Why Should Strategic Planning Be Treated Like Gospa in Your Business? 

Tune in to learn how to transform your company's strategic planning process into a powerful, results-driven initiative that everyone on your team supports and understands.

We break down the critical components of effective strategic planning through their structured approach known as GOSPA. We discuss the importance of alignment among multi-generational teams, the pitfalls of poorly executed plans, and the necessity for actionable steps that transform vision into reality.

Highlights:

Goals Aren't Just for Show: We emphasize the need for clear, actionable goals that span three to five years, urging companies to look beyond short-term fixes and instead focus on long-term visions that drive real change.

Multi-Generational Challenges: We explore the difficulties of aligning goals across different age groups—from Boomers to Gen Z—and how each generation’s unique perspectives can both challenge and enhance strategic planning.

Team-Based Planning: Dictatorial goal-setting is a recipe for failure. We discuss the importance of collaborative goal-setting to ensure team buy-in and reduce employee turnover.

Strategic Execution: Strategies often fall apart at the execution stage. Brad and Steve discuss how detailed planning and setting out clear, measurable actions are vital for bringing strategies to life and avoiding stagnation.

Real-World Success Stories: The episode concludes with Brad sharing client case studies where effective strategic planning led to significant business growth, proving that a well-executed plan turns vision into profit.

What topics would you like to hear us talk about next? 

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Brad Herda:

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Welcome to Blue Collar B's, a podcast that busts the popular myth that we can't find good people highlighting how the different generations of today, the boomers, Gen X, millennials and Gen Z, are redefining work so that the industrial revolution that started in the US stays in the US.

Welcome everyone back to another exciting episode of Blue Collar B's with your co host, Brad and Doyle. Doyle. Wow. That's different. That is very different. The pre show activity today has been very humorous out of Mister Doyle. So for this show, Steve, we talked about it. This show is going to be called the gospel according to Brad and Steve.

Strategic planning, verses one through six. Not the gospel according to Brad and Steve, but the gospel according to Brad and Steve.

Verses one through six by the book.

Of Gaspa and Gospel. Right? So gospel is one of the things that, you know, we've been blessed to be brought forward with Brian Tracy's material and things like that that he did decades ago to try to simplify strategic planning into something as actionable and results based activities along the way. Because everybody goes, does a strategic plan, they figure out the first two things and then nothing happens after that. So therefore the gaspa piece gets us down into things we can start with today, tomorrow, next week, etcetera, and create accountability along the way. So let's talk gospel.

Yeah, let's talk about that. So let's break it down into each section here and spend a little bit of time riffing on that. So when we talk. Gasp. Verse one, goals for the Jesus.

Number one. First verse.

Verse one, first chapter one, goals. Goals are always nice, aren't they?

They are fantastic. And they are off the words often overused. And then we say, well, they gotta be smart goals and they gotta be this at the end of the day, what the hell do you want in the next five to ten years? Let's just be honest about it and just break it down. Keep it simple. When you go in your strategic planning, right, this episode is gonna air sometime in April. It's gonna be q two. You probably didn't do anything in the first quarter and now you're gonna go, shit, I gotta make this up. There's no reason for us to live on a twelve month calendar.

Just because April doesn't mean that we can't go April to achieve something in twelve months. It doesn't have to be broken down in the nine. It could be you could do, you know, ten x you can do twelve week year. You can do all lots of different things. But ultimately, what is it that you want to get done. And strategic planning is more about what is it in that five to ten year range, seven year range where you're sitting today? And most do not have the vision to do so. Um.

Right.

Boomers, very easy to do that. Millennials, not so much. Gen X. Okay. Gen Z. I don't think they've been asked anything to think outside of the next 20 minutes, potentially.

I mean, because mom and dad just did it for me. I mean, let's be honest.

So when we talk about strategic planning and you have a multi generational workforce or a leadership team, that's going to be a struggle for you to get that, to understand what those goals are, because each one of those generations also has different goals for themselves. Right.

Right. So how do we get. How do we get alignment with. With goals specifically? You know, should we be. Well, let's answer the first question. Should we be doing goals by yourself in a company?

No.

Why not? It's my business. Why shouldn't I be doing all the goals by myself and setting that direction? It's my business.

Well, you can, and I've seen it done that way. It's usually not very successful. It's usually very dictatorial, very autocratic, and very much a lot of high turnover.

