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Welcome to Leading With Force — a podcast where seasoned entrepreneur Brian Force shares the invaluable lessons he's learned on his journey through this crazy, wonderful life. Having built several multimillion-dollar companies, Brian dives into the nuts and bolts of building successful teams, scaling businesses, and leading with passion and purpose.
Each episode offers practical tools to effectively cast your vision, build your team, boost productivity, and become the leader you were meant to be. Brian's mission is to inspire you to unlock the incredible power within yourself, achieve your goals, and make a meaningful impact on the world. Join us as we explore how to find your inner leader, empower others, and embrace your journey.
One of the things we really like to think about in terms of what can we place a focus on that will have a meaningful impact on the business is just some of our foundational guiding principles many of us are familiar with 📍 the idea that your business can only move as fast as your biggest bottleneck allows. Meaning if you are absolutely phenomenal in some aspects of your business, they won't compensate for the aspects where you're not phenomenal.
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Today I wanna talk about one of the most powerful tools that I think that we regularly use and implement in our business, and I think it'd be very helpful for you as well. We all have big visions for our business, and hopefully, at least some of us have a roadmap as to how we're going to get there, a general idea of where we're going and what we're gonna do along the way.
And then hopefully all of us have some version of a formalized business plan.
It's our roadmap to capturing that vision. And sometimes that business plan has certain timelines in it. And then we probably have yearly goals in our business that adhere to that business plan, that hopefully speak to that big vision. We have a vision, a plan to get there, and then year over year execution towards that plan. That's on paper normally how it goes.
We don't always visit those tools all that often. We don't always circle back to our vision, our business plan and our year over year way of executing very often in the minutia and chaos of our everyday operations. Those things can tend to get lost and we become very used to not visiting them regularly over time, but just getting swept up in the day to day operations of our business. Just trying to keep our heads above water and make it through to the next day so we can control the chaos again,
we tend to get all excited about laying these things out, but we don't really utilize them all that often in our business, I've found. And so one of the things that's been effective for us that I've implemented over and over again are essentially 90 day business plans, 90 day sprints as we kind of call 'em.
It's essentially a revisiting of our overall strategy, our vision of where we want to go, the tools we have, and the plan to get there, and then breaking it down into what can we do for the next 90 days. We're all familiar with the saying that there's only one way to eat an elephant, and that's one bite at a time. And this is a version of that ideology that sometimes the vision can seem really far away.
Sometimes the plan doesn't really feel. Feasible to execute on because things are really chaotic right now, and sometimes year over year plans of execution, they tend to drag on. They don't feel present, they don't have a sense of presence to them. They don't feel in the moment 90 days is something we've always been able to rally people around
because it's long enough for your actions to have a substantial impact on your business, but it's also short enough that it feels tangible.
You're able to stay and keep your team in the moment and focused on that short-term goal. And if you do that on a regular basis, once a year perhaps, you'll find that you tend not to lose that much momentum in between sprints.
It's like you carry that success, that momentum, that short-term satisfaction of accomplishing whatever it was that you were trying to accomplish in the business. There's a lasting effect to being that productive in a burst. And so I found this tool to be very effective. Of course, we have an overall strategy.
We have. A yearly business plan that we're trying to measure our metrics against, but when it feels like we're getting a little bit bland when it feels like we're just kind of going through the motions, when it kind of feels like the chaos is controlling us and not the other way around, we'll implement a 90 day sprint.
We'll break down the business into, here are our biggest opportunities right now, whether it's a growth goal for 90 days, an operational goal for 90 days. Or both simultaneously for different departments in the organization, we wanna break down our bigger goals into smaller, 90 day sprints.
We've had a lot of success with that. So I wanna talk about how you can implement this effectively in your business today.
Before we dive into the nuts and bolts, it's important to level set on why 90 day action plans, 90 day sprints are so effective. Talked about this a little bit a moment ago, but it's worth repeating. 90 days is a long enough period of time to have a substantial impact on your business,
but it's a short enough period of time that you can maintain energy and momentum around something. One of the reasons that you're able to maintain that momentum is because the 90 day plan stays relevant for all 90 days in just about every aspect. Whereas your year long business plan or your formal business plan may need to adapt.
