, you have to define your goals and then we'll get into your plan and how you're going to accomplish those goals.

Speaker 1:

But the KPIs are ways that you're going to be able to track your goals to see how your progress is going. So like, as an example, if you send out emails, maybe what you're tracking is your subject headings and maybe you're sending out two different email blasts to a hundred people each, and the first one goes out with all caps and maybe an emoji and some exclamation points. The second one goes out with no caps, no emoji, no exclamation point and only three words rather than five words, and you just see where who's opening more and then able to analyze that data. You can even change the subject or the body inside the email to see who's opening more, who's staying on the page more who's reading more. That way, you can develop better email campaigns off of that data.

Speaker 1:

So it's important to set your KPIs and then start managing tracking your KPIs, nail down the system that you're going to track those on. So for me, it's like I track my KPIs on my CRM. All the social media ones are also tracked, and I track all my financial metrics through QuickBooks. So those are three ways that I track all of my KPIs and I'm able to review them monthly, whether that's through reports or just looking at them, and see how things are performing. So same thing with, like Google. If you're doing ads, you look at your Google dashboard and it'll tell you things like ROAS, like my return on ad spend and a number of other things. These things are so critical because when you're looking at your KPIs, you'll be able to develop your game plan and how you're going to go to the next level by your KPIs.

Speaker 1:

But if you have no KPIs, if you're just sending out email after email, I promise you you're a waste of money. It's not like you're spending money to try something of money. It's not like you're spending money to try something, learning that it doesn't work and then pivoting and trying something new, because I don't view that as a waste of money. I fully expect to spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions upon millions of dollars over the course of my business tenure over things that I have learned, things that I try didn't work. Then I'm gonna do something else or try maybe we tweak this and double down on what works. So just plan, plan to fail, plan to learn from those failures.

Speaker 1:

The next thing is and let me give you I want to go back to this real quick, but like just some examples of KPIs, just in case you've never heard of KPIs would be like open rates, like what we just talked about with emails booking rate, just talked about with emails booking rate. So I have a call center that I am starting to track how many calls. I've been tracking how many calls come in, but how many of those book into appointments, and so that gives you your booking rate, your gross profit margin, your total revenue for the year, your profit margin, profit, gross profit are different things, so make sure that you understand the difference between those things. Your RPE RPE is important return per employee and the reason why it's important is it will tell you when to scale. It's a great guide, for when do I need to bring on new people, get into a new location? When do I need to start scaling in those regards? And you're going to take top line revenue and you're going to divide it by the amount of W-2 employees that you have and that'll give you a dollar amount and the goal within my business is to be about $250,000 per employee. So $250,000 per employee If I'm around $200,000, I'm pretty happy, but if I'm $150,000, if I'm $110,000, then there's a lot of work to do. Doesn't mean I'm not happy, but there's a lot of work to do. So hopefully I'm not losing you guys, this is one of those things that really gets me excited, because we take expert ownership over every area of our business and we watch God just do miraculous things within our businesses.

Speaker 1:

The next thing is, now that we've set our goals and our objectives and we've defined our KPIs and started tracking our KPIs, then we move on to our action plan and how we're gonna achieve the specific targets that we set above. So I wrote in my notes like objectives, goals. These are specific targets. So when you see the specific target verbiage, that's what I'm referring to. But develop your action plan. So my strategy was to be number one. Here's how I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna do that through building my brand through social media, also developing, doing Google ads and getting leads that come in. And then I'm going to track all of those. I'm going to track my booking rate, conversion rate, a number of different KPIs, and then, out of all of that, I will take all that into account and then I will set my plan on how I'm going to attack each one of those things. So, as an example, if I'm trying to get my booking rate up to 35% and it's at 15%, then how am I going to do? That is my plan.

Speaker 1:

So I would go in and change my scripting, make sure that I get off the phone a little bit quicker. Basically, I would go in and review whatever the problem was or whatever the goal or whatever the department was. I would review everything and then reverse engineer it. So I would determine, after listening to some calls, that okay, we need to implement this, take these questions out of our script, and then we would try that again and we would see okay, is our grade increasing? And then maybe it has nothing to do with the script, maybe it has everything to do with our FAQ or the form that people are filling out in order to get one of my sales reps to call them. So there's all kinds of things that we need to look at when we're developing our plan, but the best way to do that is by following this strategy up here and then we can develop our plan. Outside of that, and same thing up here.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to go back up to the strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, because this right here will go in hand with this right here. Obviously, it goes hand in hand with this up here, because you're going to review that and maybe your strengths are. Excuse me, let me go to weaknesses. Maybe your weaknesses have a lot of warranty calls. This is something that can plague businesses that are in the service industry or that are building a product that has a warranty on it. I need to develop a plan. I need to identify the weakness and then develop a plan of how I'm going to alleviate that. So let's keep it moving.

