January 1 is too late to begin the annual preparation for your business.

Studying the habits of elite military and sports organizations you will see a theme of early and relentless preparation; a willingness to bypass the chaos of the moment and all of the random fire-stopping that comes with it, and instead electing to focus time and energy preparing for what is coming.

In business, we have a poor habit of future preparation and instead give ourselves to chaotic duct-taping and a strategy of “crossing that bridge when we come to it”. 

You can do it differently and reap the benefit of early preparation with the satisfaction of long-term predictability.  

What you plant today will be harvested 3, 6, 9, and 12 months from today.  If you plant chaos today, chaos is the rotten fruit that will be gathered on the ground.  If you plant repetition, predictability, and meaning today, the robust and fulfilling fruit of preparation will be harvested and replanted over and over.

Every year beginning in November, we walk our heroic clients through a thoughtful series of exercises to get them equipped for the coming year in an event called ANNUAL PREP WEEK.

The name is a bit misleading in that we now spread the work out over a series of three weeks (we used to do it all in the same week).

Our solitary focus is to liberate owners from chaos to make time for what matters most.

The purpose of the BOP ANNUAL PREP WEEK is to provide one place each year for each owner to master plan the next year.

We have structured PREP WEEK over a series of three days (one per week for across three weeks), and ask for a distraction-less two hours each day.

The first 20 minutes of the two-hour block is spent on a Zoom meeting in a mastermind including every client that BOP serves across the country.  We use that time to inspire, instruct, and provide the action items that will be required of each owner for that day.

Each owner will then break from the Zoom meeting and spend the next 100 minutes on their own, with no distractions working through the various elements based on the theme of that day.

Day One of ANNUAL PREP WEEK is a day spent on preparing and tweaking each owner's Vision.

During their 100 minutes of day one each owner will work first on reviewing,  tweaking, and updating their vision story.

They will then begin writing an annual letter to their team reflecting on the year that has gone by and casting vision for what is coming in the next year.

They will then open their culture calendar and update any cultural ingredients they want to ensure get embedded into their business culture for the coming year.

Finally, on day one, each owner will send out the Healthy Employee Engagement Survey.  This is a twice annual survey of their team to determine the backend health of their business based on the perspective of their team.

A week later, we follow the same outline; 20 minutes on a group meeting via Zoom and then 100 minutes of undistracted, focused time and use that time for a powerful time of Financial preparation.

Most business owners go into each year hoping for the best with their fingers crossed instead of a budget set.

During Financial Prep day each owner will first go back and evaluate their subdivided bank accounts and tweak the percentages placed in each account and in some cases add an additional account based on the goals set out in their vision story.

Once updated, each owner will then open up their Level Two Dashboard.  This is a simple dashboard that tracks the flow of cash within each bank account week by week.  It is a real-life gauge of the finances of their business in REAL CASH.  They will use this time to update their tracking dashboard with new accounts or percentages.

Finally, each owner will go through a simple process of allocating dollars towards a basic budget for next year giving a snapshot of where all revenue dollars might be allocated based on the vision they have written.

Down the final homestretch, we lead each owner into Day Three of Prep Week with a focus on the future legacy of both the owner and the business.

After a powerful and final 20-minute Zoom meeting with all owners, each one heads off into a healthy time of solitude for 100 minutes to first review their own weekly schedule.  How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.  It is a sobering exercise to ask, “How am I spending my day?”

Next on Legacy Prep day, we have each owner walk through a sequence where they reach out to supportive 3rd party professional advisors (legal, insurance, financial, etc.) to ensure they are adequately diversified, protected, and equipped to deploy their assets in such a way that will ensure the vision they wrote is obtained.

Finally, in what has become the most invasive and freeing moment of PREP WEEK is when each owner sits down to have a necessary financial discussion with whoever they share their household with reviewing their personal budget to ensure it aligns with their personal vision.  We call it the Financial Barn discussion.

