370. Hope is Not a Strategy - A 12-Week Q1 Planning Framework for Coworking Spaces
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370. Hope is Not a Strategy - A 12-Week Q1 Planning Framework for Coworking Spaces
00:00:00,"Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast where every week I keep you updated on the latest trends and how to's in coworking. I owned and operated coworking spaces for eight years and then served as the Executive Director of the Global Workspace association for five years and today I work with hundreds of operators and community managers every month, allowing me to bring you thought provoking operator case studies and inspirational interviews with industry thought leaders to help you confidently stay on top of what's important and what you can apply to your own role in the coworking industry."
00:00:43,"Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast. This is your host Jamie Russo. I hope you're having a great week. So I'm recording a little bit real time. Usually I like to record in advance, get some batching done, but you know, life it is the week of Thanksgiving in the US and I'm actually recording from the Meatpacking district in Manhattan, which I am staying in the tiniest hotel room I've ever stayed in, sharing it with my 13-year-old daughter and it's totally worth it."
00:01:19,"The views are spectacular. The views of the city are so amazing. I wish I could insert a little JZ and Alicia Keys. Right now is probably not legal so I won't, but we're having a little family time here before the holiday. We're actually flying back to California on Thanksgiving Day because there's no other day to fly during the holiday week. I refuse to be in the airports. I got to tour some coworking spaces today so a huge shout out to Kurt Patrick for touring me around the Tishman Spire location in Rockefeller Center."
00:01:57,"Fabulous right off of 5th Avenue where all the shopping is such a cool location. You can see the tree in Rockefeller Square from their beautiful common area. And Lizzie Shand gave me a tour of the Molin. I'd not been in a Moland and I was blown away. I am a giant fan of bougie coworking spaces and this one is the bougiest that I've ever seen. So we'll talk more about those details."
00:02:26,"Maybe some other time. And then I got to also see Luminary and thank you. A huge shout out to Kate, the owner who hooked me up with her team. Kate I don't think is in town and Holly gave me a wonderful tour of the space and the Luminary is really more than just a space and I love learning about, you know, unique business models. They have a beautiful community, they host live events."
00:02:49,"I hope that if you are enjoying holiday week and listening near Thanksgiving in the US that you're Having a great safe week with family and friends. So we talked a little bit last week about the fact that 2025 is right around the corner and talked a little bit about the idea of planning. So we're going to dive into that a little bit more today and talk about a framework that you might use."
00:03:14,"And this is my new favorite framework. So it's based on the idea of 12 week, a 12 week year. So that you don't you, you sort of plan for a full year, you're zooming out and thinking about where you want your business to go, but you're not trying to plan in detail and set really detailed goals for a full year. Now some of you may love to do this differently, but some of the the other frameworks like Traction, which is another one I love, it's based on EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system also essentially works on 12 week planning."
00:03:52,"I we've used Traction on and off. It's harder to use with a small team, so you might have found that as well. I know coworking spaces that do use it and they tend to get into it as they build their team and I tend to try really hard to 12 or to plan for the entire year and it's difficult, it doesn't go as well as I want it to."
00:04:15,"And we'll talk through some of those reasons and why this might also be a fit for you. So I want to start this episode by mentioning that that planning is one of those things that I actually struggle with because I am an action taker. And I mentioned in my last episode that I was so thrilled to get to know so many of the action takers in our money making mailbox challenge because people who set a goal and then take action to get there just have a lot of wins and it's, it's a great way to be if that's, you know, part of your personality and you're a business owner."
00:04:55,"The challenge sometimes with being an action taker, if you're me, if you, if you're like me, I just sometimes have trouble like slowing down to go faster, right? So slowing down, making a plan, setting clear goals, I just want to go, go, go. So I need accountability to get things planned. And so I love having a framework and doing it with others and really just like setting aside time to workshop through it with some accountability partners."
00:05:24,"So you guys are going to be my accountability partners this year. We've done this before, we did not do it last year, but we're going to do a Q1 20, 25 planning session. So in the past we've done like the whole year. We're not really going to spend a lot of time thinking about the full year, except for the fact that we're going to think about what are our kind of longer term goals and what are the first, you know, what are the first set of what is the first set of goals that we want to tackle to work towards that longer term goal, which might take you a year or it might take you longer, but we're going to really focus on Q1."
