I don’t know about you, but this time of year, although busy leading up to Christmas, has me doing some strategic planning for next year and thinking about objectives, new products and what is and isn’t working!

Each business has very different ways for coming up with these strategies; planning days or even weekends with your team, brainstorming sessions, focus groups, working with a mentor/business coach. But the key is being able to create enough of a plan to focus on the business growth ideas that will propel your business and create achievable and realistic targets.

I love this tip from Julia Bickerstaff that I read today. She says: ‘After the ideas have flowed and just prior to prioritising the to do list, take all the ideas and put them into one of three buckets:

• Bucket 1) process improvements – doing what we do today, better.
• Bucket 2) new initiatives – growing new stuff for tomorrow.
• Bucket 3) stop doing – yesterday’s good ideas that are no longer a priority.

Ideas in bucket one take “doing” time, but because they are easier on the brain than ideas in bucket two they tend to get done. There is rarely anything in bucket three (yet).

So, now you want to revisit the volume of each bucket.

• Bucket one is likely to be bigger than bucket two but you need to check that there actually is some stuff in bucket two!
• You need to put some current stuff in bucket three to free the team up to work on bucket two.’

So have a think about what is going into your ‘buckets’ and let me know if it worked for you!