Many couples are not in the habit of having this important conversation, so BOP helps to coordinate what could otherwise be an awkward time.

Life and business necessarily intersect, and PREP WEEK is a repetitive, predictable, and meaningful way to liberate owners from chaos by allowing each to thoughtfully prepare and enter into a new year.

When do you begin?  Now.

A question we are asked by every person interested in business coaching is simply, and honestly, “So, what do I get?”

The first answer to your question is equally as simple, “Our goal is to get you what you said you wanted.”

The very first question we ask any heroic business owner after learning of some of the details of their business is, “What do you want?”

The question is both broad and direct.

Ultimately, your goal becomes the coordinates of the destination we set our sites on.  If we coach you to somewhere you do not want to be, then chaos grows and overtakes.  Our aim is to liberate you from that chaos.

Being coached by the Business On Purpose team also means that you gain immediate access to the BOP community, a team of coaches, support roles, and heroic owners just like you outside of your local area that we will connect you with both virtually and in person at one of our four annual live events.  

You get priority access to ticketing to one of those four local events all taking place near Hilton Head, SC in the artistic town of Bluffton.

Each quarter we host a planned event with over a hundred owners and key leaders to build out their 12-week plans, or invest in an off-site team day.  We want you to come to at least one per year so you can connect with the BOP community in person.  Many times, we will work to have you spend time with a local owner so you can physically see how they are implementing the chaos-busting roadmap of BOP in their business.
Throughout the year, you have unlimited access to 24 optional group coaching meetings; two each month.  These virtual meetings are live and tailored to the struggles and challenges you are facing.  You get to work through those challenges with the mastermind of a BOP Coach Team and other owners just like you altogether at once.

As a BOP client, you and your team will have unlimited access to the 24/7 On Demand BOP coaching content.  Every single module of the Installation Roadmap has been digitized so your team has access to this important resource outside of your mandatory 1 on 1 coaching times with your dedicated coach.

Many businesses now use the BOP coaching content as initial training when onboarding a new employee to their business.  It’s there, why not use it!

The hallmark of your coaching experience will be your 1 on 1 relationship with your dedicated, and highly skilled BOP coach.  This is a relationship that will start in the weeds of your business and grow into a connection that adds lifelong value to your life and business.

You will have 24 mandatory annual meetings with your dedicated 1 on 1 BOP coach that are scheduled months in advance, hold to a tight agenda, and are complete with coaching notes, action items, and follow-up discussions.  These meetings are air-tight so you focus your time working ON the business.

Each year in November, your coach will get you set and ready for the anticipated BOP Annual PREP WEEK.  Over three additional coaching sessions, you will join the entire BOP client community of owners to focus on three areas of preparation for the upcoming year: your business purpose and culture, your business finance and budgeting, and your personal life planning around estate planning and personal budgeting.

Finally, also included in your BOP coaching experience is the value added when the entire BOP coaching team meets each Monday at 4pEST to walk back through the scenarios and realities of the prior week so each coach learns from the others and we re-deploy new wisdom and principles back to you during our 1 on 1 time together. 

BOP has perfected the communication feedback to benefit you both directly 1 on 1, and indirectly behind the scenes.

There are over 52 available touchpoints in our coaching relationship with you so that you are never left feeling aimless and unaccountable.
So “what do you get?” 

You get way more than you probably need…but most importantly, you get what you said you want…liberation from chaos.

Hop on a no-strings-attached meeting with one of our coaches by going right now to mybusinessonpurpose.com/contact

I’ve heard a million excuses for why people don’t have the time to write things down, so why do we do it? Well, let’s dive in to that today.

One of our Core Values here at BOP is Write it Down. Now, it has a ton of different applications. From Writing down our Vision to taking notes at team meetings, to documenting processes, and even to producing Coaching Notes from every meeting we have with clients. The list of ways we write things down is exhaustive.

