RESET: 3 P’s Of Budgeting For Connection

It’s a new year and if you’re looking for new ways to budget your growth for 2016 consider following the ‘3 P’s’ in your process. And don’t just plan… budget for connection.

Watch the video to learn more.

It’s the beginning of the year. Hopefully all of us have survived the holidays, but here’s what a lot of us our thinking at this point.

How do we budget for growth? It’d be nice if we’ve budgeted for growth. Spent the last three or four months go into the holidays doing that, but most the time we do it at the start of the year. But here’s something I want you to think about. I want you to think about place, people, and purpose. Because what’s really easy to do is just to think about the dollars.

It’s not easy to think about the time and the creativity of efforts in order to achieve growth, and that’s the responsibility of you as a leader or of your entire leadership team. So think about this place. How are you going to go to different places than you’d normally go to in order to connect with clients?

It’s easy to go to the same places where maybe it’s always a facility staff or a procurement staff or a technical staff. How are you going to go to the places where you meet folks that think differently and really own the decisions?

The second thing is how are you going to engage those people? You could do speaking engagements. You can obviously do booths. But how would you go to small meetings behind the meetings at those same events to engage?

So it’s those places and those people efforts, but think about this. If you go to some different venues and you do things differently, there’s a weirdness factor that people are going to look at you and say, why are you here? That’s where purpose kind of comes into.

You’ve got to have an internal purpose and you’ve got to have an external purpose to your efforts. The internal purpose– maybe this growth initiative and the way you’re budgeting this is about engaging more of your millennials, an issue that’s important for most every single client we’re involved with. The external purposes– maybe you need to be seen as growing your practice and making the practice more than about what everybody thinks your practice does.

If everybody’s seeing you always doing health care, maybe you need to be seen as a science or technology firm. If everybody’s seeing you do a certain type of software offering, maybe they need to see the service aspect of what you do. Internal, external.

So it’s about place, it’s about people, and it’s about purpose. So as you’re going through the budgeting efforts, don’t just focus on the dollars. Focus on the creativity of the way that you’re going to invest your time even if it’s just 20% to 30% of your entire budget. Thanks for listening and let’s have a great year.