“Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.” – Jim Rohn.
With the end of 2024 rapidly rolling around, its time to set your company up for a great 2025. That all begins with setting the right focus, and focus begins with a clear game plan. This post will give you guidance on how to set your 3-year game plan, along with the tools to do it.
🏆 Why you need a 3-Year Game Plan
Scaling is hard. Most who could, fail to scale. You notice patterns when you spend 20-years helping founders scale. One of the patterns that stand out is this: most fail to scale, because they fail to execute, because they lack the system and discipline to execute well. If you want to have a great 2025, its time to fix that. Get great at executing.
See our Blog Series on Execution here, for more. What you will learn there is: the first Discipline of Execution is achieving extreme focus, and the 3-year game plan is the beginning of extreme focus. That’s why this Series will double down on the critical foundation for execution: a winning game plan.
A 3-year game plan is the lynchpin between abstract strategy and concrete action; it transforms lofty ambition into a concrete approach to achieve it; it ensures the goals of every quarter and every week of every team and person work towards the larger vision, driving consistent progress toward ultimate goals.
🧱 The Core Elements of a 3-Year Game Plan
Your game plan must include 3 elements to effectively translate strategy into action:
-
- Winning Moves: Identify the 2–3 strategic initiatives that will transform your business over the next three years. In light of market and business situation, trends and changes, what 2-3 major plays will give the most powerful and lasting edge to your business? Examples include: launching a new product line, expanding into a new market, adopting a new technology, locking in a proprietary distribution channel, or achieving operational excellence.
- A Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG): A singular, clear, compelling, and ambitious three-year goal that will change the game for your business, rallies your team and maintains extreme focus.
- Execution Blueprint: Break your BHAG into the Wildly Important Goals (WIGs) you must achieve across your People, Operations, Product, Customer and Finance domains, in order to achieve your BHAG. These WIGs get delegated to your leadership team so you are working together to achieve your BHAG.
🤝 The Payoff: Freedom and Focus
When you master the 3-year game plan, two incredible things happen: first, you move from relentless, frenetic busyness, to productive business scaling. Hard work starts translating into the outcomes that matter most, and a bigger, better business.
Second, you get your life back! You get to say no to everything that’s not in your Execution Blueprint, so your whole leadership team is more effective, with more balance and flow and less drama and stress.
Use the quieter period over December and January to define your 3-year game plan.
🛠️ Tools to Propel Your 3-Year Game Plan
Here are some resources to help you::
-
- The Art of Scale Book: Dive into Chapter 20 for a deep dive into the disciplines of execution and the principles of a successful 3-year game plan.
- The Game Plan E-Book: Download our free 3-Year Game Plan e-book and workbook on ArtOfScale.io (see Tools).
- AoS BHAG GPT Tool: Struggling to define your Big Hairy Audacious Goal? Use our Custom GPT BHAG tool to craft a compelling, strategic vision that inspires and aligns your team.
🚀 Services to Boost Your Business Strategy
Need help? Contact Wayne@Artofscale.io to explore help from one of our seasoned CEO coaches. Here are some workshops we facilitate to guide your team to set winning strategies and plans:
-
- Strategy Workshop: Define a winning competitive strategy that harnesses your unique strengths to dominate a market niche.
- 3-Year Game Plan Workshop: Build a tailored 3-year game plan.