And yet, we get pushback all the time from clients and key leaders about whether or not it’s truly necessary. All I can say…it absolutely is. Don’t believe me, well two instances in the past week, not month, week, of when it's been worth it.

A little back story from the first instance. I was working with a contractor who was frustrated about the cash in their business. We were looking at their Level Two Dashboard, and pause, this is the simple tool we use to, you guessed it, write down the weekly cash position of the business. In looking at it, his cash position was somewhere in the neighborhood of 450k. 

“There’s just so much pressure and so much fluctuation with paying vendors and subs and still not feeling like we have the buffer we need.”

So, what I did, was scroll back to the first week in January and just started laughing. “Hey, if you look back at January you only had 125k in cash in the bank to start the year. So that’s a 300 thousand dollar improvement in cash over the first 8 months of 2023. That’s a pretty impressive amount of progress!”

And the business owner was blown away. He could see with his own two eyes the undeniable progress that, if he hadn’t recorded his numbers consistently, he would have still felt stuck and unsure of the growth of his business.

But taking the time to write the numbers down and record them provided freedom from the chaos in a refreshing way as he entered the fall to where he knew his pricing was sound, and his operations were leading to predictable profitability for the foreseeable future. And he doubled back down on continuing to record and write it all down.

The second story. I was working with an installer who was so frustrated about some employee issues. “My guys just don’t get it. We’re so busy and so working so hard that they constantly complain about how hot it is and how they don’t like what they’re doing and we just don’t feel like a team right now.”

So, after listening to the conversation for 30 min or so, I scrolled back down through our coaching notes to look at what we were discussing this time a year ago. Sure enough, some of the same thoughts came up then, too. It was a seasonal discussion in August of every year as the summer just takes its toll. But, the good news is he saw that there would be an end to it.

The other thing we noticed is that we had spent 2 to 3 coaching meetings talking about materials and pricing delays and revisiting his estimates to make sure he could hit his margins. It was a period in his business that was so exhausting as he never knew what was going to happen next.

He looked at me after I finished and laughed, “Well I’m glad I’m not fighting those battles anymore!”

Perspective! Hits you right between the eyes when you look back and often realize how far you’ve come and the battles you’re no longer fighting. When you can pull the plane up to 10,000 feet and survey the landscape with clarity. To give yourself some sanity in the midst of owning and running your business.

So what do you need to commit to recording? Is it your cash position, so that you can know how your business is performing? Is it your vision for your business, so that you can know where you’re headed and make sure your team knows?

Maybe it’s some systems and processes, to ensure your team is set up to thrive in their job roles and can be held accountable to a standard?

Maybe it’s even just writing down your Core Values and your mission, so your team can know who you guys are trying to be as a business!

It all matters and it all adds clarity in the midst of chaos. That’s the goal friends.

But remember, it doesn’t start big…it starts small. Think of one thing to record each week and then build on that. And, as always, if you need tools or accountability for this…we’d love to help! 

Thanks so much for listening, have a great day!