Speaker 1:

Now that we've done all of that, I want to go to budget planning. This is whenever you allocate all of your financial resources or you develop a strategy to allocate all of your financial resources towards a specific target. So ensure you have a realistic budget. So I'll give you an example. If you're just now getting going, maybe you've been around for three, four, five, six years and you're unable to develop a budget, maybe for a new building or a new piece of machinery. I want you to get away from that mentality, because start developing your budgets today, even if you don't have enough money to put towards those. I would start developing those disciplines and putting them like $10, $15, 1%, 2%, 3%, and that's how you can start developing your budget. There's a strategy I can't remember the exact name for it, but it's the budgeting or, excuse me, the bucketing strategy. Develop these little buckets right. So it's like, if I have a 30% profit margin or gross profit margin, I'm going to put 15 of that towards this, five towards this, five of that towards saving. That'll leave me over 10% left over that can go towards net income.

Speaker 1:

So there's different things that we can do when we're developing our budget to ensure that we have the resources to be able to accomplish the goals that we've set forth. So I'll give you a practical example. Two of my biggest goals for 2025, actually, excuse me, three of my biggest goals is to hire somebody, get the right person, right seat, and so I have that built into my budget. To be in a new location I have that in my budget as well, that I'm working towards and then get a new piece of machinery, so for me that's a new forklift, and so I have all three of those things built into my budget and I developed a game plan of how I'm going to accomplish that. And again, that goes back to maybe I save some money here, put a certain percentage in, and it goes towards this pot right over here, and then I put deadline on that.

Speaker 1:

Here's the goal I want to by this time. I want to have this much saved this time. I want to have this much saved. I can keep going on that, but let me know if you all have any questions on that. I'll be happy to point you in a direction of some that are very valuable on that.

Speaker 1:

The next thing is you're going to meet with your team and you're going to share and you're going to get buy-in from everybody. So you're going to go over this whole entire strategic business plan and you're going to present the vision to everybody. You're going to get feedback from everybody and that's the buy-in right there when you start getting feedback. People that put their own spin on certain things maybe remind you of things that you didn't consider. That's the goal with that. The next thing is we want to review and adapt. These are important. We want to review this regularly. So, for me again, I meet with my leadership team once a month, but I meet with my whole team once a quarter and this is when I will review these things. I'll review the KPIs that were set in place, all the goals, the plans, and we'll track it. We'll see how we're going in comparison to our goals that we set forth. I hope that makes sense.

Speaker 1:

This is one of the best things that I would recommend going into a new year that you can do Now. You may be like me. I am waiting until January 1st to get my full 2024 statements from my accountant, but you can go ahead and strategize without that. So I have my bookkeeper print everything off that's up to date, currently through the end of the year, knowing that there could still be a few things that need to be tweaked. But that's easy for me to go in and as long as I am planning appropriately and I keep a detailed plan of all of my notes, then I can go in and just easily plug and play with the new numbers to where I don't have to redo everything and start from scratch on all that. So don't let you from doing this because, again, this is one of the most valuable things that you will do with your team going into a new year.

Speaker 1:

Two other things that I have to add to this, because these could technically be number 11 and 12, but they aren't a part of this. For me, they're not something that I present to my team during this annual strategic business plan. It's the SOP, so it's standard operating procedures for each department, and one of my game plans this year is to sit down with each department and develop an SOP for each department. That is something that I have started to do. It's specifically for my operations and I will go to the next level on that this year develop those SOPs with that for different departments. I will include to the next level on that this year develop those SOPs with that For different departments. I will include how-tos or show the system from point A to Z, and that will be what I hand new. They come on board to make sure that they have all the necessary resources to be able to thrive and succeed.

Speaker 1:

Next thing is you gotta have your systems. So if you don't outline your systems for me, I put that all on Google. I would love to get away from Google that's coming down the road but I want to outline all of my systems and let me back up. The reason why I want to move away from Google is because there's like 3,000 documents that I have on Google and it's all going to be kept in one place. I'm going to develop a software that will keep everything in one place, to where I can do all of that. It'll be where I do my CRM. It'll be where I track all of my goals, all of my people's goals. Whenever I roll out a dream center this year, that will be a hub for everything. It'll have a chat portal in it. So that's coming, but for now, there's nothing wrong with using Google and that's what I use.

