Thought Bubble - Robert Craven on 2021 Planning

VIDEO: 3:39 mins

AUTHOR: Robert Craven

If you're only going to watch one video this month, make sure it's this one. 2020 has been a disaster, but 2021 doesn't have to be. Listen to Robert talking about planning for next year, something that you need to be doing right now!

Transcription:

Robert Craven  00:00 

All right business planning 2021, you need to get on top of that you need to get on top of it right now for a whole series of reasons. Firstly, 2021 is post Black Friday is post Christmas. It's post this lockdown. It's post 2020. It's it's a new year, and not only for you, but for your clients, new plans, new ideas, new thoughts, new processes, new budgets for the larger agencies, larger businesses. So you need to be on top of that now. So how do you do this thing? Well, the first thing is you need to understand the where are we now please, you need to score yourself a finance marketing operations people and culture scores out of term returns a high school zeros a low score, you need to identify your strengths and your weaknesses. You so you need to do that. That final piece. 

Robert Craven  00:54 

 Secondly, you need to look at your products and services. And you need to look at your clients, which are the ones that are up on the rise, which are the ones that are on the fall, which the ones that are most profitable, which are the ones that are least profit, least profitable, you may end up with a two by two matrix on on the rise on the fall profitable unprofitable, you might want to start matching products and services and clients and then you're starting to get a bit more sophisticated about where, where the sweet spots are going to be. But this is all about talking and engaging with clients, you need to lots to understand exactly what their world looks like what they want to be doing in this new world. You need to be running. Projections for both cash and for profit and loss be absolutely clear the difference between cash and Profit and Loss and for your agency, you need to be totally up to speed in terms of the cash implications versus the profit and loss implications of what you're doing. Not over the year, but over the quarter. So you also need to be running a 12 week planning cycle the 12 week planning cycle quarter at a time not don't worry about the quarter at a time.  

Robert Craven  02:05 

So that you have the the launch of the of the section and you have the close and each time you're focusing people on what the targets are and achieving the targets and you're you're rewarding people according to the targets that they hit in that relatively short period of time. It means you keep keep people more on the ball. And more importantly, it means that your plan is relevant to what's going on outside you. 2020 has given us the opportunity to look at our agencies and really think through how clever our agency is in terms of what we're trying to deliver for our clients.  

Robert Craven  02:43 

It is the opportunity for you to reconfigure for you to reform for you to recreate for you to rethink what it is that your clients really want from you and how you go about delivering it. And many agencies have have literally thrown their cards up and decided that there is a different and a clever way of keeping their clients delighted and happy. The clue is that your clients probably don't want what they want in 2019. Of course they want it faster. Of course they want less like of course they want better value for money. But I also think the demand that they're putting on a digital agency is not the same as the demand that they were pre COVID I wish you luck and I look forward to speaking with you soon. Bye.