How do you plan for a new year?
We are a residential and commercial cleaning company. We have about 24 staff including office staff. How do you structure your annual planning sessions. How much do you share with your team? Do yo...
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Great question! For our annual planning, I like to start with a big-picture review of the past year—what worked, what didn’t, and where we want to grow. Before meeting with the team, I outline draft goals for revenue, profit, and operational improvements, so we have a clear direction.
In our team sessions, we celebrate wins first to set a positive tone, then share high-level goals like growth targets and key initiatives. I involve office staff to represent the team, gathering their insights on challenges and opportunities—they often see things I don’t! Transparency is important, so I share goals that motivate, like how growth benefits them (better tools, new opportunities) without overwhelming them with too much financial detail.
We track key metrics to measure success—things like client retention, job profitability, and team productivity—and focus on small, actionable steps to hit big goals. It’s all about breaking it down and keeping everyone aligned. The most important thing? Consistency in revisiting those goals throughout the year and celebrating milestones along the way.
Would love to hear how your planning sessions work!
We have some simiarities. And completely agree with the consistency. One thing that helps us immensly is all of our tasks in Jobber. Everyone sees everyone's and this way there isn't an overlap of work and we all know who does what. This keeps us very consistent.
I agree 10000%! I tend to be the bottleneck in my organization, often duplicating the work of my Admins and I've really had to take a step back - I did literally everything for the first 6 years of the business so I've had to learn how to stay in my lane! I focus on loading the front end - creating content and promotions that I run and then let everyone else do their tasks and I check the results on the back end. By focusing my energy on the higher level tasks, it's helped us all to function much smoother and more consistently!