As market conditions change, as your vision for the company develops. As the team and the culture evolve, your plan may not become necessarily obsolete, but it may not be quite right. It's gonna need revisiting, it's gonna need adjusting.
And along the way there are going to be times where it feels like it doesn't necessarily fit where your business is at right now. And it's going to be hard to maintain energy and culture around a business plan that doesn't necessarily seem to fit the current state of the organization.
Whereas 90 days of. Focused effort on one or two very important aspects of the business that stays relevant for that entire 90 day period. You can rally people around these core objectives for 90 days. You can energize them, you can gamify it, and you can show instantaneous results almost, and that's why it's easier for your team at times to maintain a higher sense of energy around a 90 day sprint.
So you can imagine if you regularly implement this strategy once or twice a year, you're gonna be carrying energy from one 90 day sprint to the next.
I do as a side note, actually think it's worth just implementing this strategy once or twice a year. That's a personal lived experience thing. I just happen to find when you try to do 90 day sprint after 90 day sprint, after 90 day sprint, it just feels like you're always throwing something at your team that is sort of.
Diminishes some of the aura around having a special sprint type thing that you're doing. I would suggest making this something that you do no more than twice a year, which by the way, when you add 'em together is half the year you might do a Q1 and a Q3, like really focused sprint on a couple of core objectives on the business.
But if you're always doing that back to back, then it sort of loses its sense of luster. But that's why I believe the 90 day sprint is so effective.
There are endless amounts of studies out there and I'll try to remember to put some in the show notes
That will show that comparatively shorter bursts of highly focused energy will over the long term, produce better results than long periods of monotonous, lackadaisical focus.
If you can have higher, more intense level of focus for 90 days, you might get more productivity out of your team than you would in 270 days of just blah. We're just going through the motions everyday.
And this strategy also trains your team to get into the mindset of doing hard things for short intervals and to really go all in for these periods of time. It really brings your team together because they know on the other side of this, Hey, we're going to have achieved something. I usually like to gamify these 90 day sprints. If we hit our goals, if we hit our objectives, there's some sort of intrinsic reward at the end. That's not really necessarily a huge driver as far as your culture.
It, it can be. You don't necessarily want to drive your culture that way. It's just a fun little gravy on top. But you want your team to look forward to the achievements they're gonna have. And when you give them 90 days to achieve something, it feels right there. It feels very tangible. Whereas your much larger vision for the company could take years and years of grinding work to even come close to manifesting.
So this is why people are able to maintain their energy levels around something on a much shorter term basis.
So now that we understand why this can be effective, let's talk about how to implement it. step one to implementing a 90 day sprint in your business is you have to know what it is that you're trying to accomplish. What is it that will have a substantial impact on your business if achieved in the next 90 days, and is realistic enough?
That with some focused effort, it actually can be achieved. The way that I like to think about these things is that we want to achieve something that seems really hard, but it doesn't seem impossible. As soon as your team starts thinking that they can't achieve whatever it is that we're trying to accomplish here, then the energy starts to die around it.
If we get to day 10 of 90, and my team doesn't believe that we can hit the goal, then the whole gamification, the energy, the culture that we've built around it, it's gonna start to fizzle a little bit every day. There comes this tipping point when you get into these things where you realize you're already far enough into it, that you don't really feel like the pacing is there.
You don't have enough time left to come anywhere near achieving what we set out to achieve, and that just simply means. That we can't necessarily set our sights too high because we only have a short window. We only have 90 days to accomplish whatever it is we're trying to accomplish. But we also need to make it seem really hard.
I. We need to rally people around this. The 90 days going forward have to be different than the 90 days we've just had. The whole reason we're doing this sprint is because we want to sprint, we want to run fast, we want to accomplish a lot in a short period of time.
So my guidance is you've gotta set a lofty goal for these 90 days, but it has to feel possible. And the way that I like to present these things is that I promise my team they're going to be hard. I promise my team that we're gonna have a hard 90 days of focused effort, but I also promise them that it's not going to be impossible.
In fact, I'll have a conversation when we do sprints and I'll ask for buy-in from the team. Do you think this is undoable or do you just think it's really hard? And we'll get the team to buy in to own it, to admit that, yes, this is hard, this is going to be a challenge. And to also admit it's not impossible.
