Optimizing Annual Planning for Agency Growth, With Kristen Kelly

Oct 22, 2025

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00:01 – 00:55 – Introduction: Marcel welcomes Kristen Kelly and frames Q4 as prime season for annual and quarterly planning, noting the high cost of leadership offsites demands clear outcomes.
01:18 – 03:10 – Why Planning Feels Hard: Kristen cites common hurdles—turning history into forward plans, aligning stakeholders, and building forecasts that can flex with scenarios.
01:55 – 03:47 – Frameworks Without Dogma: Marcel references EOS and Scaling Up, extracting shared essentials: look back, look forward, set a few priorities, and install a cadence.
03:48 – 05:16 – From Ideas to Execution: Teams stall when models are rigid or fragmented and when revenue targets are arbitrary rather than grounded in capacity, pricing, and cost.
05:17 – 08:43 – Static Models Create Drag: Rigid spreadsheets bias decisions toward the status quo, force opinion-driven debates, and delay choices into the quarter, shrinking execution time.
08:44 – 11:48 – Prep That Actually Works: Start with mission and quantifiable goals, anchor to a simple, accurate, flexible model, and compare forecast to actuals to keep scope tight.
11:49 – 14:32 – Surface Misalignment Early: A pre-offsite FUD survey (fear, uncertainty, doubt) creates psychological safety, reveals blind spots, and primes productive discussion.
14:33 – 17:16 – Make the Look-Back Lightweight: Ongoing scorecards make recaps brief; focus on AGI, delivery margin, overhead/AGI, operating profit, and levers like utilization, ABR, and average cost per hour.
17:17 – 20:56 – Prioritize by the Numbers: Identify which metrics must move, set a small set of OKR-style priorities, and tie initiatives directly to measurable outcomes and weekly execution.
20:56 – 23:47 – Objectives Stay Stable; Communicate Often: Big objectives change slowly; raise the bar via evolving key results and over-communicate the plan so decisions map back to it.
25:23 – 27:58 – Commit, Then Figure It Out: Install scorecards and targets even if imperfect; the commitment becomes the forcing function to solve data structure, forecasting, and tracking.
28:27 – 36:56 – Model-Backed Decisions & Facilitation: Use a living model to handle cyclical topics (price raises, comp), budgeting, and tradeoffs; third-party facilitation drives objectivity, buy-in, and offers ABR-improving options beyond price increases.
36:56 – 39:29 – Unified Budgeting & Final Advice: A connected model aligns payroll, pricing, overhead, and delivery targets, preventing unrealistic constraints; the closing takeaway is numbers-first planning that builds alignment and speeds execution.

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