Yep.

It's really weird because nobody has any say, nobody has any input, nobody has any opportunity. But yet, you know, George thinks he knows everything. I can do it on my own. I don't need anybody's help. I just need you guys to come and run the machine for me. Yeah, that doesn't work very well.

I just need you to squirt oil on the machine every now and then. Just do that. That's all I want you to do.

It should just run by itself, seamless, effortlessly, will print money. That's not how it works.

Mm hmm. So we got a team of people, and we start talking about dreams. Like, where do we want to be now? I know a little bit before pre show, we kind of put some brackets around goals in the. In a duration. And you've kind of alluded to it a few minutes ago. Right. You know, long term goals versus short term goals and things like that. But for our audience, for how we're setting up GaSPA right now, when we talk goals, we're really talking about, what are those things in three to five years that we really, really want to achieve? Because if we don't forecast the vision for where we want to go, if we said, okay, I want to do something in the next 30, 60, 90 days a year, from now, nine months from now, whatever that is.

While we can do a gospel around those, it doesn't cast a long term vision for something much greater than where we are right now. Because when we plan for something out in nine months, we're really only going to be doing the same exact things. We might be tweaking what we're doing and we're really not making any movement, so to speak. We're constantly doing the same things in the same areas. And when we do that, it just, it becomes repetitive or it just becomes like we're working at the insane asylum because we're doing the exact same things over and over and over again every.

Single day, knowing that, hey, I want to drive from California, from LA to New York, or vice versa, or LA, New York and back. Let's just say we're going to go back and forth. That might be the long term goal is to get back to LA, but there's lots of ways to go, there's lots of places to, there's lots of ways to do that. And you may want to get there as fast as you can. You might want to see as much as you can. You might want to go north, you might want to go south. You may not want to drive through whatever it is. There's lots of ways to do it, but at least you know that you want to go back and forth from La to New York, and then you can start having the next piece of.

This is the objectives part of it, a little bit shorter term piece of. Yep. I want to see if I'm going to do this. I want to make sure we see Wisconsin. I want to make sure we see Detroit. I want to make sure we get to St. Louis. I want to do route 66 one way or the other, or I want to go down to San Antonio, whatever that is.

Right.

Those are the things that you want to put into play as part of your journey with your constraints along the way.

Right. So that would be our objectives, if you will. Right. The old component of Gasp.

My objective is that every theme park from between here and there, every baseball diamond or every football field, whatever it is that you're talking about doing for your world tour, your Us tour, make that happen.

Right. So we've got our goal set, we've got our objectives. We've got the s component of GASPA, which is really our strategies, strategic fuckery, if you will.

Otherwise known as the place where goals go to die.

Right. And so when we talk about strategy or the strategies for what it is we're doing, what should we be looking at, Brad?

Well, this is where it gets to be really ugly because everybody has their own ideas. And that's why it's important to have people in the room to have those conversations about impact and different things. Because you may have, um, one strategy might be, I want, if your, if your long term goal is a revenue based goal and one of the objectives is develop new product lines, someone might have this weird thing how we need to develop the best gummy worms in, in the world. Even though it's a potential saturated market, it's a lot of work, a lot of marketing dollars, etcetera. But that could be a really great strategy. You could do it that way. Too often in the strategy sessions, everybody attacks the opportunity versus just letting it sit there to understand, yep, that is a possibility. And that is one of the biggest things to do in the strategy session is get them all out.

Because you, and then you riff on them together to find the right opportunities to achieve those things along the way. Because somewhere it's a combination of something. Nobody is going to come out with the epiphany and the easy button and the, here's what we're going to do. It's a combination of everybody in the room talking through the various things and it might be bits and pieces of things along the way.

Absolutely. So oftentimes this is the, this is, this is the definite hardest part because we have to spend the time to truly vet everything out that we come up and we really want the team to be aligned. Because when the team's not aligned with a strategy component, basically, things start fizzling a lot right here and you haven't even hit day one. You're still in the planning phase and you give up.

Getting everybody on board with that is vitally critical. And making sure that everybody understands it because you use the strategy you decided on as part of your decision matrix for the next two years or so, three years or so, it might be a lifetime, potentially. Um, I remember trying to, when we were building my purchasing team and getting them to understand that, um, the $20. Worried about the $20 negotiation on a $5,000 job to get a $20 million machine out the door didn't matter. It mattered to them because it impacted their purchase price variance to the positive along the way. So I get my, ooh, I keep, I get my ppv up. I must be doing a good job as a buyer. But you just delayed us getting the part by four days, which then caused all cash flow issues and all these other things for a machine to go out the back door that has so much more value than that $20 you're trying to negotiate with a supplier over.

