Mark 0:00

You've got a, air quotes, "planning session" today, and everyone walks into the room. Is it going to be the same old all-day slog, everyone moving in different directions, too many things to do? There's a simple five-step model that can help you make the most of your time together and get stuff done. Let's talk about it today on the podcast

John 0:44

All right. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to another episode of Breaking Biz Dev. I'm John, he's Mark, and today, Mark, we're gonna talk about one of your favorite subjects: planning

Mark 0:55

Planning. maybe one of my favorites. Um, this is a good model to use, and we're doing this, recording this session, John, hoping to release this episode, in the fall. the fall is, kind of a natural, time to do some planning. but honestly, this is an evergreen episode. Someone could listen to this just about any time of the year, and whether they're making plans to, go on a weekend trip or they're putting together some much larger plan for a business unit or a new venture or whatever else, this is a very simple and straightforward model that, helps people get organized and really get stuff done

John 1:44

Yeah, when we were prepping for this episode, I was having a little bit of trouble wrapping my own mind around this model. But I think in the end, it was actually kind of eye-opening to me and helped me kinda reframe the way that I will approach planning. And in fact, I've been, hearing more and more from marketers out there that they are entering the planning season now. So I've heard that, come up a few times in my conversations out there. So this is a timely episode, and I'm excited to dig in.

Mark 2:13

Yeah. And, right, this is "Breaking Biz Dev," right? Here, we're here to, break down, you know, business development. But a little slice of, what our doer sellers, marketers, whoever else out there, business developers, a little slice of time throughout the course of any given year is spent doing some planning, doing some forward thinking, right? So we thought that this was an important topic. And actually, this model is something that has been baked into a number of other sales planning models that we've actually discussed in the past. we've talked about account development plans and segment development plans, which are planning tools to help professional services firms, really focus in on a specific client account with account development plans and grow revenue and trust with that client account. And then segment development plans are created to help you grow into a new market, create new relationships, and hopefully expand, your presence in a very focused, industry, sector, market, whatever else it is. So this five-step model is actually kind of baked into both of those. And if people come to understand this model and reflect on those development plans, you can kind of, see what I'm talking about. and we have episodes on those as well, so people can listen in on those, planning processes as well. But today, John, we're here to talk about the natural planning model.

John 3:50

So I think before we dive into this natural planning model, Mark, can you set the stage a little bit? Like, what is-- why is this model helpful for folks that are going into planning? I mean, can't you just, like, show up in a conference room and just start throwing sticky notes up on the board?

Mark 4:06

Yeah. Right, sticky notes are fun. just to give a little background on this and kind of to answer your question, The natural planning model is, a simple five-step framework that I learned of through a guy named David Allen. And if anybody out there is familiar with David Allen, he wrote a book that people like. I really like it. It's called "Getting Things Done," right? Abbreviated in the acronym GTD, right? You may kind of start to come across that, GTD, right? Getting Things Done. So, your question was, as I took that long digression, right?

John 4:42

that comes with, planning sessions, and I've been part of a few where it's, "Hey, let's get together in a conference room and let's start brainstorming. And this model, what I like about it is, there are some steps that happen before that event takes place. Let's lay out each of the five steps in this natural planning model. So the first one is purpose and principles. The second one is outcome visioning. The third step is the brainstorming session. And then the fourth step is organizing, and the fifth step is next actions. So those are each of the five steps, and we'll break each one of those down. but that's it in a nutshell. So let's start with purpose and principles, Mark. what goes into that first step of the process?

Mark 5:30

Yeah, this is an important one, and this, like you sort of hinted at there, John, is skipped a lot of times. we kind of gloss over this. and I'm not certain, what was written first, David Allen's "Getting Things Done," GTD book, or Simon Sinek's book, "Start with Why." this is really important. The first step is, starting, with why. you've got a dozen people, you know, in a room, and we're gonna do some planning, and everybody needs to understand why the heck they're there. Why are we here? Why are we doing this? And why is this planning exercise going to be important for us as individuals, important for our firm today, tomorrow, and the weeks and months to come as we start to sort of execute on this whole plan? So why, capital W, why?

