Sam Taggart – How to Map out Action Plans

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Sam Taggart 00:19
What’s up guys, this is Sam Taggart with the D2D podcast and I am going solo today. A lot of you guys, the biggest feedback I get is sometimes you like my achievement framework podcast. So I’m going to give you guys a new section of a new chapter called Actions today.

And just really how to prioritize actions how to really take action, and it’s it’s part of the team. There’s part of the chapter path, or really the how, what’s the, what’s the how, and it goes, potential actions, team and habits. And we’re going to really figure out what the actions are. So if you want to achieve anything in life sales business, really go accomplish more, it’s really about action and mapping out the action plan. So knock in the in the achievement framework, it goes ask seek Knock, and this is in the chapter seek. Well, action is in the NOC chapter, but mapping out your action is in this chapter.

And really having to do with planning and execution, things like that, or like looking at how you’re going to execute. Before I dive in. I really one wanted to appreciate everybody coming to D2D con, we have over 700 and some tickets sold. Our goal is to have about 1000 to 1100 and then cap it out.

So you know a lot of people asking questions, so I figured I’d give a little bit of insight onto what this events going to look like before you guys before we dive into this, so we have about 60 Something speakers and I like to coordinate and to manage and to deal with 60 Something speakers is is pretty cool. And a lot of these guys are just top tier sales reps. We’re gonna have a sales panel on you know, solar pest control and roofing.

But what’s interesting is we have like rooms on sales GENERAL We have rooms on, you know, leadership GENERAL We have recruiting, we’ve got Dimitri Lipinski Becca Switzer and Brandon Holmes on recruiting that’s always a big one that everybody wants. Yeah, I mean, like so many so many good things. I mean, Hall of Fame this year, are inducting three new members that are huge names in this industry that have been in over 20 years into the Hall of Fame. We have like Devin Anderson and Derek Ladino. And, you know, a couple of people on these CEO panels, so it’s just like q&a for CEOs. Devon’s 21 year old dude as EDI are 40 guys doing millions of millions of dollars a month and solar yet Kirkland Dino sold their company to socius Martin Pettigrew with monarch roofing. They’re in multiple states out of champagne huge out over 300 reps and roofing. And they have like a software panel with Dan Larkin who started solo. Yeah, Zach, Kurt, Kurt sells rabbit and some other really cool people with females panel. With SULI Alex Hall Jordan, she’s up to apricot Kima Garcia Lindsey, some really, really cool female panel. With the roofing sales panel, you have roof hustler John Cenac, Adam Benson, Donna Morgan, TJ McCormack, that panel right there is just like lit having the roof hustler and roof strategist and all these cool people talking about just roofing sales and that’s like a powerhouse lineup in and of itself.

You have solar cells you have Oscar Luna, who did 370 Solar deals last year. Blake Randall Matt Crowder I mean these micro Donald double golden door award four years in a row but just insane value come in at this Yeah, Cody olive who and you know Drew Hansen doing a workshop Cody on the pest panel, Kony on our hill just so good. Anyway, I don’t want to like bore you guys. But I’m telling you if you’ve not got your ticket to D2D.con, this is going to be the time where you want to get it prices are going up. And we just keep saying hey, if you’re if you’re somebody wants to invest himself and take yourself to another level, this is the best the best coming out teaching and giving a lot of value let alone our mainstage work like our mainstage speakers are phenomenal. Jesse Itzler Tom BillyOh Jim quick. Cole Hatter Tim story. I mean, this is like a powerhouse lineup.

Okay, so I’m, I’m I’m gonna I’m gonna dive in. Here we go. Hope you have your seatbelt on because it’s gonna be good. Okay, so actions, let’s think about it. First, you got to start with the end in mind. And a lot of people when they’re mapping out their plan, they can’t see the destinations. Now caution you a destinations because once you get to one and if you haven’t thought about the hill you’re climbing after there’s like a little lol like that you you get this kind of oh shoot not to recreate re manifest rethink through what the end is.