00:06:00,"So we have a planning session that we've scheduled for December 11th at 10am Pacific Time, 1pm Eastern Time. It's a Wednesday and we now have a registration page up. If you're on our email list. You got the invite today, which is awesome. And a whole bunch of you already signed up. So I'm so glad because again, you're my accountability partners as well. If you want to register, it's $7 until Monday, Cyber Monday and $47 after that."
00:06:30,"We're only doing a fee so that you show up. That's it. We just want you to feel committed. People who pay things commit. We're not this is not going to make us lots of money. We just want you to get this on your calendar and feel invested so you can go sign up and get the details at quarter. Sorry. Coworking quarterly. Com Love the alliteration Coworking quarterly dot com."
00:06:56,"You can sign up, pay your seven bucks through Monday and get that on your calendar and we will workshop you for 90 minutes through the framework. If you're in our community manager University program. If you're in some we sent out invites to some of our the folks who are automatically invited to this. So community managers who are in our programs and the coworking space owners who have their community managers in our program and our Mailbox Money Maker challenge."
00:07:25,"And we have a couple of other small groups that we work with who are getting invites. But if you are not in those groups and you want to register, we would love to have you join us. Coworkingquarterly.com and if you want to know what you're getting into or you just want to do this on your own, let's dive into what it looks like to leverage a 12 week year for coworking success in 2025."
00:07:50,"I should mention before we dive in, there is an entire book on this topic. It's called the 12 Week Getting More Done in 12 Weeks Than Others do in 12 Months. It's a big promise. It is by Brian Moran I have both the physical book and the audiobook. So it's a good listen if you just want to kind of get a sense for the framework and how they think about it."
00:08:10,"And then I bought the book because I wanted to have it as a reference. So we will put the link to that in the show notes. So let's dive in. Let's start with a why the 12 week year helps you shift your mindset from thinking in terms of a whole year, which for some of us can always mean there's always more time to hit our goals, to thinking in 12 week cycles, which creates more urgency and maybe more importantly more focus."
00:08:39,"I think a lot of entrepreneurs feel a sense of urgency, but they feel urgent around many different goals at the same time. So what we want to do is create urgency that is also paired with focus. So the other reason I think this is helpful is because our industry moves quickly so things can change really quickly in a quarter. I was just talking about this to somebody else."
00:09:02,"They're like a quarter. It's not a long time, but it is a long time because things can shift so much in terms of buying cycles, membership cycles, et cetera. And so it's good to sort of reset every 12 weeks and figure out where is your business at, what's going on in your particular business or market and adjust as necessary every 12 weeks versus setting annual goals. And then, you know, not being very adept at changing our industry moves pretty quickly."
00:09:35,"It could be marketing campaigns, membership growth or rolling out new services like virtual mail. Shorter planning cycles can allow us to adjust to these market demands and just kind of avoid overwhelm because we're all working with smaller teams than we'd like to be. So it's good to stay focused and create really specific goals that our team can actually execute on. So setting these clear 12 week goals and executing on them with focus can help you get more done."
00:10:06,"That's the goal. So here's how it works. So you're going to start with a vision. So I mentioned we are going to start with a longer term vision because goals don't. You shouldn't have goals like in a vacuum. They should be part of where you want to be. So you might be thinking where do I want to be in three years and then what do we want to accomplish in a year in order to get that done?"
00:10:28,"And then what are we going to pick from that list that should. We should start with and get done in the next 12 weeks? And here's the challenge. This is going to be Hard. And you might need the accountability that I do on this set two to three goals for the 12 weeks. They need to be specific and measurable and they need to be get doneable. That's my addition."
00:10:51,"So I have trouble with this. And I'll tell you, I, I play around sometimes. I use Asana for most things like in terms of actually managing tasks and our team uses it to communicate and manage projects with each other. But I also will use Google Sheets for things. And I think the first time I put my Google sheet together for 12 weeks, it had like nine things on it."