John 6:28

so let me give you an example. would we need to grow firm revenue by 20% year over year? Is that a good why?

Mark 6:38

Well, I think that's more of a goal. I think that's okay. You're gonna, you know... and I don't wanna create any hard boundaries on this 'cause people get really confused with goals and objectives and strategies and all that nomenclature stuff, right? for me, what's most important for me when it comes to a goal is to have something that people can sort of unify around and something that gives us a sense of purpose together, right? For me, that's one of the most important goals, and a lot of times that may not necessarily be the dollars and cents or the numbers or the spreadsheets or the metrics. A lot of times it's something that is the, I don't know. are you a Ted Lasso fan? I mean, is there any...

John 7:17

No, I haven't. I have not watched a single

Mark 7:20

I can't... You're,

John 7:20

I probably should,

Mark 7:22

I can't believe that, that we've even hung out together. That's ridiculous. There's a lot of people out there who are the Ted Lasso, you know, fans out there. Ted Lasso's, you know, it's, this is 2026, right? Ted Lasso's been around for a few years now. People have enjoyed it a lot. there's this yellow, piece of sort of paper that gets, sort of taped to the wall in the locker room and it says, "Believe," right? And it doesn't say anything about we need to, you know, eight wins this season, or we need to score two goals today, or, you know, any of that. It just says, "Believe," right? and there's so many other examples around that, you know, when, the teams are running out to the field in the locker room when they're hitting the thing, hitting the stone, you know. Whatever. There's a lot of sports references. I'm certain there's a bunch of other references as well where people just need something, to kind of believe in, right? so for me, this first step, which is purpose and principles, and we'll get to that principles part as well. So purpose is the why, right? The capital W why. And if it has to be numbers and metrics and everything else, okay, I get that. But, hopefully it's something that people, believe in, align around, and can kind of focus around.

John 8:27

Yeah, I was being a little facetious when I brought up that firm revenue by 20... But no, I think it's important just to go beyond that because a lot of teams or a lot of planning sessions, at least that I've witnessed and been a part of, have centered on that goal as the why. And I think it's your point is important to just highlight real quick in that it's, okay, well, why is our goal 20% more revenue? And going beyond that to establish what that purpose is.

Mark 8:54

Yeah. so the other part of this first step is, the principles. And principles are, sometimes a little bit difficult to get your head wrapped around, but they're kind of guardrails, is how I like to refer to them in that, it sets some boundaries of, where this plan should and could, take us, how we sort of define our why and/or what's outside of our why. is there something that, we could come across in the process of planning and then executing this effort? that would make us stop, is there something that, if we were creating a plan around a particular client, a particular client could want to do or request of us that would, make us stop and say no? maybe this is a client that all of a sudden, there's... Maybe we're creating a really focused plan around an important client account, right? And there's new leadership at the client account, and suddenly, they're not a very good partner anymore, and they're not, working with us. they're working against us. is that one of our sort of guardrails or values maybe that we would say, "Hey, this is not in alignment with our sort of purpose anymore. we need to stop." Right? So principles are sort of that. it's maybe it's your organizational values. So it's things that help you, sort of put the blinders on and say, "All right, we need to focus." so that's what principles are.

John 10:09

When we were prepping for this episode, one analogy that you made I thought really kind of connected the dots for me, and these principles, I think of them as like your core values as your brand, right? From like a cultural perspective. Like what are the non-negotiables when you're working with a client? and I thought that that was a good way to frame that.

Mark 10:28

Good, good

John 10:28

awesome. Should we move on to step number two?

Mark 10:31

Yeah.

John 10:32

All right, so step number two is outcome visioning. Mark, what is outcome visioning?