And because we’re always seeing about like, okay, these accomplishments and we’re talking about achievement, we get to think of it more like milestones, we’re gonna be talking about milestones in a second. But the first thing is like, Okay, how do you establish like your one year where the end in mind five years? Where do I need to be 10 years, where do I need to be? And then you got to work backwards to like to figure out what that is. And if you have like a centralized place, meaning, some tools, I’m gonna talk about this in a second, that is going to help you map out your vision and map out these kind of goals, like let’s say I’m trying to achieve.

And I’m going to use this baby romper company that I created, started a baby romper camper with my ex, years ago, as called Eleonora and CO. And I’m going to use this as kind of the analogy throughout this chapter. But basically, if you think about it, like, what is my you know, is it just to make like a fun side hustle? Is it to go sell this thing? Is it to go? Start? I don’t know. Yeah, like, go get into stores like Nordstroms? Is it to go, you know, make a million dollars? Or is it just to kind of bring in a passive 20 grand a month, you know, what is the what’s the end of mind. And I like to use these tools. So I’m going to share few tools that I’ve used throughout my career and ones that I’ve really honed in on. So the first one is the vibe TV.

And, guys, I love the vibe, it’s like $4,000 investment, but I have two of them. So what you do is you can draw on it like it’s, it’s like a digital whiteboard, you can screen mirror TV up there and then snapshot that and share the vibe notes. And he’s in presenting I use it mapping out my vision to great, great digital tool to map out you know, business plans.

Next one I use more than anything is Evernote. It’s a note taking tool. But I use this to organize my my my trainings. And so I’ve got reading and podcasts and seminars, if I go to anything education, where I’m learning something cool, I put it my Evernote, and I’ve got that thing categorized out like no other, where, you know, I’ve got this whole book has been organized in that in that. And then I used it to write it I used air table, which is like an Excel spreadsheet on steroids. So air table phenomenal. It’s like, you can put long notes, you can put images, you can put links, really, really cool organization tool. That’s where I map out all my content. I use Google Keep that’s like my on the fly co it’s where I put my monitors. It’s where I put kind of some of my bigger visions stuff actually lives in my Google Keep of kind of long term. And then obviously journal, I’m a pen and paper kind of guy, then Lucid Chart and mind maps are very effective tools to map out kind of this plus this, this square to this square to this cure this hierarchy this, this like timeline. Those are great tools.

And then Google Sheets and Google Slides and Word doc guys, I’m telling you, it’s sometimes you just map out a PowerPoint of here’s my vision, here’s the end in mind. Because this is this is the biggest problem when you’re trying to work with team and you’re trying to map out plans and actions. It’s communicating that and enrolling the team and enrolling those that also have to be involved in something that you can go and edit, and you’re going to have iterations to it. I think a lot of times people don’t have the flexibility when they journal, something sits in their journal, but then it’s like, oh shoot, we’re adjusting this product, we’re ingesting these financial goals, we’re adjusting this. And so having some digital tools to kind of give you that flexibility and shareability and, you know, it lives in all of your devices. So if you’re on the go and you want to live on, you know, access it from your phone, and you want to access it from a computer, you can do so and I think a lot of people fail to have a centralized communication piece to their actions to their plan to their how they’re going to accomplish something. And so this isn’t a to do list. You know, I that’s a whole nother thing too. You can build out to do lists and things like that on air table and in a to do list and Google has some cool action tasks I use pronto for tasks I use My journal for test planner. But it this roadmapping. And really mapping out action plans is very different than a to do list. And what I’m gonna, I’m gonna break this down into kind of three categories as I map out roadmapping. And you think of like, how do I map out an action plan, I’m gonna break this down into different categories. The first one is going to be timeframes, lanes, and assignments. And if you think about it, you’ve got to start asking yourself, like, where do we want to go? Where are we now? And how can we get there? And that’s kind of the bed base of any mapping out action plan? Where do we want to go? Where are we now? And how can we get there? And then you follow those things by asking yourself, why do we need to act? What should we do? And how should we do it? By when? So why do we need to act? So a lot of people are like, Well, why are we needing to take these actions? Like really challenging that? And that was kind of another chapters? What should we do? How should we do it, and by when, and so this, this whole timeframe, we’re gonna start with timeframes. And, you know, when I built out this baby romper company, so think of it as like, the, the first thing is, I said, what’s now what’s next, and what’s later. And the problem is, is our tendency is we want things now, and it’s hard for us see the big picture to unfold, and we don’t properly plan out the order in which things are gonna happen, the timeframe in which they’re going to happen, we’ll get fatigued on the journey hopeless, when things don’t feel like they’re progressing. And it’s interesting, I have some employees that it’s obvious black and white, you sell a deal, you get paid, you know, you comp with something right away. Well, some people, if they’re in the project management tool, like side of things, customer service, it’s hard to see, and you get tired, because you’re like, Man, I don’t have clear like, I’m checking things off a box, or I’m, you know, accomplishing so much. It’s harder to keep yourself accountable. And the team accountable when they’re kind of more vague project based or, you know, just kind of like, maintenance based.