So we created our own decision matrix of safety, quality, delivery and price was our strategy for how we went to market with our products.

Right. It's really key. Good to have that alignment on the strategy. So let's talk about the, the p aspect of Gaspa. I did. Okay, we're not twelve.

I'm not. Apparently you tell me all the time.

No, boomer, you're not twelve. So ironically enough, and this is where there is some differentiation on what some of us use for the, for the p component. Some of us use plans and some of us use priorities for gospel. Right?

Correct.

So let's talk through that. Brad, you lean more towards the plan side on that, for gospel. So talk through that for a minute.

So what is the plan to achieve the strategy? So if it's a, if the strategy is to go, you know, develop new gummy worms. Okay, what's the plan to go do that? Do we need some market research? Do we need to, are we targeting adults? Are we targeting kids? Are we targeting, who are we targeting? What's going on? Put together the plans to go forward with that and then we sequence those later in the a items along the way and develop that, the plans for what that looks like, particularly in a manufacturing organization. I've found that that is a much easier thing for people to relate to from a processing perspective than a prioritization perspective. And that's where most of my activity has happened. That may not work quite as well in a white collar setting or in a more of a service based setting. You might have to go more to that prioritization than get down into the what are all the things that need to do.

So, and I absolutely love, and I see where you're headed with the plans. I focus more on priorities because if we come up with, maybe we only come up with one goal, then it's no longer a priority. It becomes what is the plan to achieve? Which I agree with, but in some organizations we might have three to five goals.

Yep.

So which goal should actually takes precedence over the other one? Because I can't, I can't. Could I multitask and do all the goals together throughout the whole year? Yeah, I could. But when there's a clash for resources and where should I be investing my time? We need to really understand which priority, which goal has a priority over the other ones.

Yeah. And I'll usually do that at that point with that group of, group of leaders. So I had one a couple years ago. You know they want to double EBITDa by 2026.

Yep.

There were five goals to go make that happen. And we had done a bunch of pre work, a bunch of interviews ahead of time, brought data, brought stuff to there to be able to say, okay, let's walk through this, let's make this happen, let's understand and okay, where's our priorities? Where's our opportunities to achieve that? And adding a new product line was way down on the list of. It was, it was the fifth goal. So when we put the document together, that's where goal one, goal two, go three, goal. And then, okay, where are we at in each one of those and the timeline that goes with it as you go through your plans and actions. So for me, it's what go. Yes. What goals are important.

So we don't prioritize there. We actually get to the plans.

Right. Excellent. Then that brings us to our, the last component of Gaspar, actions. And some of us use action, some of us use activities.

That's where all great strategies go to die for sure.

Oh, come on now. What do you mean you can't get alignment on what we need to do to achieve the strategy for most strategic plans.

And this is where I think this is different. It's very important for every understand across all age levels, the strategic planning for most people will stop at what, what are the goals and objectives?

Yep, 100%.

And it's given downstream for everybody else to go fend for themselves. And God bless. And it's in your, it's in your reviews, it's in this. And you have no idea what needs to happen or what you can do or whatever. Here's the goals, here's the objectives. Now God bless, we're going to get everybody off and go do it. Yay. Because they don't spend the time to go have it happen.

So execution, the actions is the execution of all the other things. Yes. Execution is truly that. It's the execution of the strategy. And when I mean execution, that's where most of them go to die because it never happens. Because we get too busy or we get this or we get that, or it's sitting on somebody's back Credenza and six months later, oh, the next flavor of the day shows up.

Yeah.

And you need to have a strong enough leadership team and support team that was involved to come back and say, hey, dumbass, you're telling me to do this. It's not in alignment with this. Why am I wasting my time and energy on these things. Why do we have Billy building these crates for this product over here where it has nothing to do with what we're trying to achieve. It's noise and it's, it could be a cash grab, it could be something scarcity model, it could be a bunch of different things. But if it doesn't fit, it shouldn't be inside the organization.

