Fast Break: Creating a Strategy that Sticks

Matt Cranney

Welcome to Fast Break as we kick off a new year, it’s time to talk goal setting. Did you know according to an article in Ink magazine, people who write down their goals are 42% more likely to achieve them? And get this according to a study in the Harvard Business Review, companies with documented goals have 30% higher revenue growth.

But here’s the kicker: I read an article in Forbes Magazine that cited the survey they conducted that more than half of Americans abandoned their new year goals within three months. Clearly goal setting can be a game changer.

But it’s not enough to have goals. You need to know how to set them and how to stick to them. And that’s where our guest today, Matt Pletzer, Founder of Lift Consulting. Matt is a 20 year veteran in the goal setting field and he’s helped thousands reach their full potential and I’m thrilled to have him on with me today.

He’s also a past guest on Fast Break, and so I’m thrilled to welcome him back again. Matt, welcome to Fast Break.

01:00 Matt Pletzer

Thanks Matt, appreciate it.

01:01 Matt Cranney

Let’s dive right in. If it’s OK, let’s jump in and tell our audience a little bit about yourself and the work that you do at Lift Consulting.

01:08 Matt Pletzer

Yeah, you bet, man. So we tend to work with organizations that are looking to maximize the performance of their people and their processes. We’re in the field of helping organizations through training development solutions, we do a lot of private training or custom training, whether or not it’s customer service management training or leadership training.

A huge part of our business is actually strategic planning, which ties directly into what we’re going to be talking about today or goal setting, and then general management consulting, as well.

01:40 Matt Cranney

And M3 has been a  client and a partner with Matt and Lift Consulting for a long time and can personally speak to you how awesome he and the team are over there. That will become even more obvious and evident as we dive into our conversation today. We’re really thrilled to have you.

So, Matt, as we begin this new year as the pages turned into 2025, I think everybody is still even at this point early in the year thinking about goals and thinking about the year ahead, what advice do you have at a high level for small business owners who are setting goals for their businesses? They’re sitting down, maybe with their teams, they’re putting a plan together. If you could coach them all one on one, what would you say?

02:26 Matt Pletzer

Yeah, I think that like at a high level, the big thing that I would encourage most business owners is to look longer term. You know what I find is that individuals or business owners, whether or not you’re conducting goal setting or strategic planning for your company is you know we tend to look at, hey, what is the next 12 months have in front of us?

And while that can be good, it’s similar to triage. Like if there’s a patient in the field that’s, you know, injured, we got to triage the patient right away. And sure, you got to take care of triage, but you can’t triage in perpetuity. At some point in time, you got to treat the patient. You got to treat the underlying cause that created the right, the wound or the injury that the patient has.

And so when we’re looking at our organization, when we’re only looking at a 12 month road map, it’s kind of like we’re always working in triage. Where it’s we’re driving down the road with blinders on and we’re only looking at the five feet in front of us. Where, longer term, you know, two years, three years down the road, there might be a deer that’s jumping out in front of the car and then we might not be seeing it.

So, that that’s a common thing that I see, especially with smaller business owners is maybe the business is new or we’ve just bought it and we’re just taking over and we’re trying to grow this business as we’re so focused in the now. But if we had a better idea of a little bit longer term would look like for us from our business, it may impact our immediate decisions more.

And it doesn’t mean that like we, we can’t pivot. I also believe that, you know, the old Mike Tyson quote, “everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face” is real and we need to be willing to pivot. But we should have a north star you know that we’re pointing towards and have and understand where we’re going.

04:06 Matt Cranney

We’ve used the phrase around M3 that the plan is nothing but planning is everything. And sometimes the tendency, and I know I’ve fallen into this trap before, we put so much effort and weight on what the plan actually is, right, versus taking the weight away from the magic, which is happens in the process to actually get to that plan.

And I love your call to our audience to think longer term, but to think strategically about the business, think about the people that you serve, think about the people you’re going to serve and that you want to serve.

Let’s build off that if I can. If you’re in that coaching meeting with a CEO of a small business and maybe they have a small team around them. What are some of the things that practically you would tell them in of they’ve never done it before or they haven’t had success with it and maybe some of the , okay “here’s some of the steps that you should think about in order to begin that really cool process.”