Mark 10:38

so this comes after the why, and I think people get a little confused with visioning, but for me it's pretty literal. It's like, hey, close your eyes. What picture of success do you see in the future? are you doing business in a new geography? has your organization grown from 72 employees to 160 employees? have you acquired, a new expertise? have you doubled or tripled your work, with a particular client account and now you're working more together like a partner rather than just a vendor? what are you seeing? What are you feeling? what behaviors are happening inside your organization and maybe, your client organization or, other people you work with or whoever else? It's like, what are you actually seeing and feeling and experiencing,

John 11:17

I like this one and I liken this to just a recent example in my mind. I'm a DC sports fan, and the local football team is going to build a new stadium at the old RFK grounds. And the architecture firm released renderings of it and, you know, fans are all, jazzed up about it. but I think that's, a great example of like what this outcome visioning is. It's like paint a literal picture, like do a graphic rendering, close your eyes, describe it. and going through that creative process kind of like anchors that vision in your mind.

Mark 11:49

Good. And, these first two chunks of work in the planning process, and if people are sort of picturing, you show up in the morning with your coffee and there's donuts and you're gonna do this planning session, right? hopefully these first two sessions can be done fairly quickly. And it's also an exercise that, you got a dozen people in the room. Hopefully it's something where everyone has some amount of input on, and that people can sort of align around. when I have done this in the past, I take feedback. We just do a round robin. Every single person in the room will mention something, maybe some characteristics, and a lot of times people say, "Oh, yeah, yeah, what she said," and this and that. so we end up with this collection of thoughts relative to the why and the purpose, and then this second step, which is the vision. and then hopefully we take all those thoughts and sort of, simmer them down to a cohesive statement of why, with some principles in there, and also a cohesive statement around a vision, a picture that people will share in their minds. so you boil those down and you get sort of a statement. It's like, "Okay, here's our statement. Here's how it reads, and what does everybody think about that?" I actually did this recently, We went through these first two steps, and I was just taking all the thoughts and the bullet points and everything else and just feeding them into, you know, Claude. Claude helped me spit out, a lucid statement, that was, 50 words long or something like that, for each of these steps. I read that back to the group and they said, "Yeah, with some tweaks and maybe a little bit of editing and, maybe less AI-ey and more people-ey, we can make it work." But at a minimum, we got something to work with. just so as we describe this, I'm wanting to provide sort of the practical application of this, and it's like, yeah, this should not take you all day to come up with these two things. You should get some thoughts down, get a cohesive statement. People say, "Yeah, yeah, okay. That's the why. That's a good why. And the why hopefully is something that six months down the road when you're still engaged in this effort, executing on the plan, people can go back to the why and say, "Right, that's exactly why we're doing this." And then when they look at the vision statement, they're like, "Oh, yeah, we're still chasing that. Yeah, it's gonna be great when we get there."

John 14:02

And so all that alignment, that exercise, getting the team on the same page, that opens up, a more productive brainstorming session, which leads us to this third step where, you know, this is where the sticky notes go up on the wall and the whiteboard and everything

Mark 14:20

the third step is brainstorming, and it is exactly that. It is, crack open your brain and just let it fly. It can be anything. It can be dates and times and people and places and, expertise or mergers, acquisitions. it can be anything, anything that comes to mind. an important client that you worked with, a recent project or recent initiative that was really successful, something that wasn't successful, some criteria to consider. it's called brainstorming for a reason in that it's wide open, right? So we just went through, the first two steps are sort of convergent in nature in that you're trying to simmer down some things to get some guardrails on it, get some areas of focus, get a vision, get that clear. And then brainstorming is like, all right, given, given the why and given the vision, how are we gonna get there? And how I've seen this practically implemented in a planning session is, yeah, everybody just gets their stack of, Post-it notes. And everybody's got, 30 Post-it notes spread out across the table in front of them or, eventually put them up on the whiteboard, or the wall or whatever. so that's what that sort of looks like, right? It's everything. Brainstorm. It's get, get, get everything out. All the stuff that you came into the meeting with and now there's, you know, we're 45 minutes later or an hour later or whatever else after we got our step number one and step number two done. Now everybody's just chomping at the bit and they're like, "I just need to get my stuff out of my head." I'm like, "Now's the chance. Go."