00:11:17,"And the amount, the resources I would need to get the things done I wanted to get in 12 weeks was ridiculous. Nine things, it's too many. So this goes back, I did an episode I probably a couple of months ago. I'll link to it in the show notes about kicking soccer balls down the field. So that might resonate with you. And do you want to kick a bunch of soccer balls down the field and it takes a long time to get to the goal and get it into the goal or do you want to kick one soccer ball down the field, make the goal go back for the next one?"
00:11:49,"So the 12 week approach is really around two to three soccer balls. Those are going in a goal. You know, you're not going to show up at the end of three months and have nine soccer balls and none of them gotten the goal. That's not what we're looking for. So if you crave a little bit of focus and you want to see those three soccer balls go in the goal, then this approach is for you."
00:12:13,"And again, it's not easy. I struggle with this for sure. So again, that's why I like accountability. I like a process. I like my team to not, you know, make sure I'm getting, getting out over my skis. And then you break those goals into weekly and even daily actions. I think daily is a little bit aggressive, I don't go that far. But weekly 100% because it's only 12 weeks."
00:12:35,"And so part of the you can do this in Asana and sometimes I just kind of play with it in Google sheets and I lay out the 12 weeks and the three goals and I just literally go through what are we going to do each week, what has to get done each week to get there. And for me that's like such a good visual and you can upload that into Asana."
00:12:54,"If you start with Excel or Google Sheets, you can throw that into Asana and kind of line it up with actual Dates, which is nice. And then, so, okay, so we're visioning three years, one year specific goals for our next 12 weeks. What's the plan? By week, and then we're going to execute. So then you're just committing to showing up every day. The beautiful thing about this is if you're a space owner listening to this, you have team members who can to some extent help with these projects."
00:13:22,"They have day to day responsibilities, so they have to get those things done first. But they do have time for special projects generally. Or if somebody on your team, maybe it's a contractor, maybe it's not your location team who can work on special projects, they can't sneak those special projects into slower times if they don't know what they are and they aren't clear on what their weekly actions are."
00:13:45,"And another great reason to do it weekly is because maybe some days they're not going to get to these things at all. But if they know in a week what their goal is and what their reasonable action is, they could block a little bit of time off, maybe get away from the front desk a little bit and work on them. Or again, maybe you're outsourcing this to a team member who's not sitting at your front desk."
00:14:05,"But then you have just real clarity around what you want them to get done each week and what success looks like. And then speaking of clarity and success, you just want to track it. Okay, so what are we getting done each week? And this is where the accountability piece is really helpful. Meet with your team members or meet with your contractor, somebody who's paying attention to what you're getting done each week and calling you out on it if you're not."
00:14:28,"Or you can call them on it. You can mutually call each other out. If you don't have that check in, then you can go way off the rails. Right? It can be, you're three weeks in, you only have 12 weeks and you've done nothing on two of the three goals and you've let other little things become urgent, you've gotten distracted, maybe you put another goal on the spreadsheet."
00:14:48,"So accountability can be really, really important. I do that with my team in weekly meetings. We don't have a full team weekly meeting, but I meet with each person weekly. Might only be a half hour, but it gives us a chance to go through what we're working on and just make sure we keep things moving. Sometimes I will either even create tasks in asana for me and co assign them with somebody else who I know will keep Me on track."
00:15:15,"Carla, on my team, is that person for me. Sometimes I have to co assign her to things that I have to get done so she makes sure that they get done. Okay, so how, what might this specifically look like in your coworking business? Let's try to keep it real. So let's say your long term vision is to increase your occupancy to 85 or 90%. So this would be a stabilized business."
00:15:40,"Maybe you're fairly new or maybe you just haven't gotten there yet. It can take a year, it can take 18 months, it could take two years. So your goal is to get there 85 to 90% occupancy and you want, and you want to build a profitable virtual mailbox program. You know, I love that example. Those are awesome goals. They're too big to tackle all at once. I know, I know you want to do both of those things right now."
00:16:06,"I totally get it. You want those results right now. You can't. If you try to tackle them both at once, you will not do either of them very well. Those soccer balls are not going in the goal. So for your first 12 week sprint, focus on two simple goals related to your bigger goals. Increase occupancy by 10%. Add 15 new virtual mailbox clients. Spend the 12 weeks figuring out what are the processes that work to accomplish those goals and then repeat for the next three quarters."