Let's be honest. As business owners, we can often be the creator of our own chaos, which means we create chaos for other people.
Hey, it's Scott Beebe with the Business On Purpose platform.
Make sure to go to mybusinessonpurpose.com/healthy and you can take a Healthy Assessment of the backend health of your business and see if you're one of those that stirs up chaos. You know, one of the biggest reasons of chaos stirring in a business is, lack of communication, which means a lack of clarity. And you go, Well, Scott, we talk all the time. Well, if Ashley, my wife, and I just talked, quote, all the time, that meant we're texting, phone calling, that sort of thing. But we never sat down to have intentional conversation on a walk, a bike ride, the back porch without distraction being our constant companion, then that's not really talking. That might be communicating back and forth, but we're not actually growing. We're not developing. And so we've got to do something different. The reason I'm doing this podcast is I just got asked about the difference between meetings. See, there's a variety of meetings that we have when we talk about the five foundational cornerstones of any business vision, story, mission statement, unique core values, hiring process being the center, we've added this fifth team meetings. Now, usually we get eye rolls when we do it right. God, we hate team meetings. We don't like team meetings. They never do anything. In fact, one author wrote a book, Team Meetings Suck. Or maybe the title is just Meetings That Suck. But nonetheless, they share a lot of sentiment from a lot of people that we've got to be aware of when it goes into meetings. 
Here's the truth about meetings. Too often they're just a continuation of the chaos that we've done chaotically throughout the day. So we bring that chaos into the formality of a team meeting rather than allowing that to be a hub of clarity. There's a couple of different meetings I want to share with you. Number one is the good old fashioned team meeting. Now, I'm going to give you a rundown of what that agenda should look like here in just a second. But for most of you, you should also have what's called an operations meeting or a project meeting or a production meeting or in our case, for a business coaching firm. We have a coaches meeting. That's where we spend the majority of time following up on a couple of different elements around our weekly scorecards that we have as coaches. But more importantly, we dive in to the reality of our client work. Questions that we heard last week, conundrums that we were in trying to help clients through to help liberate them from the chaos of working in their business. See, if we leverage our team meeting to do our client meeting work, then we would never get to the purpose of our team meeting, and we would never create culture. Remember, Torbjørn Ekelund of that great book "A Year in the Woods"? He said that nature is God made, but culture is man made. It's manufactured. What does that mean? That means anything related to culture in your business was directly created by you. And the people you work with don't like your culture. Guess what? It's kind of on you. Like your culture? Great job. It's on you. Part of the reason we have team meetings is to create culture. That's right. We can create culture. We generate it, we manufacture it. We're not waiting in reaction to those things. There are other times that we need to communicate in a reactive format to see what's been going on and what we need to do to change that. That's where it comes into the project meeting or the production meeting or operations meeting, depending on what kind of industry you're in. Now, the over 50% of the industry that we work with are construction, infrastructure and supporting entities around that. So we talk a lot about project meetings. So we'll talk to a client about a team meeting. They'll go, oh my gosh, ours last 3 hours. Why do they last so long? Well, it's because we had to talk about all the problems at 31 21 Maple Street. Wait a second. That's where things begin to break down. See, here's the thing we've got to remember about team meetings. Project meetings is too many of them are not agenda driven and leader led. In fact, they keep the seesaw of predictability out of balance. What in the world is that? The seesaw of predictability balances two primary elements that lead to unpredictability, which ultimately lead to micromanagement. Many of you wonder what's the difference between micromanagement and healthy leadership? Well, it's the seesaw of predictability. Imagine on one side of the seesaw you have the right questions. Imagine on the other side of the seesaw you have the right time. If you ask the right question at the right time, you have equilibrium, you have a lack of chaos, you have clarity and you have leadership. But if you ask the wrong question at the right time or the wrong time asking the right question, then you are out of balance and you're now in the realm of micromanagement. So if you want to know if you're micromanaging or not, then just ask yourself, am I asking the right questions at the right time? A right question might be, hey, do you have last week's sales numbers? The right time. At a designated agenda driven, leader-led team meeting, the wrong question might be, hey, do you have sales numbers from 2014? The wrong time? texting at 11:37 p.m. on a Friday night. The moment we start asking the wrong question at the right time or at the wrong time, we ask the right question. That's when we know definitively we've moved into micromanagement. So instead, let's take the time and make the time and take the effort to build an agenda driven, leader-led team meeting. Give