Knowing the current state of your business, defining its strategic objectives, and your own aspirations is critical to successful growth planning, the primary outcome of your Creative Mastermind membership.
As part of our onboarding process, we’ll conduct an extensive business diagnostic with our strategists to better understand where your business is today. This allows us to identify and prioritise opportunities within your business and it will highlight areas to address.
The business diagnostic follows a 4-stage process over the first 8 weeks of your Creative Mastermind Programme.
- Discovery – Our strategists will walk you through the business diagnostic and provide you with objective support to understand areas of opportunity or areas to focus on
- Deep Dive – Building upon our initial research, we’ll address strategic areas that require further review, analysis and discussion
- Growth Plan – together we’ll build a plan to implement our agreed actions
- Delivery – the execution of our growth plan
Stage 1 – Discovery
We host a bespoke workshop that specifically addresses the core pillars of growth that agencies must fulfil to grow in a sustainable and profitable manner. Within the workshop, our strategists will support you in answering questions that directly relate to the business you run, the team you have and the market you operate in.
Immediately it will begin to highlight the opportunities and challenges your business faces. Most agency owners have a strong understanding of what their business needs to do, but it’s rare that any of us can pause to plan for the future. Our business diagnostic workshop will allow you to do this with a structured and proven approach.
Within it, we cover 6 core areas:
- Business Strategy & Planning For Growth
- Leadership & Management
- Recruitment & Retention
- Current Plan For Growth
- Technical Advantages
- Funding and Investment
You will be provided with the workshop documentation in advance of the project commencement, as there are a number of high-level documents that require preparation in advance. These include:
- Profit and Loss
- Balance Sheet
- Cashflow Forecast
- Utilisation Report
It usually takes around 2 hours to complete the discovery questionnaire, but this becomes the foundation of all future decisions and allows our team to understand the position of your business fully.
Stage 2 – Deep Dive
The diagnostic has been design to shine a light on your business: the good and the not-so-good. But please understand that none of us will ever have the perfect business. Our agencies change at a moment’s notice. The markets we operate in are in constant flux and well our teams…..you know the rest.
Led by Connor, your completed diagnostic will be thoroughly checked by our leadership team. We’re looking for your strengths and weaknesses, as well as identifying strategic areas of your business that will have the greatest impact or return will be discussed. We’ll work to identify 2 or 3 immediate actions or quick wins that will have a huge impact on your business but can be completed independently as we further review the data.
Using our experience and understanding of working with successful agencies, we’ll benchmark your data to identify areas of potential review and discuss these with you further.
Within our deep dive, we aim to successfully:
- Review your current vision and strategy objectively
- Identify areas of improvement and opportunities for growth
- Improve your business’s operational performance across all functions
Stage 3 – Growth Plan
This is where we start to formulate a growth plan for your business together. Based on the insights and understanding gained in stages 1 and 2, we’ll look at the ambition of the agency and start creating strategic goals to get there. These OKRs or objectives and key results will be broken down into achievable milestones both at a departmental level and inclusive of individual team objectives.
We’ll create a working document to achieve our short, medium and long-term ambitions. We do this by utilising Sprints, or short cycles of considered focus that enable us to implement our strategy fast but in a controlled manner.
Stage 4 – Delivery
Once our plan is set we move toward delivering this within the business. Each month our strategists will meet with you for up to 1.5 hours to discuss implementation of the plan and provide constructive support. This review meeting is pivotal to maintaining the momentum and focus on the strategy, as well as answering any of the questions you have faced in its implementation.
Through your ongoing membership within The Creative Mastermind, we offer unlimited support via our strategists’ advice channels. Many of our clients want a sanity check on decisions and or the ability to ask an ad-hoc question. These dedicated voice channels are often the quickest way to get the answer you are looking for.
we will be able to monitor and refine the plans as they are put into action over the coming months and years. Connor and his strategists will be available to support you throughout the entirety of this journey.
How long do I need to be a member?
Many of our members choose to continue their membership over many years and in doing so the support changes from growth strategy to top-level board support. Generally speaking, if you want to create, build and deliver your growth plan, you could achieve this in 18 months with significant focus and resources dedicated to the plan.
The business diagnostic is provided exclusively to The Creative Mastermind programme members. It is an integral part of onboarding our clients to ensure we have the greatest understanding of their business while providing actionable insights and plans to grow their agencies.