And as soon as you rally people around this idea that they admit this is not impossible, but they also acknowledge it's very hard. Well now we know where we stand, and now we know we've set the tone for how we're supposed to show up every single day. So whatever it is that you decide you want your team to be striving for in these next 90 days.
Make sure they don't think it's impossible. Also, make sure they do think it's hard. That's very important.
And then of course you want it to really move the business forward. We're not gonna do hard things just for the sake of doing hard things. It has to be impactful.
And so this is where you as the owner need to be looking at your KPIs and saying, where do we need to move the needle forward that would have a massive impact on our business in the next 90 days? And by the way, you can do more than one, but I would never do too many. I would really only have like two things that we're trying to achieve in any 90 day sprint.
I would have sales and operations, and I wouldn't make it any more complicated than that. For us when we do sprints, sales is usually some sort of new business generated goal. How many new clients can we sign? How many new sales can we make? How can we increase our conversion rate to X in the next 90 days?
Wherever we feel like we're struggling right now, we'll set a goal for 90 days around improving that part of our performance. We ran our real estate sales organization as a great example of that. We have new signed clients, we have new executed contracts.
We have. Increased conversion rate on appointments. There's a lot of things that we can look at and we track all this data to say, Hey, we're doing these things right? But if we increased our performance here.
We would see massive results. And so we'll look at the business and decide what's the most meaningful KPI we can move forward? Are we getting really high levels of activity but not converting? Are we just not getting enough activity in the first place?
If we increase activity, will everything else fall into place? Or are we doing the activity, but we really need to focus on closing for the next 90 days, and so we're going to have a 90 day sprint on how we can increase our closing rate. Right? Same thing with operations. You've gotta figure out where are your gaps right now?
What part of the operational aspect of your business can in 90 days, you really move the needle forward on that, would have a lasting effect on your business. For one of our organizations, our major KPI on our scorecard is processes completed on time.
the percentage of processes that we complete on time, every single time. It's like a subway sandwich line. We just want the sandwich to come out at the end of the conveyor belt accurately and on time, and we measure the percentage of the time that happens.
And so when we dip way below our standard for the percentages of processes completed accurately and on time, that's a great 90 day sprint, KPI to focus on. Are we only completing. 80% of our processes accurately and on time, eight outta 10. It's not the end of the world. It's not really our standard though.
What would our business look like if we got that to 95%? You see how my team can show up every day and see that needle moving forward? Your sales team can show up every day and see that needle moving forward, and it's up to your job as a leader. To figure out the most meaningful needle to move forward that will have the biggest impact on your business.
If 90 days of focus on this thing impacts the business in a meaningful way, that's the thing you wanna rally your team around.
One of the things we really like to think about in terms of what can we place a focus on that will have a meaningful impact on the business is just some of our foundational guiding principles many of us are familiar with the idea that your business can only move as fast as your biggest bottleneck allows. Meaning if you are absolutely phenomenal in some aspects of your business, they won't compensate for the aspects where you're not phenomenal.
Your business as a whole will only really ever perform as well as its weakest parts. Because if you have a process, then as the business moves through that process, every client, every service, every sale is eventually going to hit that biggest bottleneck. And so one of the ways to think about a 90 day goal is what would the business look like?
If we improved our biggest bottleneck by X percentage, if we made a substantial impact in getting better in this one area, what would it do for the business as a whole, rather than focusing on doing the things that we already do at a high level, even better. Where can we improve the things that we lack greatness in?
And what would that do for the rest of the business? So that's just a little bit of a tip to help guide you as far as where you're putting your focus for these 90 days.
And that's especially important for the sheer fact that oftentimes the things that become our biggest bottlenecks become our biggest bottlenecks because they're not our strengths. They're the things that we really.
Don't like doing all that much in the business, and so we avoid them or we just don't focus on them enough to really make a meaningful impact day in and day out. This is probably where we could use 90 days of focus because it would have a lasting effect on the business as a whole.
Another great thought exercise to do around this is just a simple SWOT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, right? This is a very fundamental business principle, and we should be doing these analysis on a regular basis, but we focus on what we're doing well, what we know we're not doing well enough, and then where our opportunities are to improve.
