How to Translate Business Action into Strategy By Mike Pappas Mike Pappas ( Stands in front of camera and speaks directly into lens) After years of setting goals and objectives for our company, we were looking for a new method for reaching those goals. We found it in the Four Disciplines of Execution, a book that offers four disciplines that allow you to effectively deal with the most difficult aspect of creating breakthrough results: executing a strategy that requires a change in behavior. I'm Mike Pappas, president and CEO of The Keyes Company in South Florida. Let's take five minutes to talk about how to implement this simple system. * Before we started using the Four Disciplines of Execution, or 4 DX, we had broad goals and objectives that weren't always tied to results. We would come up with four to six items and assign a “champion” to take care of the action items. We did well with that. But at our strategic planning meeting last year, we decided to try 4DX. * The first discipline of 4DX is to focus on a wildly important goal. The authors call this WIG. The key is to take the goal out of the conceptual, such as I want to make more money, and give it a target and a finish line. We talked about what drives our business, and decided the answer is listings. From there we drilled down and determined that in order to get more listings, we needed to have more appointments. So, our wildly important goal was to get 15 percent more listings in the first quarter compared to last year's fourth quarter. * The second discipline is to ACT on the lead measures. Lead measures tell you if you're likely to achieve your goal. For this, we determined that if agents get face-to-face with a prospective customer, they would have a closing ratio of 70 percent. We broke it down into five main activities that we could measure. Then, we determined, based on production, how many appointments each agent needed per week. What was shocking is just how low that number was. For example, if you wanted to close $5 million in sales a year, you only needed five appointments per month. Agents were to do the five activities and go on a specific number of appointments each month based on a goal given by the manager. * The third discipline is to keep what's called a compelling scoreboard. This part makes it fun. Every week, the information about appointments was uploaded to our system, and the managers kept track of who was accomplishing their goals. At a glance, managers and agents could see their scoreboards and determine if they were on track with their activities and appointments. This transparency allowed everyone to see where they were compared to others. * The fourth discipline requires a cadence of accountability, or a frequently recurring cycle of accounting for past performance and planning to move the score forward. Discipline 4 is where execution happens. Each week, we reviewed the scoreboard and the managers met with the agents to find out if they needed anything to move the goal forward. * We gave out weekly prizes to the people who turned in their appointments and met or exceeded their goals. It became activity-based, and everyone could see exactly what they were accomplishing. Success breeds success, so the agents who saw their appointments increase, saw their listings increase and got excited. * At the end of the quarter, we met our goal of 15 percent more listings than the quarter before. And, we set a new wildly important goal for the next quarter, which was to do business planning with the 20 percent of the agents in each branch who were doing 80 percent of the business. * Where it broke down for us was the scorecard. We had weekly calls with managers in all our regions, but we didn't execute that as well as we could have. The call was supposed to be about how to help get more appointments, but more likely we saw our focus shift due to outside influences like dealing with the fall out of the 2017 hurricane. * The truth is, you don't have to do it by the book to be successful. But, it helped us to be more focused on being measurement oriented rather than goal oriented and it gave us more specific ways to track and improve business. * You can find the book on Amazon.com. It's called The Four Disciplines of Execution by Sean Covey and Chris McChesney. It offers you more specifics on implementing the scoreboard and the accountability piece. Good luck!