Ideas for your 2025 planning process

December is a natural time to work on plans for the coming year. People don’t have as much going on, so it’s easy to carve out a day or more to do nothing but planning. Let’s face it, a lot of employees and leaders aren’t doing much real work the closer we get to Christmas.

Planning for the new year is so important. Jim Rohn once said “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got.”

So if you want to create greater outcomes in 2025, then you need to come up with some new ideas to do things a bit different. If you just do the same things you did this past year, growing would just be by chance. (Unless you already have amazing processes in place, which some people do.)

If you haven’t already, I’d recommend you pick a day right now and get it on everybody’s calendar. If you have a small or no team, it might just be you. If that’s the case, I recommend hiring a consultant to work with you on the process, challenge your assumptions, add ideas to the mix, etc.

Then, before the meeting day, spend some time setting high-level goals. This should be done at the CEO level. Do this in advance of the planning meetings. Then send it to the rest of your team prior to the meetings, so they have time to chew on it.

This should include what you want to achieve big picture. Revenue goals, etc. Strategy review and refresh (if needed). Big rocks for the year that you know need to be included in the plan.

Ask your team to come prepared with ideas for the planning meetings. Which people and teams need to be part of this? Identify the most important functions/teams in your company. Bring those leaders in to build plans for the year. There may be separate groups representing sales, marketing, customer service, etc. Whatever the main drivers of your business are, you need to have a plan for how to improve on last year and reach the new goals.

On the day of, I like to start the day with a CEO presentation. Essentially reviewing all of the prep work with your team and facilitating an open discussion around it.

In a small company, the CEO likely will be part of the entire process the rest of the day. If you lead a larger organization, give it to your people to do the rest. And then come back at the end of the day, and have them present to you.

Each team should develop quarterly goals and metrics for the entire year. Make sure these goals and metrics, if achieved, will lead to achievement of the revenue outcome established by the CEO. Each team should have a number of projects/priorities that need to be achieved, and the major ones should be identified and agreed upon.

I like to create stretch goals. To me this represents what would happen if most of our plans are achieved. But it’s unlikely that will happen. So you want to create a baseline goal as well. Essentially this is the real goal. The goal that you would be happy with achieving. And the stretch goal is more like the goal you would ecstatic about.

Think about how you can get your people to actually care about these plans and goals. Often the only way to truly do that is to tie it to their compensation. There are many ways to do that, which I’ll leave for another time. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that your people will just naturally give a shit. Will they participate in the planning process if there is no carrot? Yes. After all, you’re telling them to do it. Will they actually really care if there is no carrot? Probably not.

Schedule a meeting for early April to review Q1 and adjust plans for the remainder of the year. Do this each quarter! This is an easy way to make your planning process impactful throughout the year. And not just something you do now and then forget about.

Remember: “What gets measured gets managed”

Hopefully this gives you some ideas to help with your planning process.

On December 18 I’m co-hosting a training on a unique process for planning your entire year on ONE sheet of paper.

If you’re interested in attending, click here for more details.

I hope 2024 treated you very well, and wishing you an even better 2025.

And thank you to all of you who wrote in with messages of congratulations, for the birth of my new baby girl Grace. All the kids and momma are doing great!

Talk to you soon,

Josh

Josh Turner

Multiple times Inc 500 + 5000, built and exited multiple businesses, WSJ Bestselling author, dad, #LetsGoBlues, big fan of planning to create better outcomes.