The End of My Five Year Plan

Sandenn

2024-04-02

Digital Strategy,Entrepreneur,Online Marketing

There is something called the lifeline exercise. It’s not revolutionary, but like most things in life, the results can be pretty outstanding if you take the time and pour effort, focus, honesty and emotion into it.

Well, in 2019, just before the birth of my son Jack, I had a completed lifeline exercise in hand. The goal was to be happy in my home and make enough money to feel secure and to feel like I was moving forward. The measurement or inflection point I had set up for this target future was the deck of my suite at Animal Kingdom Lodge, where I could drink coffee and look at giraffes with my kid happily playing beside me.

I was fortunate enough to realize that goal last March, and the picture above shows the realization of that goal. But what do we do afterward? As much as this article is me deconstructing a goal-setting activity for you, it’s also my way of working through the creation of my next five-year strategic plan and choosing which balcony I’ll be having a coffee on in another five years.

Reverse Engineering

What I liked about the life-line exercise was that it essentially took my favourite exercise, Reverse Engineering, which I like to run with clients , and asked you to pick a moment, describe it, and then figure out how you will get there.

When I work with clients on Reverse Engineering goals and building strategic plans, I use these kinds of mile markers to ensure that we can keep some goal in mind and then create an action plan to get there. For me, Animal Kingdom Lodge offered some easily reverse-engineered goals that I was able to track against simply by doing a Google search and some math:

Cost of the accommodation
A well-adjusted and thriving 5-year-old
A wife who I love spending time with
And I could go on that trip without worrying about work or what awaited me when I returned.

This might not seem like a lot to build a 5-year-plan around but you’d be surprised about everything that needed to be in place to achieve those 4 objectives.

From There to Here...

It wasn’t a matter of pulling the trigger on the vacation, which I was happy to do. A huge journey brought me there.

Consider how you can use this end-state mentality to build your strategic plans. You could do this from now until retirement, but unless you’re staring down the barrel of retirement, I recommend no more than five-year increments. Otherwise, it is hard to keep actions out of the abstract, and the core of any good strategic plan is measurable steps that you can take.

Determine the financial requirements of the person who is standing on that balcony.
1. If your vacation budget (average 10-20% of annual income) can afford the view, what is the annual income that makes that possible?
2. What’s the difference between what you make today and that target number?
3. What skills or career will enable you to make that level of income?
Look at your personal life, or buckets, as our good friends at Leaders Forums would say.
1. Who is standing with you?
2. What do you need to do to ensure that the relationship you want with that fellow balcony member is what you want it to be?
3. Do you even know who these people are yet?
4. What would it mean if the person you want to be there wasn’t?
Look at yourself. What is running through your head at that moment, in that spot?
1. How do you feel about yourself?
2. Are you able to relax?
3. Is this a rare instant of calm, or is it the norm?
4. If you were to look in the mirror, would you smile?

This is a good place to start. As you answer these questions, some of the answers may result in much bigger life changes than going to Disney World in the spring of year five. For example, I knew that to reach my revenue target, my arts degree wasn’t cutting it. So, I enrolled and got my MBA. It hasn’t had the effect that I was hoping for, but I can see that the barriers to many of the income targets I had started to remove themselves. For others, I am considering whether I can earn the income I seek in this next plan in the area I currently live in. A move to a new city, town or even country has much larger implications than where you go on vacation, but reverse engineering from the balcony can make you ask the questions that are core to understanding what you need to do to achieve your desired future state.

If You're a Business Owner, Leader, Elected Official

If you are an entrepreneur, a member of a council, or a leader in your company or community, these objectives will have a lot to do with factors outside of your direct control. This is where we get into the realm of systems and processes. Not that systems are not useful for individuals; they are and will be another post. However, when the activity of others directly influences your revenue or success, it is critical that you understand the use of accountability and responsibility systems and processes, which are critical for you to reach that balcony.

My recommendation is to develop an organizational chart for the future. For instance, to take 10 days off and not be stressed about work, someone in the organization needed to be able to handle my activities while I was gone. In my personal consulting business, I needed to ensure I got my own stuff done, but in Contendo, it was great to see other team members take on activities like invoicing and using our communications infrastructure to avoid siloing work and people getting stuck.

If you’re running a business or community, look at your desired end state and identify the jobs that facilitate that end state. Chances are that either entirely new positions will be required, or the current positions will significantly increase responsibilities. So, how do you support those added stresses? Are there technologies that can be adopted to automate current or future tasks?

Conclusion

I am determining where that next balcony is. I know my dream now for Jack, Mallory, and me has less to do with one specific balcony than it does with being able to experience the world while we are young and gaining the perspective of experiencing new cultures, locations, lifestyles, and calling more places home. I also have determined that I hate Canadian winters, so that’s going to factor in.

If you want to chat about your balcony, I am always happy to do so on a free discovery call. And, of course, if you want to help us both get to our next balcony, we can always work together. 😉

Cheers,
SK

Author

Sandenn Killoran

That Guy, I know He’s the Worst