Speaker 1:

So, detail all of your systems. I go onto Google Sheets and I detail each department and I list out every single system that's affiliated with those departments. I give that to each department. I have them write all of their systems down, because what you will find when you're doing this is that everybody has their own systems within the systems, and you have to get away from that. That is not sustainable for growth, and so the goal is to sit down with them, see what systems that they do as a part of the company system needs to be added to the company system, because what they're doing may be missing from your system. And just listen to your people. They know you're not the one doing what they're doing, so listen to your people and adjust it accordingly. That's basically it and these things are.

Speaker 1:

This is like most exciting for me, developing these plans, because it gives me a not only a 50,000 foot overview of where my business is at, but a face-to-face overview of exactly where I'm at, what I need to improve upon and the plan of how I'm going to improve upon that. It does something psychologically to where you just get rocking and rolling. I promise you, whenever you get into all this, if you're like me, you'll have a hard time peeling away from it because it's just so fascinating you start to look it's like. I'll give you some other information about my businesses. Over the course of the last year, by the grace of God, I have seen over 100% increase in total revenue and I have seen an increase in just about everything. Some things have fallen off in which I've developed my strategy and my plan in order to get those up, and things are already being worked on to get those up. But for the most part, literally time to get those up. But for the most part, literally everything is trending up and it's extremely exciting to see that. And the only way that you will see that is whenever you're analyzing everything.

Speaker 1:

If you are one of those that relies on somebody else to do this for you, that's a problem. If you are relying on your accountant to do this for you, that's a problem. If you're relying on your COO to do these, that's a problem. If you're relying on somebody else to do these things, that is a problem, not always right. You'll get to a point to where you can hand this off and you can delegate this out and teach somebody how to do these things, and they're reporting directly to you.

Speaker 1:

I'm not there. I'm working to get there, but I'm far away from that. And I love it, man, because business to me is my calling and I believe that it is your calling as well. And how awesome is that man. God has called us to partner with him in business and to advance his kingdom. We have a unique opportunity to change the culture, to change the way business is done and to change the whole atmosphere within the United States and abroad. If we would just start taking ownership over everything within our business so that we can continue to bring people on and we can continue to pour Christ into them. You know, for me it's like I know a lot of people that are running away from having employees and for me I'm like running to that, like as many as I can have, makes the most sense financially and within my business. I want, because that's impact right there. That's how we make an impact, that's how we change the culture. So we change cities, states, states, countries is by bringing the church to the marketplace, by not shying away from the things that are required in order to lead our people, and that includes accountability, that includes discipline from time to time.

Speaker 1:

But what you will notice is if you find yourself constantly having to discipline people or hold somebody accountable, there's a good chance that that's your problem and you need to cause. It was my problem. I have no problem talking about like for the first, I don't know. I would say year and a half or so. I would point the finger directly at me because I hadn't learned some of this stuff yet and now that I am like I am a student of business, I can't get my hands on enough literature, can't get my hands on enough websites, can't get my hand on enough scripture.

Speaker 1:

That provides the foundation for the next level of where we're going Because, again, god's called us. God's called us to do this. He's called you to excellence and just like Colossians 3, 23 through 24 talks about, we do everything as if we're doing it unto the Lord. So that is the purpose of these we do these things as if we're doing it to the Lord. You are called to partner with God on everything that you do, whether that's business or your family or buying a car or going on a vacation. Bring God in on everything.

Speaker 1:

Quick story I asked the Lord over. I shut my shop down over the Christmas break for eight days and I asked the Lord about going on vacation and he was very adamant or very clear on no, and so I didn't listen and I went ahead and scheduled a vacation. But what did God do? Thwarted that from happening? The people. It was through Airbnb. The people did not reach back out. And then I recognized right that I had went against what God had said, and so I pulled back my offer and I quickly learned why I got there and I actually was able to spend roughly about 30 hours over those eight days with the Lord in quiet time in the morning studying scripture, and I got a revelation of who God is and who really is within scripture. I'm still far away from truly understanding exactly what that means or having a full picture of what that means. I don't know that I ever will until I get to heaven, but it was one of the most beautiful things because I was able just to focus on God and really pour into God and the result man, he poured into me and it was just. It was beautiful.

Speaker 1:

So don't wait for breaks to do those things. Do those things daily. I have worked into my schedule to have four to five hours or, excuse me, four to four and a half hours every single day for time with Lord or reading, whatever you name it, and it starts with time blocking, so I'm kind of trailing a little bit. I'll get into those things later, but I really hope that this helps you. If it does, I would love to hear some feedback on it. I would love to hear how it's helped you grow. And last thing well, actually I already shared the data Again. Going from last year to this year, I was able to see over 100% growth and was able to look at everything tangibly and see what needs to happen going forward. Hopefully this helps you guys. God bless you and we'll talk to you soon.