An annual plan is a core component of many successful companies, but creating one can be a challenging task. Without a clear annual plan, team members may lose sight of long-term goals, neglect to reflect on the previous year, and fail to agree on key objectives and milestones.
Here are five tips to implement into your annual planning process so that your meetings will run more smoothly and your company is on the right track toward growth and success.
Table of Contents:
- What Is an Annual Plan?
- Benefits of an Annual Plan
- Critical Meetings of Annual Planning
- 5 Tips for Improving Your Annual Plan
- How Ninety Approaches Annual Planning
What Is an Annual Plan?
An annual plan is a comprehensive road map that aligns your leaders, departments, and individual team members toward the same goal. When creating an annual plan, the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) should evaluate the previous year, discuss key issues, and set goals for the next year.
When an annual plan is established, team members are incentivized to create results-based outcomes that push the company toward growth.
Benefits of an Annual Plan
As your organization grows, it’ll become more difficult to align your business goals across teams. An annual plan is a way to give everyone perspective, guidance, and clarity on the future of your organization.
Aligning Goals
An annual plan keeps everyone focused on the same goal. It can be difficult for leadership teams to communicate the overall goals of the company in a way that reaches individual employees. By creating an annual plan and aligning your goals, you keep everyone on the same page. Some of the questions you can ask when establishing your goals include:
- What will the market do in the coming year?
- What lessons can we learn from the past year?
- How can we learn from the things outside of our control?
Gaining Perspective
If a company isn’t growing, it’s dying. Every business should continuously work toward growth. When your organization isn’t growing, it’s moving toward an inevitable decline.
Annual planning is the time when your team can gain perspective on your organization’s position. If it's growing, how can you strengthen that process? What can you do to take advantage of that growth period? What changes can you make to sustain that growth and improve upon it in the next year?
If your business isn’t growing, this is the time to ask what changes need to be made. Do we have the right people in the right seats? What are the lessons we need to learn from the previous year?
Improving Team Coordination
An annual plan makes sure everyone is focused on the same objective. From SLT to individual team members, everyone is aware of what the organization is working toward in the coming year and focused on contributing to the success of the company.
This opens up avenues for team members to help each other on significant projects, give their insights on how the company can grow, and provide their valuable skills and expertise to overcome any issues that may slow down or prevent the accomplishment of the organization’s goals.
When everyone on the team prioritizes the company vision and is working toward the same desired outcome, the chance for success becomes much greater.
Establishing Desired Outcomes
Your annual plan should primarily focus on 1-year and 3-year goals. These goals should be clear, consistent, and have a tangible and measurable endpoint. Don’t think of just “growth.” Instead, consider how much larger you want your business to grow, the revenue you want to achieve, and what milestones you want to establish toward reaching these outcomes.
Keep in mind that these desired outcomes are set for the year and they should reflect all the information you’ve gained through analysis, reflection, and detailed planning.
Critical Meetings of Annual Planning
Effective annual planning involves members at every level of the organization meeting to review performance in the past while planning for the future. There are four critical meetings for annual planning. Each meeting helps your team align goals and develop focused objectives for the year.
Senior Leadership Team Annual Planning
The SLT meeting happens first. It’s recommended that the SLT take two full days for annual planning. During this meeting, the team should lock in their 3-year, 1-year, and 90-day goals.
Departmental Annual Planning
The next key meeting is the departmental Annual Planning Meeting. This meeting should only take a day to complete. This is where each department comes together and lays out plans that should align with the company’s goals.
State of the Company
The quarterly State of the Company Meeting (SCM) is an organization-wide session in which the company’s 3-year and 1-year goals are reviewed. This meeting establishes transparency and ensures the team has a shared vision for the future.
The SCM is about more than just reporting numbers. It’s about acknowledging achievements and challenges and motivating the team to move forward toward greater goals.
Quarterly Planning Meetings
Quarterly Planning Meetings help the company stay on track with its goals. These meetings are when you establish your Rocks, which are quarterly goals that should help you reach your larger, annual goals.
In the day-to-day rush of getting work done, it can be easy to lose sight of long-term goals or get distracted by new opportunities. Quarterly Planning Meetings allow us to bring those goals back to the forefront and see how well everyone in the organization is working toward them. This is the time to reflect, align, and make changes to keep the company pointed in the right direction.
5 Tips for Improving Your Annual Planning Framework
1. Review Your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT)
A SWOT analysis gives you more clarity on your business as a whole. This analysis is meant to bring awareness to the internal and external factors that impact your company’s growth.
- Strengths — These are the qualities that give your company value. Identify what sets you apart in your industry. Do you provide a product better than others in your field? Do you have incredible client relationships? Taking advantage of your strengths can be an effective way to further set your business apart in your industry.
- Weaknesses — It’s just as important to identify your weaknesses. Find out what reduces your company's value and prevents it from growing further. Consider things such as poor user reviews, slow production, and not meeting goals consistently.
- Opportunities — Your opportunities are areas of untapped potential. This could be a new product or subscription model for your company. It could be a potential acquisition or taking advantage of new technology.
- Threats — While weaknesses focus on internal things that may impact growth, threats are external factors that negatively impact the company. This can be anything from new competitors to higher material costs.
The key takeaways from your SWOT analysis should inform your annual plan. By strategically taking advantage of your strengths and opportunities while staying aware of your weaknesses and threats, you can create an annual plan that positions your company for significant growth.
2. Set Clear Goals
When setting annual goals, clarity is key. Outline 3–5 primary objectives that align with your company’s mission and are realistic, given your team’s resources. Consider using the SMART framework (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) to give structure to each goal. Clear goals make it easier for each team member to understand their role and contribute effectively.
3. Monitor Key Metrics
After you’ve established your goals, the next step is to start gathering data. Try to stay focused on your key objectives. Track your most important KPIs and see if things are trending in the right direction. If you spot areas that are underperforming, you can pivot or address them in your weekly and quarterly meetings.
4. Connect with Your Team
Accomplishing your goals as an organization is a group effort. Everyone has their part to play to help the company grow. Connect with your team members regularly to make sure they stay aligned on goals. During meetings, highlight key issues and discuss them with the team. By regularly checking in on everyone’s progress, you ensure everyone stays focused, aligned, and thriving.
5. Check In Regularly After Your Annual Planning Meeting
Annual planning isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it process. Check in regularly — ideally, weekly meetings are had to assess progress on quarterly goals. Quarterly meetings are held to establish new Rocks toward your annual planning goals. Market conditions, resources, and business priorities can change throughout the year, and making quarterly adjustments allows your team to stay aligned with overarching goals even as specific tactics shift.
How Ninety Approaches Annual Planning
Annual planning becomes much more manageable with the right process, tools, and knowledge. The Ninety platform provides you with the tools needed to streamline the annual planning process in a way that fits your business — from our Meetings tool that offers a customizable, pre-built agenda to our new Assessments tool that gives you benchmarks for your organization.
Get started in Ninety today.