00:16:41,"So you have to again go a little bit slow to then go fast. Because if you can figure out what's the flywheel that increases my occupancy by 10% or gets me those 15 new virtual mailbox clients, then you can just put it on repeat and then you can add a new goal to the sheet. Okay, so you're probably thinking, how do we do this? How do we make this happen?"
00:17:05,"So that's where you put your tactical plan in place. So again, just kind of going with this example of occupancy, you want to increase occupancy. Your weekly actions might include running Facebook ad campaigns, hosting free co, working a day, a week, even a month, sending follow up emails to warm leads from your CRM. Maybe it's making sure your team's using your CRM that is a common complaint. I think I talked about that in the app last episode as well."
00:17:34,"So it might be these three simple weekly actions and the one of actually you might even have to step even further back. What if you're going to run your own Facebook ads and you don't know how to run Facebook ads? Then maybe the 12 week goal is learn how to run Facebook ads. Maybe you're going to get one up in the 12 weeks. You probably could do it a little faster."
00:17:55,"But let's just say for example, I'm going to, I'm going to learn how to do it, I'm going to take a class, I'm going to test it and I'm going to figure this out. And then I will use it to increase occupancy. So it might even be dialing it back that much. And then you're going to pick a couple of other tactics like the free coworking, like the bring a friend and such and like making sure that your CRM is being fully used."
00:18:22,"And you're going to focus on those and look at the results those bring and evaluate those results. For virtual mail, your weekly actions might be adding a pop up on your website with a deal. It might be adding a referral partner. It might be optimizing your landing page. These are the things that your landing page, by the way, shout out to Christine who pointed out that not everybody knows what a landing page is."
00:18:50,"A landing page is a page on your website that is dedicated to a service. So you might have on your main navigation virtual mail, virtual officer, digital mail, whatever you call it when you click on that and then we see a page that has all the detailed information about that service, that's your landing page. So you might start optimizing that landing page. So I think you get it each week you're going to know what to focus on."
00:19:15,"You are not going to sit there and chase squirrels. You're not going to add new things to the list unless the 12 weeks are over and you're planning for the next 12 weeks. So here are a few things that you want to think about while you're working on this system. Because any new system takes a little practice and you won't be great at it at first maybe. But if you like this idea, try it again."
00:19:42,"I think the biggest mistake folks make, including yours truly, is too many goals on that list. Really you would just want to try for two to three goals and keep them simple. So the occupancy and the virtual mail are examples. Don't go crazy. You're not, you're not going to build the virtual mail business that you're gonna have in three years and 12 months, just be or 12 weeks just because you focus on, you're gonna create the processes that build that business over time."
00:20:12,"Same with occupancy. So 2 to 3 goals for your 12 week sprint. If you do too much, you won't be successful at any of them. Make sure you're second. Make sure you're tracking your progress. So create a little scorecard. Whatever you KPI tracker, whatever it is that you use with your team. By the way, I probably said this before on other episodes, but my favorite tip is if you, the entrepreneur, don't fill out that scorecard, you, the entrepreneur, do not have to fill out the scorecard because maybe it's not ever going to get done."
00:20:44,"If it's your job, assign a team member to do it. So if you have weekly calls with your team, maybe your community manager does it, maybe you have a VA that does it. This data should be easy to pull from your systems. So if everybody knows what the goals are, you just set up a little simple scorecard and someone else pulls the data. That's what I do because I won't do it myself."
00:21:05,"Too busy taking action. And finally try to find an accountability partner. So this can be someone on your team, this can be someone in your network, this can be a contractor. It doesn't need to be somebody who works with you full time. It could be somebody in a membership you're in. It can be a business coach, it can be just somebody who you're setting a calendar date with to have that accountability."
00:21:29,"So I will share that. What we would like to do is host these planning sessions once a quarter. So if you like the process, and we're testing because we have never done it once a quarter before, but we're planning to do that with our community manager team because they we want them to be focused on a couple things at a time so that we can really help them drive results against a couple things that they want to get done in their business or that they want to learn in the membership."
00:21:57,"So we're planning to open up that planning session to you, assuming this goes well and you like it, and we think it makes sense to do it again. So that's not weekly accountability, but you could put the planning session in your calendar and know what's coming up and use that as some accountability to really try to follow it and then be ready to set your next couple of goals in the next quarter."