Absolutely. And where I see a lot of it, a lot of these activities also die is that they're really, there's no alignment to the division, the group, the individual. There's no alignment upstream to what they're currently working on. And so now these activities become something extra they have to do with, no, there's no reward. Why? Why do I want to do extra when I'm already overworked and overwhelmed?

Why?

Why? What's in it for me? Because, so that the boss can look good, the boss can bring home, you know, substantially more money. Like why, why should I work my ass off and kill myself or somebody else?

Yes, they're, and if they're not involved, that's where the problems come in.

Correct.

Because they're, the vision is not communicated, the things aren't there. And when it's done correctly, when the gospel is followed and communicated and done correctly, and you create the opportunity and you have the alignment along the way, you can achieve a lot of great things. And again, basically the twelve week year is doing this just four times a year, right. Somewhere else. And really, that's really, and that's where the things come in. It's like, okay, here's these small incremental changes that we can make or actions we can take to do something better because most organizations get stuck in their day to day bullshit. I'm so busy. And busy is just an excuse of not doing something or understanding what's supposed to be done to move forward.

They just stay flat or they grow on accident because they've got right that they just grow on accident and God bless. And then when it gets time to sell or exit, they don't have anything to fall back on because it was just dumb luck. And the owners like, well, it's relying on you as the owner and the charisma that you might bring or your own vision. And there's no structure, no process, no anything to it.

Mm hmm.

And then also.

Absolutely right. Anything else to add to the book of Gospel? And as before, we close, just like.

In the gospel, right. There's going to be somebody that's going to turn on you along the way.

Yep. There is.

There's going to be somebody that's going to turn on you and is going to go stab you in the back for their own greater good. And they're going to have the I told you so card and they're going to do all the things to sabotage what you're trying to accomplish. So it's really, really important to make sure everybody's on the same page and making sure that it all is in alignment and it's going to work. This has to be a team effort. Strategic planning is a team effort, is not a solo leader, dictatorial aspect to it.

Amen.

Wow.

All joking aside. All joking aside. Right. It's so much truth in what Brad, just what Brad just mentioned there is with the alignment side. Just trust the trust that you've hired the people to help support you and build the business that you want, that you dream of, or build the department that you want, that you dream of. Your team is your support, is your support group. Because without them, you're nobody. You're nothing.

Your business is done.

Correct. And it is vitally important to find somebody. Let's just say you're going to be the supply chain group or the manufacturing group or whomever. It's vitally important that you go find somebody outside your organization, outside your group to lead that conversation so that it's not the leader leading it, because nobody's going to talk about the things, nobody's going to want to bring those things up. You have to create the environment of openness and opportunity to not get refused. And when I do my stuff with my clients, it may be I can tell what's going on and I need to ask the owners to leave the room. Hey, I need you guys to go away for a while. We'll come back and get you.

Give me 45 minutes, because nobody's talking, nobody's doing anything. Great. Get them out. Let's have a conversation so we can figure it out and get to the root of the matter and find out what's really going on.

Right.

And where the anxiety is. And too often, like I said earlier, people will sabotage the opportunity because it's a change or it's different or it's looking like it might be something that doesn't fit. And when you sit back and embrace it and trust the process, you know, you. The process works.

Right.

The process works because I've seen it work successfully numerous times. Specifically, there's two organizations that have at least doubled in size since they've gone through the strategic planning.

Yeah, my clients were when we first started working together, 2.5 million in revenue and gross profits were 200,000. Fast forward five years later, almost a $50 million in revenue company and their profits? Well, well, more than ten x. So it works when you work goal, right.

It works when you stay focused. Because it doesn't. Because it doesn't take you down all these other paths of temptation.

Yep.

Don't bite the apple.

Well, Brad, thanks for the conversation today on GasPa and how we both use it. So great topic. Thank you.

Yeah. So as you guys are out there potentially not doing your strategic planning or have never done it, let us know how we can support you in that process, because it does work. It doesn't have to be overly complicated, but it does take time and energy and it does work.

All right, Brad, well, thanks for another great episode.

All right, Mister Doyle, have a great rest of your day, sir, and we'll talk soon.

All right, sounds good.

Thank you for listening to blue collar b's, brought to you by vision for business solutions and professional business Coaching, Inc. If you'd like to learn more on today's topic, just reach out to Steve Doyle or myself, Brad Hurta. Please like share rate and review this show as feedback is the only way we can get better. Let's keep blue collar businesses strong for generations to come.