5:04 Matt Pletzer

Pre work is essential, and preplanning is essential. Matt, you know what we teach this concept, or this behavioral assessment tool called DiSC. What it does is it breaks people out and personality style.

Now what I find with a lot of business owners, depending upon your personality style is if you want to include your team in this process, we need to give them time to think and prepare accordingly. Because half of the population or actually more like 3/4 of the like they struggle with real time thinking.

And so I find often like small business owners can be frustrated with is very often they’re the idea person, they’re the visionary. And what the first times that they do strategic planning, they get frustrated because they don’t take enough time to give their team time to prep and prepare and then they call a meeting, they bring everybody together and they say, OK, let’s think strategically. And they’re asking their team, who doesn’t typically, it’s not natural to their personality to think on their feet like that. They really want to be thought through to provide their ideas and it ends up being the leader leads the whole thing and it becomes their plan, not their team’s plan.

So you know, first step is make sure that you put together a planning process that allows your team to think ahead and conduct some pre work. Next step would be really identify who you’re including in strategic planning. A lot of times we just may include those that are closest to us, but those that are closest to us, maybe closest to us for a reason because they think like us and they may not be actually be thinking differently.

It might mean including people that are not actually on your team, maybe people that are in the field or on your management team that you normally wouldn’t interact with. Think about who you’re including, their personality styles.

And then perhaps the next kind of third, I mean there are a lot of best practices, but I think the third, have an understanding of who’s going to be leading the meeting and is it best for you to lead the meeting or not? Small business owners tend to lead the meeting because they’re the small business owner. But then if you’re leading the meeting, it’s really difficult for you to be an active listener and participate.

Leadership should be brought towards your team through strategic planning by listening to what they have to say rather than have it bringing them into a meeting to hear what you have to say.

07:39 Matt Cranney

You know, as CEO’s and owners of the business you likely have been thinking about this plan for days, weeks, months and people on your team have been thinking about how do I take care of this customer today? Do I solve this problem?

I know it’s something that we’ve talked about with Lift Consulting. How people are able to jump at the challenge between jumping from tactical to strategic. And back and forth and that kind of like almost like turbulence that happens in an airplane when you lose height, right, it. And it can kind of be disorienting for people.

And so I love your call, Matt, to sort of, one, give people time to prepare, give people time in advance and know what questions we’re going to dive into, what they need to be thinking about so they can walk into that room really level set.

And this might be tough for some people who are listening, who are the CEOs or the business you may not be the right person to guide that process for the very best reasons in terms of you may benefit more from watching your team at work in that process and listening to it and then adding your feedback as you go through versus guiding and directing the whole the whole process.

Because often times when we do that as leaders, we kind of have an idea if we know where we want to go, we either consciously or subconsciously right and the ability to sort of put that if you have a talented person on your team or bringing in somebody from the outside, like a Lift Consulting or others to help guide that process can be really beneficial because again, that leader to participate, but also to allow it to go to the right destination, not maybe the one that they thought about in their heads is that is that fair?

09:15 Matt Pletzer

Yeah, I mean, you know, one of the things that it’s kind of a phrase I use, but I think when you include people, but you already have the plan in your mind, it’s actually called the illusion of inclusion. I bring that up with a lot of my leaders.

We’re talking about strategic planning, which is, are you really just providing illusion that you’re including your people because you’ve already found out the plan and you want this? Because if that’s the case, you should just run with the plan and tell the tell the team the plan.

If you really want to include your team, then you should sit back and listen to them. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have executive authority, but man, what a way to like, tap your team on the shoulder. Identify, who has additional potential leadership capabilities.  And identify what they could come up with without you being present to kind of test your team. I think it’s well worth it.

10:04 Matt Cranney

It’s funny, we use a similar phrase around here I have at least/ You know the illusion of choice is worse than actually no choice at all. It’s sort of that idea of if we’re inviting people in to sit at the table, they got to be fully at the table. They can’t be outside the table. They got to be, you know, around that table from a perspective, you know, point of view, everybody’s equal.

And that way you’re able to, I think, probably have the best chance of bringing the most perspectives, the most diverse ideas, the things that only somebody really close to the customer can think about.