And then what is the downside or the. Threat to us of not improving on our weaknesses or capturing those opportunities. So we're about to implement a 90 day sprint in one of our businesses, and we need everyone on our operations team to pitch in because we are trying to build a knowledge base so that we can have AI agents start handling a lot of the repetitive, Non-dynamic thinking tasks in our business. Essentially everything that we do on a repetitive basis, that doesn't take a whole lot of complex thought. We want AI agents to be doing those tasks as quickly as we reasonably can, so long as they're accurate, effective, and they're up to our standards.
And the way that we do that is we have to build a knowledge base to train that. Agent on. So coming up, we're gonna be doing a 90 day sprint where we have a goal as to how much knowledge we can build from our current processes day in and day out, using different tools to document down to the nitty gritty, not just our SOPs, but like everything that goes into them.
Click here, point there, type this like down to the most absolutely granular level 'cause that will help us with our curve in training this agent. And so we're gonna gamify and put a 90 day sprint on how much knowledge we can build. Reason being that's a massive opportunity in our business.
It's a massive opportunity because it will free up man hours to do things that we're not currently getting to right now. It's a massive opportunity to increase our productivity overall as a business and where the market and the industry is headed. It will become a weakness of ours if we don't get ahead of it because we're already being threatened by other companies that are adopting this technology. So, that is an opportunity that's being threatened already and we don't want to become a weakness over time.
So we're gonna do a 90 day sprint to try and get ahead of the curve. That's a great way to think about where your focus should be.
All right, so once you have an idea of what you wanna accomplish in the next 90 days, now we need to actually implement the plan. We need to communicate to our team, and we need to actually deploy the plan so we can start working. I like to use a simple, smart S-M-A-R-T framework for building these types of things.
That just means that the plan has to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. So many of these boxes are already gonna be checked by doing the thought work that we just did in our previous step by thinking deeply around where our opportunities, our threats, our weaknesses, our strengths are, we're gonna be able to build a plan around that that fits most of the letters in Smart.
But specific is a very important one for us in the 90 day sprint around the knowledge base. One of the reasons that I haven't launched the Knowledge Base 90 day Sprint yet is because I don't.
Really have the specificity just yet that I think we can measure to make sure that we're actually on path with what we're trying to achieve. I've gotta get a little bit more clarity around the specificity behind that 90 day sprint. But for something like sales or operations, if you're measuring your KPIs day in and day out.
You should be able to set very specific goals, very measurable goals. And then of course they need to be hard, but not impossible, achievable, and difficult. And then of course, relevant to the actual vision and business plan and for the company and time bound. Is pretty straightforward. It's 90 days. So when you're drawing up a plan and you're communicating this plan to your team, just think about that smart analogy.
When you're communicating, are you communicating the specificity of what we're doing? Is it measurable and we're clear on how we're going to measure it? Is it difficult, but not impossible? Meaning it's achievable? Is it relevant to the health of the business? Is it actually what we need to be doing right now?
And of course it's 90 days long. This is the framework we want to use to draw up a tangible plan that we're gonna execute on.
And once you have that smart roadmap, you need to make sure that you have the right time people and resources dedicated to achieving the goal of the sprint And so I like to focus on those things kind of in the right order there. I. One, do we have the time set aside? Meaning how do we implement this 90 day sprint without becoming so focused day in and day out on only these one or two things that we actually start dropping balls, right?
Are we very clear around the time that we should be dedicating to just this 90 day sprint goal, and then also the time we need to be dedicating and the level of prioritization we need to give. To daily operations and normal ongoings for the organization.
You don't wanna become so laser focused that other aspects of your business start to suffer. So I want you to think deeply around how you're gonna communicate that. To your team. This is the goal for the next 90 days. Also, these are the things we still need to be up to standard, our client service and communication.
You can't start blowing off client calls because you're trying to focus on the 90 day sprint goal. Things still need to be business as usual around here. And then resources are important, right? So what tools do we need? Or what capital do we need? What do we need to invest in right now or focus on that we might not currently have available?
Right. So in this kind of knowledge based building example, there are a lot of documentation tools that have really come to market in the last couple of years since we've really cemented our normal SOPs that we're bringing in and having our team learn how to use because they'll expedite the process of really documenting those things day in and day out.
