Conference take-aways: Strategic Planning and 1 Question Survey
I’m at a National Business Incubation Conference (NBIA), Monday through Wednesday this week, and this is keeping me very busy. The Weekly Reader may also be in jeopardy as I’m scheduled to attend an after-hours event Thursday night after I get home.
To while away the useless hotel hours, I thought I’d post a couple good takeaways from my session today.
One-page Strategic Plan
Just having a one page strategic plan may be the real takeaway for some folks, and it certainly is something to consider. The intent is not that your entire strategic plan only takes one page, the message was being able to communicate your plan to your Board and your Stakeholders on one page.
The presenter knew what he was talking about, managing a 55 acre Innovation Center campus. The real value of the session was the actual one-page form that he uses to visually communicate his strategic plan to his Board. I can’t share that document here, but I can describe the elements that make up the overview.
The core data elements build from the top down. For each level of the overview, I’ll list the “why”, the “what” and the “when”:
Foundation : Core Values and Culture : Forever
Why do we exist? : Purpose and Passion : Life of Leader
Where are we headed? : Mission Milestones : 3-5 Years
What do we do to get there? : Annual Goals : Annually
How do we do it? : Big Actions : Quarterly
When does it get done? : Schedule : Weekly
What takes responsibility? : Work : Daily
Pretty basic stuff, but the beauty was in the simplicity of the presentation. If I get the document after the conference and am allowed to share it, I’ll post it.
Net Promoter Score
The other real gem of the session was my introduction to Bain & Co.’s Net Promoter Score (NPS). I had never heard of it before, but it was introduced as a highly reliable one question survey indicative of the perceived value of your services. I don’t know about your clients, but entrepreneurs are notorious for not completing surveys. Actually, they are notorious for not responding to any requests for information, so any way to get a highly reliable score corresponding to the quality of our services by asking one question, was definitely intriquing.
The NPS works like this. You ask your client to rate your services on a 0 to 10 scale. Ratings of 0 through 6 are classified as Detractors. Ratings of 7 or 8 are ignored. Ratings of 9 and 10 are classified as Promoters. Add up your Detractors and Promoter scores. Your Net Promoter Score is then figured as:
Promoters – Detractors
Our instructor didn’t really have much guidance on what to shoot for with your NPS, nor industry benchmarks. He did say that when he started using the NPS in his incubator, his score was around 20% and he has since raised it up to 80%+. He also shared that best in class scores are typically taken to be 70-80%. Doing a quick Internet search I found this article with some benchmarks from a few sample industries.
At the very least, the NPS is an extremely simply way to collect an important qualitative evaluation of your program. Comparing to your industry benchmark may require extra research (or purchasing Bain services or database).
That’s it for today. Off to room service and Monday Night Football. Let’s hope tomorrow brings another thousand points…
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment