Now that you know which team(s) will take part in strategic planning, the time horizon objectives should have, and the rhythm you should follow to measure the success of your objectives, you should be ready to write down your objectives for the upcoming period.


Our Business Plans product was built on top of a popular strategic management framework named OKR.  It stands for Objectives (O) and Key Results (KR). The paradigm used for the plan is Objectives and Key Results OKR attributed to Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, and later described by famous venture capitalist John Doerr in his book, Measure what Matters.  


Since the concepts advocated in OKRs are quite simple, you should be able to apply them to a variety of other strategic management frameworks your organization might already be using.



Business Plans in FranchiseBlast can help you to co-create a living document with your franchisees where you define their objectives, how to measure their success with key results, and the initiatives they can do to reach them.


Objectives Define Where You Want to Go

Objectives answer the question: “Where do I want to go”.  They provide a qualitative direction for people to aim for that should be easy to understand.  Set inspirational objectives for them to be easily remembered.


Set objectives with the expectation that only 70% of the objective will be achieved.  Set the bar high to challenge the status quo.


Depending on the nature of your strategic plan, you might have several team members working on it.  To keep things organized, we use Focus Areas to group objectives together.


Key Results Measure the Success of an Objective

Key Results are quantifiable metrics that will measure the success of an objective.  They answer the question: “How do I get there”.  They should be quantitative, measurable, and specific.  


They are indicators you and your team should update regularly according to the rhythm you have decided on with your team. 


Keeping your key results up-to-date ensures that you can course-correct before it is too late when you realize that some initiatives in place aren’t moving the needle. 


Initiatives Are Activities You Perform to Reach an Objective

Initiatives are hypotheses representing concrete activities that could have a positive impact on the key results for an objective.  Whether or not they will have an impact is what you test throughout the execution of your strategy in a given period.  You evaluate if they are successful or not by evaluating the key results of the objective.


We recommend that you have at least one initiative per objective. Initiatives can impact several key results, therefore, they should be seen as contributing to the overall success of an objective, rather than an individual key result.


Review Areas of Opportunity

To get inspiration on what to focus on, you can review the key results of your previous period.  There might be some results you weren’t tracking yet, however, there are certainly some key indicators your business is tracking to evaluate success.  


Looking at the results for a previous quarter should help you identify the areas of opportunity for a team.  


It is however difficult to see the big picture when your metrics are scattered across a variety of systems.  A good exercise to go through is to collect all the metrics you think matters most for the success of your team and put them in one document to get an overview of your strengths and weaknesses.  


Streamline Your Process

You can streamline this process by creating a library of recommended objectives, key results, and initiatives aligned with your organizational objectives in a document.  Utilize that document to pick and choose what works best for a particular franchisee and adapt it to their business context.  Review that library at least once a year to ensure it stays aligned with your vision.  


Focus on Outcomes

It doesn’t matter which direction you take, if you don’t know where you want to go.  Be results-driven rather than focusing on outputs while defining your key results.   


Outputs are results that are obtained immediately after the execution of an initiative.  Whereas outcomes measure the impact that initiatives are generating on key results.


For example, if a pizza delivery service’s objective is to provide the best service in town. If they focus on outputs, they could measure the success of the objective by measuring the amount of pizzas delivered within the period.  However, that doesn’t ensure that the right value was delivered to their customers.  They could have delivered a pizza that’s not hot, or delivered the wrong order.  Hence, it doesn’t properly measure if they are becoming the best service in town.


Instead, they should focus on the outcome that was delivered to their customers.  For instance, the service company could set a key result to measure the percentage of accuracy in delivering the right orders to their customers. 


Such an indicator could help to discover that customers are only getting the right order only 70% of the time.  It’s a better measure of success for their objective because it represents the value they provide to their customers.  If they would implement initiatives to deliver the right order 95% of the time, it would greatly contribute to their objective of becoming the best delivery service. 


Ensure you are not writing down outputs from initiatives that are within your control as key results.  Use measurable outcomes that result from the outputs of those initiatives instead. 

 

Next Steps

Get started for the upcoming quarter.


✅ Review areas of opportunity by looking at your key results for the previous period.


Not sure what to look for?  Start by looking at your Franchisee Scorecard and Field Audit Analytics to find weaknesses with areas of improvement.


✅ Get inspired


To help you get a head start, we have compiled a library of examples from our market research with many franchise systems that could spark your creativity while writing your objectives.  Have a look!


✅ Create a library of recommended objectives aligned with your brand vision (optional).


Write down recommended objectives and some key results to measure them on a document You can use this document as a library to have a conversation with franchisees about their objectives for the upcoming period. Write the name of the source where each key metric comes from to verify your capacity to track them.


✅ Set 3-5 objectives for each unit in your pilot with franchisees.


Have a conversation with each franchisee to co-create a strategic business plan for the upcoming period with them.  Write down their objectives, key results, and initiatives for the upcoming period’s Business Plan in FranchiseBlast. 


For each franchisee objective, pick 2-3 key results to measure its success.  Define at least one initiative per franchisee objective that could drive change in its key results.


Still Under Consideration

Interested in setting up a streamlining goal-setting by creating a library of recommended objectives which align with annual brand objectives? Let us know how important this idea is to you on our Portal.


Let us know about other things we could build to help and check-out our other ideas under consideration.


Wrap-up

That's it for creating strategic business plans!  You are all up to speed on how Business Plans in FranchiseBlast can help you to co-create a living document with franchisees where they can come back, again and again, to review and update their objectives, key results, and initiatives.


Next up, we'll take a closer look at how to perform check-ins throughout the duration of a period, in order to keep franchisees engaged, and measure the impact of your initiatives on the success of your objectives with key results.


See Also