And so be careful on that when when you’re mapping actions is like, how do you put milestones and timeframes around things that are more maintenance based. So we’re gonna talk about like milestone mapping, it’s really, it’s just like to determine a fair and reasonable timeline in which these things are done. So you think of now next, later, you can draw three lines, and you can put your first things in the bucket of Okay, the first milestones we need to hit are the now bucket. And then next would be by, let’s say, so like, when I had an idea, in March, so this is back in March 2016. I said, Hey, let’s get a pattern design by May of 2016. So it’s like, let’s give us a month or two, to come up with a pattern design for baby romper that’s going to have a zipper in the crotch, it’s can be trendy, it’s going to be good, it’s going to be, you know, we’re not gonna think fabrics, we’re just gonna think this thing’s utility, this function, how do we build a product.

And then I said, let’s get samples by, you know, from the manufacturers, because we need to send these things to China, they need, like, we bid it out, like three or four different factories, and I want to get those by July of 2016. And then when you get the first small inventory by September of 2016, to prove the concept, and then you know, basically you’re, you’re kind of mapping out, okay, these are milestones of when I could get these major pieces of my, my business done.

And then you simply prioritize all the little things that kind of go into that, and doing the important things first, where we naturally gravitate to the fun things. And I’ve had to find myself like, okay, am I willing to sit down and do the important things first, because sometimes it’s the fun things follow the important things, the fun things is going to shows and selling the stuff the fun things is going and creative marketing ads that are fun and entertaining, posting on social media for this bigger on PR company, but the hard things are kind of okay, let me sit there and negotiate with factories and, and map out designs and inventory and bag all of like, you know, packaging like nobody likes it in there and packaging and coming up with systems to to mail out inventory. That’s not my genius like that is not fun for me, but it’s like had I not put a system for production and packaging, and labeling and putting out you know, mailing these things out. I would have just crumbled. And so every system let’s talk about lanes lanes is kind of the next thing every system is perfectly designed to get the result it gets. So you think of like sales is in a lane.

Maybe production is in a lane finance could be in a lane. And you know if you map out your action plans based on these three planes, or however many lanes you want to put You can really see, there’s, there’s kind of prioritization in each lane. And you can do you know, depending on your competency as a leader, as a business owner as a sales rep, depends how many lanes you can juggle. Now, we’ve all heard that multitasking is not effective. And at the end of the day, if I’m a solopreneur, I’m a young startup, I’m a business owner, like, I’m sorry, I need to figure out how to juggle so many different things. But I can multitask lanes, but not multitask activities at the same time. So it’s just doing one thing, the three in front of you, through its prioritization in its proper lane, in its do timeline, or milestone. And if you can map these sorts things out, so you have your, your, your timeline and milestone, what Lane it lives in.

And, you know, you basically say it’s got these buckets. And then the next one would be what is the, the assignment and before we get to assignment, we’re going to think through these buckets. Okay, so mind mapping or think of a web diagram would be the easy way to kind of figure out lanes, and you’re in buckets. And so you’re like, Okay, I have this project, big romper, I have a bucket that might be design of a bucket that is finance of a bucket, that’s sales of a bucket, that’s marketing of a bucket, that’s trade shows of a bucket, that’s customer support, which is, you know, returns, shipping, you know, questions, internet questions, email questions, social media, DMS, you know, all of these things can kind of go in their buckets, because they all are kind of a, you know, piece to like how you run this business. And but so now we’re going to move on to assignment. So I’ve, I’ve organized the lanes, I’ve organized the buckets, or whatever you want to call them. And you got to figure out who’s doing what. So, you know, Jim, who was Jim Rohn. But the right seats in the right, you know, so first you got to get the right people on the bus, they got the right people in the right seats, then you got to get the right people or the wrong people off the bus. And then you got to figure out where you’re taking this bus, right, it’s like, you got to use an organized system to track and manage assignments.