Patrick Lencioni has that phrase. Like you want as many people in the room who can smell your customers. And not in a weird way, but in like you know, when you talk to them, you know that they’ve been interacting customers because they’re telling stories like. If we focus on that, it would make us more efficient, more effective. It would be easier, and they’ve lived it because sometimes as the leader, as the CEO is the owner, if you have that slightly removed perspective, you can potentially see things even clearer than somebody who’s so close.

But I love your call, Matt. To sort of say, hey, let’s get everybody to the table with the idea in the notion that, hey, we’re all sitting around and we all are important here,

11:27 Matt Pletzer

Yeah, and I think the only thing I would add to that is that from a participant standpoint, if you are someone who has been tapped on the shoulder to be part of, you know annual goal setting or strategic planning, however you want to dub it. Like it’s essential that you do contribute. Oftentimes there a lot of people that they want to be part of they want to be maybe they have a little bit of FOMO from not being there, but at the same token, when you observe them, they’re quiet for 98% of the meeting and then they leave the meeting after the fact and that’s where oftentimes they’ll share their true feelings and sometimes they’re feeling true feelings may not align with the plan that was put in place.

And so you know, depending upon your personality, if you’re someone who naturally tends to be a little bit quieter, more reserved. If you’re tapped on the shoulder to be part of playing the, it’s essential that you contribute. Essential that you push yourself outside of your comfort. To let your voice be heard, to be the voice of the customer or your team. However you’re looking at.

12:26 Matt Cranney

It if somebody is listening to this today and they’ve got their business to a certain size and scale and it’s been through sheer force of, you know, hard work, passion and leaning in and they’re at that place where they recognize, hey, what got us here won’t get us maybe to the next phase of growth and they want to lean into the strategic planning or goal setting process.

Can you just maybe talk a little bit about, hey, if you’re in your first go around and you just want to put together the first plan in the history of your organization, what are some just like big thoughts for how you can structure that?

12:56 Matt Pletzer

As I started before, I would start with a little bit longer term vision. And so, what maybe probably easiest way is just to answer what we do because we believe in what we do as a rights of this process.

So I think the first thing would be to start with a little bit longer term vision, whether or not that’s three years or five years that can be written out in almost what we call the vision statement. Think about it, like, hey, if I were in a coffee shop and I’m talking to somebody who doesn’t know my business, how would I describe my business five years from now?

So the longer term doesn’t have to in my opinion, doesn’t have to follow the smart goal format. It doesn’t have to be so written out, but it’s got to describe your business as far as what it looks like, perhaps who your ideal customer is, what geographies you’re in, what market segments you’re in, what is your, your team org chart look like it? It’ll describe that so that anyone picking it up just like you’re reading a book and read it and be like, oh, this is cool. I want to inspire to be part of it. I know directionally where we’re going, right?

And then you move down into annual planning. And when I look at annual planning, that’s where I think you take that vision and you say, OK, this year, what blocks do we need to put in place to achieve that longer term vision? What are the core critical things?

And you’ll hear a lot of companies do things like a SWOT analysis or they’ll do a start. A start, stop and continue. How well you want to do that is fine, but I encourage someone to do an exercise like that to help you identify, okay in the now, compared to that longer term vision like, what do I need to start, stop or continue doing or what’s our strengths weak, our opportunities and threats that will impede us from achieving that vision. And usually the result of that will help you identify your initiatives for the year. And those initiatives, I do believe should follow the smart format, which is you know specific measurable, achievable, or attainable, it’s relevant to your business and it’s time bound. And the better that you can follow the format the clearer it’s going to be for you and everybody else.

And then the last thing I would say is what sometimes smart misses, which I think is important is two factors is first, what is painted done look like as Brené Brown would say. So we can identify what a smart goal is, but what are we actually saying? We’re unifying around Is what done looks like for us.  And then what’s the structure around who’s actually doing that? We follow a principle called RACI, which is responsible, accountable consulting informed. But whatever it is, whether or not it’s informed or involved, or you fall into a different model, but just being really deliberate about who’s responsible for which part of the plan is essential.

