2015 Planning Begin At 50,000 Feet

Developing the Next Generation of Rainmakers 2015 Planning: Begin at 50,000 Feet I am continuing my reposts on how lawyers I coached prepared their 2012 business and personal plans. As in the other blog posts. I have changed the year from 2012 to 2015. As you will see below, Squire Patton Boggs  partner, Kevin O’Neill  uses  David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach. Kevin tells me he is still using the approach he wrote about three years ago. Through my work with Cordell, I am a big fan of the Getting Things Done (GTD) series of books by David Allen, and they are very helpful in the process of developing my business plan. The GTD principles compare your planning and implementation to an aviation system with different altitudes from “runway” duties (the literal next step tasks needed to move the project forward) to the 50,000 foot-level where you are focused on the mission and vision for your life. I’ve adapted the GTD principles to my own needs in developing long-term goals and objectives of which a business plan is just one element. So working down from 50,000 feet, begin by understanding who you want to be and what you want to become. My vision and guiding principles have been in place for 15 years and will remain the focus for who I want to be professionally and personally. If you don’t have the vision and principles in place, planning for the year will be difficult to conceive and implement. The next level down (40,000 feet) define your roles in daily life. For me, those 2012 roles are Husband, Father, Friend, Self, Citizen, Attorney, Manager, Leader and the nature of each of those roles are evolving over time. That’s true at work where my roles as Attorney, Manager, and Leader in 2012 are different than what they were in 2008 or 2010. It’s true outside of work as well, because what my wife, children, and friends need in 2012 is not the same as prior years. You must spend some time thinking about what you would define as success for each of these roles in 2015. You also must consider how you are going to allocate the 8,760 hours you have in a year between these roles because we know the hours spent succeeding as “Attorney” often come out of the time we wish we had for “Father” or “Friend.” My final “business” plan for 2015 will have a page for items related to “personal issues” to go with a page on purely “business issues.” Both pages are taped to my desk where I can see them everyday and highlight the subgoals as they are accomplished. Keeping the personal and professional together and in front of me makes it easier to make sure work won’t swallow my real life over time. Also, this the part where discussion with your significant other is key â€" you can’t have support for a plan that’s not shared and accepted. At 30,000 feet are your multi-year goals â€" these are the mileposts to making your long-term vision a reality. For lawyers, we have lots of multi-year goals we are working towards: make partner, make equity partner, have a book of business worth $x, write a book on my topic of expertise, etc. Your personal life is full of those goals as well: Get married, have children, send your parents on vacation to Europe, buy a home, retire with $x in the bank, etc. Do you have these goals on paper somewhere? They don’t have to be in your 2012 business plan but they should exist on paper somewhere even if you have to write them as part of this year’s business plan development process. Are there elements of your work/personal plans for 2012 that you can point to and say “this is helping me reach the multi-year goal of [fill in the blank]?” Lower down, at 20,000 feet, you have the various publics to whom you are responsible: clients, partners and colleagues at work, family, friends, your church, and yourself at home. There’s lots of turbulence at this level because the needs of these people are ever-changing and that alters your obligations to them. Do you know who is being served by each of the goals in your business plan? Professionally, what are your clients expecting you to do in 2015 that they would define as success and is that in your plan? In my 2015 business plan, every client I currently have could read the plan, point to a specific bullet and say “That’s what you are trying to do for me next year” yet only about 25% of the bullets in the business part of the plan are specifically focused on current client goals. At 10,000 feet, you have projects, defined broadly as anything requiring more than one step to accomplish. Most clients will have lots of projects over the course of a year (Ex: association conference where I will speak, legal memo that needs to be researched and written, etc.) but none of those projects are likely to be something you want in a business plan. The same is true with the “runway” or next-step tasks needed to move forward on various projects. Yes, you are going to have to implement your business plan via projects and tasks but that level of detail is for a project/task list not a business plan. Keep the plan focused on measuring success for the coming year and how that success will help you achieve longer-term personal and professional goals. In developing my plan, I try to follow a few rules: In the end, what I have is a series of documents. I practiced law for 37 years developing a national construction law practice representing some of the top highway and transportation construction contractors in the US.