So I got the right people, I’ve got the team. And we talked about that another chapter. But there’s tools like smart sheets, monday.com, click up airtable Trello, Google doc whiteboard, something that you’re going to want to have as your centralized, universal piece of assignments. And I think a lot of people, it lives in their head, including me any entrepreneur or sales or team lead or manager, they put, you know that I use a planner. And so it’s like pen and paper. But when I’m trying to get my team to get on the same page as my planner, that’s not effective.

But I feel naked without my planner. So it’s like, I need my planner, because I spent two hours every Sunday really mapping everything on my planner, I spend every morning mapping things on my planner, but then it’s like, okay, how do I translate that into some team work, because there’s all sorts of people on my team, they need to know what’s going on my head. So I have to communicate the proper expectations and how I do that I use air table or use pronto, depending on the team. So you know, most business leaders, they have this idea, if you can put it on to let’s say a task, and then clearly outline it to look like this. And he does look like this, I needed to look like this.

And I use loom, which is a great tool to where you say, let me screen record my my computer so that it is so clear, and it’s recorded. And if you have questions, you can go back to this screen recording of exactly what I’m looking for. And sending it to them, they can see if they’ve watched it, they can comment back. And you can now clearly communicate something. And then the third step is return and report. This This part’s crucial, at least for my sanity, you know a lot of times you’re like sending out the stuff into the ether with your team and assigning stuff. And then all sudden you’re like I hope we got done. And then it’s still what it is, is it’s taking without feedback where they they don’t return and report, then what ends up happening is this kind of energy, bandwidth gets taken up in your head. So when you have 20 tasks out there that are to be completed.

And then there’s their want, you’re wondering, are they getting completed, it’s still living the energetic bandwidth is still living in your head, thinning you out or keeping you spread thin to where you can’t accomplish as much as you could be accomplishing if you could focus more your energy bandwidth on your projects and your tests, not on the test that you sent out to people. full trust of you sending those out then returning and reporting on progress. completion of those tasks and feedback are those tasks that you’re not having to worry about until they come and say, ring the bell and say, Hey, let’s talk about this test. Now you’re like, oh, yeah, I forgot about that I assigned you that cool. We’re on test rom timeline, we’re on, you know, we’re on track. And then having some kind of KPI system to keep people in integrity. That’s what I think of KPIs. It’s not, you know, there’s key performance indicator, but it’s also keeping people in integrity, which is important to narrow things down to two to four key performance indicators, where you can hold them accountable to these numbers. So it’s like, okay, these are the numbers, you know, if you can hit these non negotiable, that’s what, that’s what we’re going for, maybe have a couple Mulligan’s here and there, but it’s like, I want to know that you’re shooting on the right hoop, you’re doing the right task, and you’re focused on the right metric to really go drive this mission forward. And if you don’t have truth behind the data, and the numbers, like I’m actually right now looking for a Data Architect where that person is literally just going to be fully putting data and graphs together so that we can have good data, good dashboards, good visibility, on who’s winning and who’s losing, because if you’re not keeping score, then it’s hard to win.

And so you’ve got to have a good space to keep the data. So there’s a couple of tools that I’ve seen or use, you have, like big ones, like Domo, or, you know, you’re like a lot of different graphing tools out there that put the data together. But there’s a free one called Data Studio that you can integrate a lot of your stuff into. And it just graphs it out nicely. You can pull data from CRM, from your books from your marketing tools, and go aggregate it and put it into one central place. And that would be helping you really come up with your true tracking of care. If I’m going to set out a roadmap and I’m gonna set out some action plans, then I need to know that I’m winning or losing.