15:46 Matt Cranney

For those that were listening, I’d encourage you to hit back 30 seconds or back 15 on your podcast and listen again to what Matt just talked about because in a really short amount of time, he distilled a really awesome framework to take you from nothing to something in something really meaningful and practical.

Because while we talk about hey planning’s everything, the plan’s nothing to our conversation. The people that count on you, count on the plant and when you think about how that plant can be used as a recruitment tool. We do that here at M3, I think you guys do it with consulting too? Like we, we talk with all of our employees and we talk with prospective employees about here’s kind of where we’re going.

Because one of the things that and our CEO Mike Victorson has used this phrase a lot. We think that really talented people want to be on a winning team that has a plan. The beauty of that sentiment is the simplicity of it. There’s so much else that talented people want to meet.

So I think you know competitive benefits package, a competitive wage and it doesn’t discount all of those. But if people don’t know that they’re on a team that’s winning, that has a plan to continue to win some of those other things, you can pay people all the money you want. But that sense of engagement and connection may not may not be the same. So, Matt for sharing that gold with our audience, I think that was really, really meaningful.

So we’ve gone through the plan. Set our goals. People can set goals both personally and for their organization, and then you know, we fail at it, right? We’re human. We sort of, either get busy or we think about other things. I think it was at the 19th of January was like, what was it called? Like a holiday and I was like, quitting day or something like that where it’s like most people have given up on their resolutions and goals. What are some of the ways that if you’re a business owner, you’ve gone through the plan, wow do you stay, accountable to it? How do you stay motivated and stay on track with to honor all that incredible work that you did at the front end.

17:45 Matt Pletzer

So a few first off, you know I’m a big believer that nobody can hold you accountable by yourself you gotta look inward, not outward.

But it can help to have an accountability mirror. And what I mean by mirror is someone who’s gonna, you know, show you your plan on a consistent basis. And so as a leader, you know, identifying someone who you can communicate your plan to outside your team. Perhaps you have an executive roundtable that you’re part of, or you have a coach or someone that you’re working with I think can be really beneficial because as you get off plan, it can be easier for someone that’s not within your existing team to help remind you, hey, hold on. But when you have employees that report up to you often times it’s difficult for them to say, hey, hold on, we’re squirreling here, right?

So communicating to somebody that you consider a colleague, the plan can be really beneficial by participating some type of executive roundtable or coaching scenario, or just even having someone that you look up to for mentorship can be good.

Other thing is just looking at your meeting cadence. You mentioned Patrick Lincoln before he has a great book called Death by meeting, which outlines a really good meeting cadence. Part of that meeting Cadence is having a specific dedicated meeting to holding yourself in your organization accountable to your strategic plan.

And at a minimum, making sure that you’re meeting on a frequent basis to review the plan, but that that meeting needs to be specific to your strategic plan. Well, a lot of leaders do is they try to blend it in with other meeting topics. And usually, like we were talking about before, the difference between tactical and strategic like those tactical items, they’re the small easy things to solve. So more leaders tend to focus on, well, this is just triage, so let’s solve these small things, then we’ll talk about the plan and the plan just keeps getting kicked down the curb further and further and further.

So then we don’t have the accountability to it that we need to.

19:47 Matt Cranney

Your, essentially, call to action is how can you make the plan a living, breathing document, right? A part that is as much a part of your company culture as anything else. If we’re doing it right, that plan should impact almost a aspect of every single day, right in terms of how we’re doing our jobs, who we’re doing our jobs for, where we’re working on our job like you think about, if you have a goal to launch a new product, man, that’s a huge deal for the organization. And even for employees that don’t focus on that new product. They’re still going to need to be updated and about what’s going on in their organization.

And I love that idea and we’ve made this mistake, I know I have, of where you make the planning update. One of the agenda items on your executive team meeting or in where we found, we got a lot of traction is no, we’re having a dedicated meeting with our leadership team specifically about business plans. Which is in in our M3 world is kind of how we chunk our strategic plan down into quarterly runs is our business plans.

And We have meetings where we have updates from our CEO and how the organization’s doing and then we launch into having actually two or three of our leaders present to the group on, here’s something that I’m working on in my team. Here’s how my part of that’s going and I get a chance to ask them some questions about lessons they’ve learned, things that went well, things that maybe didn’t go so well, because if we’re all not benefiting from that It’s such a waste, right?

