The evolution of our strategic plan has been remarkable – when we started in 2011 with just one person, it was very much ‘fly by the seat of my pants’. And even when we ventured into formalising our strategy in 2015 we certainly didn’t get it right the first time. In fact, on paper, you wouldn’t recognise us as the same company if you compared our 2015 to our current strategic plan.
We started with a grandiose moonshot goal that was something akin to ‘world domination of the HR scene’ (!?!), a brand promise that spread us thinly across every sector and industry, and our values were all the expected words of respect, honesty, integrity etc.
But I am not trying to be disrespectful of our 2015 efforts – we were intensely proud of it; it gave us the direction we needed; and it was a great starting place.
By 2018 it was clear that ‘world domination’ was in fact about as far from what we wanted to achieve as you could get; and by the end of 2019, the team had a breakthrough, light bulb moment when we identified that actually our moonshot goal – the big 10-year reach – should be moving towards our purpose (in particular having a positive impact). And so we set the target of having a positive impact on the working lives of 100,000 people by 2030.
This goal inspires the way we approach all thing people, leadership and strategy as we know that a positive impact can only be had when we practice what we preach. Our team helped set the target and now we’re on a mission to get there together!
We also wanted a way to make it really visual. One of our team, Jess, told us that there was this really cool thing called ‘BrickMe’ where you could get an image turned in to a lego design. So we got it made (they loved the idea at BrickMe too) and each red lego tile = 10 people positively impacted. So we can see our progress toward the moonshot goal with every tile, every row of red that we add.
Our team knows that the core elements of our strategy are not just pretty words, they are not just something to put on a wall, and not something that we only stick to when it is convenient.
Our message for every small business out there … you don’t have to get it perfect the first time, but if you never start, you will never get there. So this is our encouragement to you to take the leap, and start flexing your strategic thinking, not matter how large or small your business is. We’d love to be part of your journey too – talk to us if you would like to hear more.
~ Naomi Wilson