00:22:22,"So just a couple of things you want to have in place before you start. Nothing fancy, but probably a project management system, Trello, I think, has a free version that you can use for a while. I think Asana is free for a while. We pay for it at this point. But an Asana, a Trello, it can be spreadsheets and you just, you know, kind of keep track of or to some extent your CRM might be able to manage it."
00:22:48,"CRM is really for sales funnel tasks. So I probably don't do that, just use Asana or Trello. But you could start with a free version. Keep it simple and make sure your goals are documented and that you have weekly tasks that get added to that project management system. Even if you can do it in advance, if you can lay out the 12 weeks again, I have a hard time with this because I just want to go right, I want to start, I don't want to spend time planning."
00:23:17,"But that's where the payoff happens, is in the planning. Because then everybody's pointed in the same direction and is very clear and we go, don't get distracted. Because this is a great industry for getting distracted, right? Something new pops up, something happens in the business. Of course you're going to need to react sometimes, but you still want to be really focused on the things that you've identified proactively as what you want to manage in your business."
00:23:43,"Have the scorecard. So before you even start the 12 weeks, don't do it in week three, start the scorecard. What are the actions that you're going to take and keep track of those and the accountability. Get your plan in place for how you're going to manage that. Okay, so just to recap a little bit here, the 12 week year is all about focus, urgency, execution on a couple of things at a time."
00:24:07,"Instead of feeling overwhelmed by year long goals and feeling like that's totally fine, we didn't hit it that month, we got the whole year, you know what I'm saying? You might have revenue goals, you might have membership goals, that's okay, we got the whole year, we'll make it up when. So you might have to do that of course, because of real Life, but the 12 year gives you really real focus and helps you try to create that urgency to hit those goals within that 12 week, even if you have an off week."
00:24:35,"So break them into 12 week sprints and take clear, measurable steps towards your goals. So for coworking space operators, this method is also really great because it aligns with what is really kind of a fast moving industry and helps you to prioritize the goals that matter the most. So not all the goals, but the ones that matter the most and really drive towards your primary goals the most, which might be filling, you know, you're adding occupancy, launching new services or you know, improving member retention so you can do this on December 11th with us coworkingquarterly.com"
00:25:15,"or take a few minutes after you listen to this episode and outline your vision for 2025 and then pick two to three goals to focus on in your first 12 week sprint. If you want some accountability, share it with us, send us an email, put it in the Facebook group. We would love to hear what your goals are and that you're trying the 12 week approach. And again I'll put the link to the planning session in the show notes and the 12 week book and there's again there's an audio version if that works better for you."
00:25:47,"So thanks for spending time with me today. Thanks for spending time anytime you listen to the podcast, we love to have you along for the ride and we'd love to see you in the planning session if you can join us if you want to join us. And if not, just make sure you sit down and tackle this on your own in any way that works for you. The 12 week process may not work for you."
00:26:09,"You may have another way that you like to get this done, but plans are really important. Tell your entrepreneurial self to chill out and spend some time planning for the future. It also makes you easier to deal with for your team. Teams do not like uncertainty, right? That's they're not entrepreneurs because they like to know what's coming. They like a plan, they like to that they have projects that they can make progress on."
00:26:34,"They like to know what the goals are for the business and if you don't lay that out for them, it's less rewarding for them. So if you can do it with the team and I should mention the planning session, bring the team, bring anybody. For our community managers, we're encouraging the space owners to come as well so that everybody's aligned on the goals. So the more the merrier."
00:26:55,"You do not have to pay seven bucks for everybody. Somebody should just pay the seven dollars and put it in the calendar and then share the link with your team. We again, we just want you to be invested and show up so you do not need to buy a seat for each person. Definitely not. You can sit in a meeting room and do it together. You can each be on your own, Zoom, you can tag team, whatever works for you."
00:27:18,"Anyway, we'd love to see you. Happy Thanksgiving for those in the US and we'll see you same time, same place next week. Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you like what you heard, tell a friend, hit that subscribe button and leave us a rating and review. If you'd like to learn more about our education and coaching programs, head over to everythingcoworking.com we'll see you next week."
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