Mark Wainwright 15:50

You're listening to breaking biz dev

John Tyreman 15:52

the podcast that beats up, breaks down, and redefines business development for the professional services firms of tomorrow. Your hosts are John Tyerman, founder of Red Cedar Marketing, the podcast marketing company for experts and professional services firms,

Mark Wainwright 16:07

And Mark Wainwright, principal consultant and founder of Wainwright Insight, the fractional sales manager and sales consultant to professional services firms.

John Tyreman 16:16

If you find this podcast helpful, please help us by following the show and leaving a review on Apple podcasts

Mark Wainwright 16:22

and now back to the show.

John 16:25

I think it's important to note that during this brainstorming session, I've seen creativity get squashed by people saying, "Oh, no, no, that's a bad idea." But that's not the point. Like, we'll organize later. Right now it's let's get all the ideas out because, maybe it's not such a crazy or bad idea, when you really think about it and stop to think about it. But yeah, just wanted to make that point real

Mark 16:47

it's a great point to make and, you know, that is the hope is we want people coming in, ready to just go. And you could tell there's different people in the room that are gonna do different things. you've got someone who walked in the door thinking, "I have a singular purpose in this planning, and it's gonna be this one thing." But then you've got, heck, you even see it sometimes where you've got maybe a more junior team member that comes in and the ideas just explode out of their head and you're like, "Wow, awesome."

John 17:16

this sweatshirt that I'm wearing right now says, "What if we?" shout out to Silverback Strategies. They were very, like, conscious of this, like, pl- these planning methods, one of the main points is, like, the next big idea could come from anyone within the organization, so there's no bad idea.

Mark 17:33

So, I call this in my account development and segment development plans, I call this sort of all the Ps, you know, the letter P, right? People, places, projects, potential work, problems. It's like, what issues do we have? what problems do we have in our organization? Let's write them down on a Post-it. Let's see where they go. you know, here's the things we do great. Here's the things we don't do great. You know, all of that. So, we need to get it all out, all out there. So now it's out there, and people are tracking with me on this one, and I don't know where we are in, timeline. is this an hour? Is it two hours? I don't know. It's an hour and a half something. I've actually executed this entire process in about 90 minutes and

John 18:08

Oh my gosh. wow.

Mark 18:10

Yeah.

John 18:11

I like the brainstorming sessions that kind of go on for a while, that you kind of have to say, "Okay, let's pause and go get a pizza real quick."

Mark 18:18

Yeah. for sure. And maybe it's sort of like a, "Hey, let's, you know, do a working lunch thing," as people kind of come up with more ideas and people are thinking and they scribble stuff down and stick it up. So that's good. So brainstorming.

John 18:28

All right, and now the, food is digesting now. We're starting to go from our creative right side of the brain. Now we're gonna start to move into step number four, which is organizing. So Mark, tell us how you've seen successful organization of these brainstorms. You mentioned all of the Ps. Is that kind of where you start?

Mark 18:48

you can start with it. There, there are in any planning exercise, particularly in the world that I operate in with, new business development, inevitably some of the buckets end up being sort of people, expertise or projects, that sort of thing. so those are some natural, who do we know, places, geographies, you know, all those are all some natural buckets. But honestly, I don't come into the room as either a facilitator or a participant with a ton of expectations around what buckets we're gonna come up with,

John 19:18

Okay

Mark 19:19

It's not important that someone makes sure that they flesh out these five specific buckets. That's not important. what is important is that we get enough information up on the board and then start organizing it into these different buckets so that it starts to make sense for people, and that you see the group aligning around the different buckets. Just the process of organizing and then starting to prioritize, 'cause those are two parts of this same step, right? So it's organizing and then prioritizing. We've got all these sticky notes. All of a sudden we have five or six different buckets or maybe 10 different buckets, and we've got three things in this bucket or 10 things in that bucket, whatever else. So we start to put things into groups or categories, and then we start to prioritize those different things within those different categories. maybe you've got 10 Post-it notes in this category over here that says people, and then, two people in the room are saying, "Oh, yeah, those two people that we put in that category right there, they are super important for the success of this. We can see how they're a priority." Great, let's put them at the top, right? Just right at the top. That's number one and number two, and then we start putting the other things down below it. So we literally are sort of now we, we've bucketed, and now we're starting to prioritize. So we're starting to put what's most important and what's, least important. So that's the other part of this step. Step number four is organizing and then prioritizing.