And I love that sort of a call to where if you’re to see this, maybe is to summarize to see it as a process, not an event. Right goal setting is not a one time event, it’s a process that just continues. If we’re doing it right, live in our organization.

21:28 Matt Pletzer

Yeah, I 100% agree with that. And I think the great companies that I work with that do planning really well is they take that high level plan and they cascade it throughout the organization and they have every member of organization has their goals or their own department plan ties into that plan. So then they develop their own segment plan and I think that’s really essential if the planning process is something that just your executive team does and everybody else looks set it like this is something that they do once a year and they close themselves in a room and to go have fun like, that’s not what it’s intended to. It should be something that everybody in the team rallies around and it cascades down.

22:11 Matt Cranney

Matt, before we wrap this part of our conversation, I’m I really want to take a path into more of how this plays out for maybe our individual goals as well. So we’ve talked a lot about, you know, how we do this for our small businesses. But when you think about our audience for this podcast, a lot of senior leaders, a lot of CEOs, a lot of people that carry a lot of responsibility. And typically a lot of driven people who want to go through that exercise and set goals for themselves, not just for their business but for their life in general or how they want to show up.

I’m curious man, what are some of the recommendations or thoughts you would have for us as individuals, as we think about our own personal goals and how maybe what everything we’ve talked about for the last 25 minutes maybe applies back to us as individuals.

22:57 Matt Pletzer

Yeah, limited to the vital few. Not the many. You know, organizations tend to do this and individuals tend to do it. We sit down and we do our annual strategic plan or we do our, you know, personal goal setting session and it’s easy, like when you looked at the factors of life, you know, family, finances, physicality, mental health. You know, if you really outline social status.So you outline all the different departments on a personal goal setting how it could be, well, I want to go for each one of these.

But at the end of the day, if you were to really prioritize the impact that you want to make, it’s probably on a few, not many. And I think a lot of individuals probably start with too many goals, whereas hey, earn the right to move to the next. Don’t try to do them all at one time.

So that’s one thing I would do. And then on the personal goal setting too is it’s to me it should be almost identical to the business goal setting in that. Like who do you want to be remembered as or for. And when I work with individuals and individual goal settings, a lot of times like we’ll do something really deep and it’s hard to do, but we’ll even write our own eulogies. And it’s interesting how many people, when you when you write your own eulogy and you say, hey, this is what I want to be remembered for. And then you look at how you think you show up today or what your actions are saying, today, they’re not in alignment. And so that’s where I, same thing on personal goalsetting. You know you’re in the rocking chair on your porch in your cabin. Like what do you want to say you’ve achieved and accomplished? And then look at what you’re doing today and are your actions parallel or are they fighting with that and that might help you redefine what you’re to do this year.

24:46 Matt Cranney  Matt Pletzer

Oh man, I love that lot. Don Miller from story brand. He talks about you know how we stay in pursuit of eulogy values, not resume values, right? That’s exactly what you’re calling us to think about, Matt in terms of how we think, again, like the theme, of our how we think long term both as individuals and organizations, how we have consistency and congruency right between the things that we say and the things that we do

And then something you said that I think is really important. I think everybody, regardless of where they are on the DiSC, regardless of how they’re wired, everybody likes to get a win. And when we set ourselves up with goals that say, hey, you know, I’ve never run before. But my goal is to run a marathon. I love the aspirational aspect of that. But what if instead, the very first goal went on your plan was I’m going to go for two runs, or I’m going to do a 5K in the next three months or something that feels like, hey, we can do that because what that allows us to do is stack success, right?

I think it’s Mike McCarthy, the old Packers coach and Cowboys coach used to talk about, hey, we just want to stack success. So once we get one, we can get two. Because the hardest thing in the world, I think, is to go from nothing to something. Once you get to something, it’s much easier to go from something to something bigger, better, faster, whatever.

And so I love how you’re calling us to think about that. We hold this big status symbol for.

26:15 Matt Pletzer

We hold this big status symbol for, hey, want to lose 20 lbs or whatever it may be, but we don’t really drill it down to, well, what’s the one thing? So for me, for this year, for example, the one thing for me to achieve my goals is honestly, I got to limit my TV consumption at night.  I’m tired and I consume too much. So TV, can’t be on for more than 1/2 hour, right? So that’s my one thing that I’m tracking.