And if you think like I even you know, what’s crazy, is in fitness, I just started this new thing called superhuman. So shout out to John Madsen, I signed up for a fitness coach. And there’s an app and some of you guys want to use this, but it’s called My Fitness Pal. And it’s like, you know, a lot of this is diet. And so you have to track every little KPI essentially, of how many macros if how many carbs, how many proteins, etc. But then it’s like, okay, if I’m tracking in my fitness app, where that’s called superhuman app, or whatever, is he literally my fitness coach gives me a workout every day, and it tracks my weight, how my rest time I workouts, and then it shows like my progress, photos, everything in one app. And I look at the seriousness of when I took fitness, it’s like, okay, if I didn’t have any kind of KPI tracking, or accountability to fitness, I probably be the same way the same outcomes as I am right now. If you think of like, okay, now I want to focus on achieving more and more relationships. Okay, that’s a little bit harder. It’s not like accomplish, I lost 10 pounds, it’s like, accomplished I did the relationship. It’s like, there is no milestone, so then it gets a little bit harder.

When it’s more of a lifestyle, it’s more of a, of a consistent thing. So maybe that’s where you have a, I have a thing called the lifestyle design, or put this cool spreadsheet together that has seven different tabs at the bottom, I’ve mapped out finance, fitness, you know, mapped out my, just my whole life, it’s pretty dope if you’re interested in DME, and I can maybe send you a copy of a template. But one of the tabs is relationships. And so I put, did I go on a date night, once a week? Did I have 30 minutes of uninterrupted phone time? Did I you know, and I’m actually have a dashboard where I’m heading a check box. That’s graphing out how consistent I am with these things. So like my kids, they’re not a they’re not a milestone, they’re not an accomplishment. So I put an action plan, say map out times my kids. What’s my queens Academy?

So I have this little thing that I do with my girls where I say, what’s the lesson I’m teaching them to become queens, so they’re princesses, queens in the making. And like, for example, yesterday, I was wearing a shirt that said lions, not sheep. And they asked her like what’s lions, not sheep? And I was like, Well, you know, let me teach you about the sheep. And let me teach you about the lions. And we took a picture. I think in the farmers market. On Saturday, it was like, Okay, what’s the Queen’s Academy by doing these intentional things about taking them to a farmers market and teaching them about small businesses where they’re self sustaining, instead of just going to the farmers market, buying a little cinnamon roll and then going home? It’s like, no, these are small, little local businesses where, you know, you go to Walmart, they’re not small little local businesses. They’re just putting their stuff in Walmart, but these are guys that are like, home growing and they’re, you know, and just teaching them that and then I could put a check to say, Hey, I did Queens Academy every day that I was with them, and I actually keep track, and I’m keeping score, you know not to show anybody not to, like, there is no reason other than so I know that I’m being consistent with my action plan in my things that are important in my life. And that’s where people struggle is they just, they don’t track, they don’t have any action plan. They just live in the drift and every Sunday and map these things out. And so the action map, the road mapping is so critical in success in life.

So, I’m gonna wrap up with that, but that’s the section so if you guys got some value out of this, I hope that you guys leave some reviews on this podcast because it guys, I’m telling you like, we’ve had so many good guests, I just dropped Jim quicks last one and a lot of other good ones coming. So like, I put a lot of time and energy in this podcast, maybe my audio call, I’m doing this on my phone right now in case you didn’t notice. Sometimes I don’t even care guys, I hope you have headphones in or in your car and you’re listening and you’re getting value because I care about you. And I care about the success stories, you know, I I get these little things all the time where, you know, DM guys, send me DMS and stuff that you’re you’re getting value out of semi DMS on where you’re, you know, winning or where you’re struggling and then I can help even more there. And you know, this one from Colton. The other day was, Hey, man, thanks for connecting your content has blessed my life, on and off the doors. And when I say off the doors, I hope this is blessing you way more off the doors because I look at life as a school of hard knocks.

My goal is with D2D to become my best self, a better husband provider and a Kingdom Builder. Your videos have picked me up when I’m down and kept me on track. Thank you for your hard work and all that you do. I love hearing these guys please send me these when you guys see when you see a nugget impact your life or connection or guy that inspired you. And I love hearing the reviews of the private DMS but I do this for you guys. So thanks so much. And hope you enjoyed the podcast