John 20:43

Awesome. And so then once everything's organized, all the ideas are in the right place, you've got all of the priorities in order, and so the next step is next actions. And this seems pretty straightforward, right? It's like, you know, who's doing what in the next 30, 60, 90 days or how would you overlay time on that? I guess that's kind of a curious question of mine.

Mark 21:04

I think it's important to look at this process as not just a one and done. I think this group that's in the room will need to come back together to, assess the actions that were assigned, see what everyone did, see the results of those actions, whether they were research or, conversations to be had or, whatever the ideas are. people need to come back together to report out what was done, analyze, the results of all of that, identify some new actions or maybe some new ideas come in, identify next actions and then set those next actions. So if I was in a room, and we had organized and prioritized, and then step number five is the, go and do stuff, I would say, "Okay, everybody that's in the room is going to pick one or two things that are a priority, in these different categories." It could be all the categories. It could be ones that are just relevant or important to you. Everybody's going to pick a couple things to go and do. I'm not assigning stuff as the facilitator. I'm going to say, you need to go pick it. Everybody go pick some next actions, and we're going to come back together in, let's say, four weeks, and everyone should be able to discuss the results." it could've been something that takes someone 20 minutes. It could be something that took two weeks to come together because you were playing phone tag with this person that you critically, needed to speak to, so all these different ideas that are up on these little Post-it Notes have different levels of complexity, and each one, there could be a one idea and one Post-it Note that has an entire Gantt chart of, activities associated with it.

John 22:37

That's what I'm thinking, that these could roll up to like quarterly rocks if we're using like an EOS term. You know what I

Mark 22:43

for sure. perfect for EOS. This is a fantastic way for anyone who uses the Entrepreneurial Operating System, this is a great way to pick 90-day rocks. Like these little Post-it notes are great because, all those rocks and things, that whole process, is also designed to, identify a specific goal and then have these 90-day periods of time where you're undertaking different actions to help you achieve that specific goal. so yeah, these are great with that. So,

John 23:08

So Mark, you've got a go and do for our listeners who maybe they're interested in, testing out this natural planning model. So what is this? you said it's a 30-minute exercise, so can you explain to our listeners what this is?

Mark 23:22

I think that, this can either be an individual exercise or this can be something that you do with a fairly small group. I do not believe that, anyone out there can execute this entire process with a large group of people in 30 minutes. That's really hard. I mean, you're gonna have a tough time getting people done with coffee and, the morning hellos in 30 minutes. Um, don't think you can execute this entire thing in 30 minutes. But I think an individual, if you just yourself want to try to plan something, you can do this in 30 minutes. or you and maybe a few other people can sit down and actually get this done in 30 minutes. so yeah, I think you can plan something in 30 minutes. whether it's, personally, you could be planning a vacation trip, or organizing, a home office or, launching a project. For a firm it could be, planning an offsite meeting, planning to plan, right? a modest, project or, like a website refresh. Maybe just not an overhaul, but maybe we just, "Oh, this little... There... We've gotta change these couple little things." Right? So I'm gonna sit down with these two other people that are involved in this whole process. Let's just sit down and let's just run through a planning process real quick, right? So it's our five steps. Just do three minutes and say, "Why are we doing this?" One or two sentences. Why are we doing this? What's the point of this? so if someone, maybe our boss comes back to us, There's the three of us, we're doing this little planning exercise. They come back to us, say, "Why are you doing this?" It's like, "This is why." And they say, "Oh, yeah. Got it. Good. Good." push for the real reason, not the obvious one. So why are you really doing this? Get that down. Be quick. You can be sharp with it. Vision. what does wild success look like? I mean, literally, if you're doing like a refresh of a section of your website, it's like, what does it look like? What are the elements that are gonna, what's it gonna do? What's it, like, there you go.

John 25:01

What's the impact on search performance, right? what's the conversion rate increase? Yep, exactly

Mark 25:06

yeah. Boom. So that's, that should be really, really clear in everybody's head. It should be a shared vision, right? Brainstorming. Get our Post-it notes and just, just go. You know, it needs to be blue, it needs to be big, it needs to, use this technology, it needs to function this particular way, it needs to, meet these metrics, whatever, right? We're kind of on the website thing, but it could be anything, right? You know, your offsite meeting, and it's like, it has to be somewhere sunny, like, whatever. Brainstorming, eight minutes. Dump every single idea. There could be questions, concerns, any, any of that. put it all out there on the table. the whole thing here is this natural planning model is designed to just get everything that's flowing out of your brain, just the ideas that are knocking around in your skull to get that stuff out, right? It's designed, this is a wide open exercise. So eight minutes. Where are we now? Three minutes, four minutes, seven minutes, eight minutes. All right, 15 minutes brainstorming. Get the stuff out. Go, go, go, right? Organize, five minutes. Take your Post-it notes and move them around. You know, if it's a small exercise, you're not gonna have 20 different buckets. You're gonna have a handful of buckets. This is what we do first, or this is the technical bucket, or this is the aesthetic bucket, or whatever. There you go, five minutes. Look at the brainstorm that you have, the cluster of ideas, all you have on the wall. There's pink Post-it notes and yellow Post-it notes and everything else. Get them all moving around. That should take you five minutes. And then the last five minutes, which brings us to 30, is what's the next actual physical action? What are we gonna do next, right? For each cluster, is there one or two ac- activities or exercises that we're gonna do right now? Right? Leave the meeting. This take, it has taken you 30 minutes, you know, so we're only half past the hour, right? By the top of the hour, you could have executed on one or two of these things. so call this person, set this particular thing up, you know, whatever it is. There's our last five minutes. That takes us back to the top

John 27:05

Well, Mark, wait a minute. That's, by my count, that's 25 minutes

Mark 27:09

I wasn't doing my math right on this one. maybe I was in that you just get the five minutes that are extra bonus minutes, or maybe it's just flex time or something like that. So who knows? all right, there you go. So 25 or 30 minutes. I would be shocked if someone could get this thing done in 30, but, why not? Give it a go, right?

John 27:26

sprint, right?

Mark 27:27

yeah, it's a sprint, and honestly, I think we take way too long doing all this planning stuff, because anybody who's ever been involved in the planning process, creating the plan, putting all the stuff in the three-ring binder, all that sort of stuff knows that, you know, it doesn't mean a darn thing the until you actually get stuff done, right? Until you ac- actually kind of get out there and execute on it. So

John 27:50

I see what you did there

Mark 27:51

See what I did there? Yeah. Get things done. All right. John, there's the natural planning model from David Allen. Like I said, he didn't write a big, huge book on it, but it's definitely in his book, "Getting Things Done," GTD. and that is, a good book for, for many, many reasons, but it's a nice, simple process and, and I also mentioned that there's a bunch of other resources out there where people can kind of dig into it. So as people consider how to plan, this is a simple model that's not gonna take three days. It doesn't require putting 20 people in a room and, you know, hours and hours and endless hours of, you know, billable time. this is something that can be done quickly, and, I think it's really, I think it's really effective

John 28:36

Awesome. Well, I learned a ton just from planning for this episode, Mark. This has been an awesome conversation. I know our listeners, got some value out of this. Hopefully, some of them go out and do that 30-minute test, and hopefully folks, if the folks are listening to this podcast episode, aren't already following the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts, hit us up, follow the show, give us a rating, a review. We'd love to hear from you. And Mark, until next time

Mark 29:07

Thanks, John. Until next time