26:40 Matt Cranney

If you’re listening, you can tell Matt and I are both nerds for leadership, development and reading and podcast. But it makes me think of  “Atomic Habits”, right, by James Clear. It talks about how every time you if your goal is, hey, I want to put my gym clothes on, it’s a vote for the kind of person that you want to be and you’re just stacking the deck in favor of being that person versus the person that maybe we used be or that we no longer want to be.

I love that and if you’re listening today and you’re in the thick of how you set the goals, I love that call to sort of, less but better.  In thinking about that powerful first domino and first thing. If everybody set one goal that was achievable and then was smart and all the things he talked about, man, and they were able to achieve it? It doesn’t matter if they achieve it in a month or six weeks, then we can do it again and then we can do it again. And then we’re stacking success. I really love that, Matt.

What a really powerful conversation to begin our year together on Fast Break. So, thank you for everything that you’ve shared. But before I let you go, we always like to cover our fastest break set of questions and so if it’s OK with you, I’m going to dive into those.

27:51 Matt Pletzer

Let’s do it.

27:52 Matt Cranney

I think you may get the same answer, but I’m going to ask question favorite book you read in the last 12 months.

27:55 Matt Pletzer

Not the same one, different. I read that one a long time ago, but this one is the Experience Maker by Dan Ginkas.

28:04 Matt Cranney

I love that. Complete the sentence for you, leadership is.

28:07 Matt Pletzer

Both an art and a science of that.

28:11 Matt Cranney

The most impactful coaching advice that you’ve ever received.

28:13 Matt Cranney  Matt Pletzer

John Schrum said to me, If you won’t bet on yourself, who would you bet on?

28:17 Matt Cranney

I love that. Look at all the things that have happened because you betted on yourself, so what an awesome piece of coaching advice. 

Your favorite podcast that you would recommend to our audience?

28:25 Matt Pletzer

I don’t really have a favorite, but the one I’m into right now, which is really good, is called The Game with Alex Hermosi.

28:32 Matt Cranney

You can’t live without it app on your phone.

28:34 Matt Pletzer

It’s my habit tracker.

28:35 Matt Cranney 

Oh, I love that. Last thing you did that truly scared you.

28:40 Matt Pletzer

Having a crucial conversation when I wasn’t in control of the outcome.

28:44 Matt Cranney

And last one, if you had to give a Ted talk, what would be the title?

28:47 Matt Pletzer

I have to admit, I asked AI to help me on this one, but it’s Uncluttered Success: Embracing simplicity can transform your business.

28:57 Matt Cranney

Oh man, I love it. I would watch it. So you know how that you spoken that out. You know, you got to go record that.  So I think it all hopefully all audience would, would TuneIn.

So Matt I’m infinitely thankful to you for your time today but before we wrap, in light of what we’ve talked about, I can imagine a lot of people are like, OK. I’m buying in. I understand the value of the process. I wanna do it, but perhaps they’re recognizing it might not be their skill or anybody on their team currently, and they might want to reach out to you or to Lift Consulting and engage with you in a conversation about that.

I’m hoping you can share where people can find out more about you and more about Lift Consulting.

29:34 Matt Pletzer

Yeah, I mean, obviously LinkedIn is an easy one. Just look myself up or any of our team at Lift Consulting here in Wisconsin. Lift@sandler.com is our general e-mail inbox, or Lift.sandler.com is our website.

29:50 Matt Cranney

Awesome. Again, audience encouragement to you all. If this is something that you are struggling with or thinking about. The return on your investment in this process, whether you do it yourself or with the help of somebody like a Lift Consulting is going to be 10X a 100X because we all get better when our businesses continue to grow and thrive.

And so Matt, with that, thank you so much for being willing to join me today on Fast Break and for sharing your insights and wisdom with our audience.

We really appreciate it.

This has been Fast Break brought to you by M3 Elevate. I’m your host, Matt Cranney.  Thank you for joining me.

Do you want more tips to help grow and protect your business? Subscribe now and catch all of our episodes and we’ll see you next time.