you the outline in just a second. And also an agenda driven, leader led project or production or operations meeting to talk about the actual work being fulfilled. So what's the difference between the two agendas? A team meeting should go something like this. We always start with BIG wins- Begin In Gratitude. We ripped that off from Dan Sullivan years ago. And so we start every team meeting, every coach's meeting, every director's meeting, and every client meeting that we do. Hundreds a week, starting with big wins. Why? Is because we can definitively begin in gratitude. We can set the tone of the call. This isn't some Tony Robbins, pie in the sky, toxic positivity sort of thing. This is really setting a tone so that we begin to work through our agenda at that point. Now, once we're done with big wins, shouldn't take any more than 3 or 5 minutes. We then move to our first agenda item that is walking through our culture calendar. The top side of the culture calendar is the date of the first day of each week. Take Monday of this week, and then Monday of next week, and then Monday of the following week. And then the left side of the graph, which would be the vertical side of the graph, are all of the ingredients that you want to insert into your business to build great culture. Do you want monthly team days? Do you want a weekly team lunch? Do you want regular team meetings, regular project meetings? Do you want individual one on one check ins, vision days every other month? Do you want unicorn rides for the kids every quarter? Whatever it might be for you? There should be 5 or 10 or 15 or 20 elements that you see that you want to build into great culture that goes on the vertical element. We call that the culture calendar. And then every week in the team meeting, after big wins, the leader of that meeting checks the agenda, which tells them to go look at the culture calendar. They review it, everybody stacks hands, and we move on to the next line item, which is 12-week plans. Now, if you're a client of ours, you know what those are. If you're not, it's essentially our goal setting tool. Every team member, owner, key leader has a 12-week plan. Goals with multiple tactics per goal. And so during that time on the weekly team meeting, no more than 1 hour, the leader goes around to each person after big wins, after checking the culture calendar, and says, all right, Tim, give us an update on your 12-week plans. All right, Hannah, give us an update on your 12-week plans. And so we're holding each other accountable to the business goals. These are not project goals. Sometimes projects might creep in, but ultimately they're our business goals. For the next 12 weeks to make sure that we have alignment in our accountability. Then there's also a line item at the very end just to go back and make sure everybody's got their action items for the next meeting and then we leave that's it. No longer than 1 hour. And if it bumps up to an hour, you cut it off and you learn for the next time try to keep it within an hour. Then the project meeting is where you can deep dive into projects. I would still start it with BIG wins because project meetings you're usually talking nothing but problems. So let's set the tone for something different. And then within each project, I would highly encourage you to set a timer. Too many of us owners get on our high horse and we start pontificating about what we see rather than really using that time to encourage, to leverage, to understand, to offer feedback and to gain insight. And so we get on our high horse because dang it, we're the ones who started the business and we start telling people what to do rather than active listening, offering feedback and then maneuvering through the real issues that you're dealing with. Each project ought to have an allotted amount of time. A project meeting really shouldn't be no longer than 1 hour. If you have to go 90 minutes then that's it. But absolutely zero minutes longer than that. Why? Is because you're going to exasperate your team and eventually they'll either leave physically or they will leave mentally and emotionally and you as the leader cannot afford that. So team meetings, project meetings should be agenda driven, leader-led, really no more than 1 hour. Always start with BIG wins, should have an agenda so they follow a method of predictability so people don't get exasperated with what's going on. And by the way, each of these to start with should happen every single week. And if the owner's not there, they should happen anyway. Just because the owner is gone doesn't mean we don't meet. What is that communicating when we do that? So that's the difference between those two meetings. And every business should have a version of a team meeting, which talks about the macro-level culture and goal thing and then from there should also have some sort of project meeting to talk about the in the weeds element and they should be absolutely separate. Why? Clarity.
Remember the RPMs of great leadership, Repetition, Predictability and Meaning.
All those together equal clarity so that you can be liberated from the chaos of working in your business. 

Join Scott Beebe, Founder of Business On Purpose, and Thomas Joyner, BOP Director of Coaching, as they break down the 30-Day Business Owner Challenge. Learn about preparation, key takeaways, team strategies, and driving business growth in this insightful discussion. 

LISTEN HERE to learn more!

Are you working IN your business or ON your business? Do you have all of the foundational elements that will liberate you from the business chaos?  Take the assessment to find out which areas you can grow and improve on. 
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