On a granular level, there's some really cool new tools that'll basically just follow you along as you work all day and build an SOP as you're going through your normal daily cadence. It's very, very cool tools that we didn't have before because we weren't focused on building those SOPs, we already had them built.
Now I want to document them for an a AI agent, and that takes a different level of granularity. So we need to bring in some new tools and train the team how to use them before we start the 90 day clock. So these are things to really. Think about as you're working through this,
and then of course, people as well, do you need to maybe backfill some positions to keep the business moving forward as you're focused on this 90 day sprint? Do you need to build a little bit of a bench of talent to handle some of the day-to-day minutiae while your heavy hitters are focused on this one or two objective goal for 90 days?
The important thing is that people have the resources that they need. To actually achieve a very hard goal and that you as a business don't completely shut down or start to collapse on yourself because we're so laser focused on these one or two things. We need to keep the business moving forward as usual.
Those are the things you want to think about when you're coming up with your plan and how you're gonna communicate it to your team.
And the last little piece of guidance I would give on implementing a 90 day sprint is set the tone for constant communication, check in and making adjustments. Think about a 90 day sprint as just condensing your entire one year of business into 90 days. Like. From a communication standpoint, if you're regularly meeting with your team once a week, your direct reports,
maybe you need to be meeting with them once every day or two days for quick check-ins. How do we do today? Are we moving the needle forward? Right? You're basically condensing the entire year into one quarter, and you need to really bring that type of intensity because if you are doing a 90 day sprint in your initial strategy.
Isn't bringing you as close to the goal as you need to be. You've gotta iterate much faster than if you had a longer time horizon. You've gotta know right away. So if you're sending your sales team out there with a new product or a service offering and you have a 90 day goal for it, and day three we're like not making any progress at all.
We need to pivot. We need to figure out why we need to adjust. We need to do something. But where we might usually have like a month to measure something. Now we've got like five days and then we've gotta take a look at it. And so I would really advise that your direct reports, your team as a whole, you're increasing the intensity and the regularity of your communication, and you're ready to pivot. You're ready to control that chaos a little bit for 90 days because it's gonna be a lot more intense than your normal, everyday operation.
So you need to really think about how you're gonna create those micro feedback loops. What you're gonna look at data wise, and then how you're gonna make decisions to pivot or iterate on the fly. Because we've only got 90 days to achieve something really hard
we're gonna have to steer this ship and course correct on the fly. So we wanna set the tone ahead of time so people don't feel freaked out that you're like all in their business all the time. If you set expectations and you're transparent about what it's gonna look like, your team is not gonna be taken aback when you're all in their face.
All of a sudden, we're in this together, we've got 90 hard days, and we need to be aware of what's going on at all times. So set that expectation ahead of time when you're laying out the plan for your team.
So let's tie a bow on this one. 90 day sprints can be a phenomenal tool in your business. I wouldn't do them more than once. Or twice a year because you want them to be a unique phase in your, in your business, in your cadence. You want people to get excited around them, rally around them, and you don't want them to be happening so often that they lose their sort of allure.
It, it's something that can bind your team together if used effectively, but you have to understand what it is that you're trying to accomplish. You have to make it hard, but not impossible. And you have to make it impactful. You can't do hard things just to do hard things. You gotta find the thing in your business that if you do a 90 day sprint around it and drastically improve that area of your business, it's gonna improve the entire business as a whole.
That's where things like SWOT analysis and smart plan can come into play. Look at where you're weak. And look at your opportunities. And oftentimes those are the places that you could use hard 90 days of focus. And then you've gotta communicate it to your team.
Set expectations, make sure they have the right tools and resources, and then have a plan. For how we're gonna keep the business moving forward from a day-to-day everyday operation standpoint. So we don't take the eye off the ball and things start to fall in on themselves. If you do those things well, and you utilize this tool every once in a while, I promise you, you will reenergize your culture and you'll see a version of your team that doesn't always show up.
They'll prove to themselves what they're capable of, and it tends to make a lasting 📍 impact on their performance. So think about what you're gonna do for your 90 day sprint. I would love to hear what it is, and I'd love to hear the results and how this had a positive impact on your business.
Drop a comment below, get in touch with me. I really hope that you got some value out of this episode and I look forward to seeing you next time.