Galen Low is joined by Simon Severino—CEO & Founder of Strategy Sprints—to break down the processes behind an agile business and how you can make agile strategy a reality for your own.
Interview Highlights
Simon’s background [1:57]
At Strategy Sprints, they coach a couple dozen teams every day.
Team: it’s consultancies, marketing agencies, PR agencies, recruiting agencies, UX/UI agencies, design agencies.
They do a 90-day Strategy Sprint
Month 1: they free up 10 to 14 hours of people’s time by better organizing, better processes
Month 2: they improve the conversion rate, they improve sales
Month 3: scaling via marketing
The notion of Strategy Sprints: who is it for, and what problem does it solve? [3:12]
Started from being frustrated with strategic planning because it’s a waste of time and it’s hard to change.
Traditional strategic planning: you create a plan (a list of activities), then you have interdependencies. And so you have already wasted six hours just planning.
Simon is frustrated with two things:
Doesn’t want to stop and do strategy.
Wants to do strategy while in action.
Simon was frustrated with arbitrary timelines.
When you want to change things quickly, and you have all these interdependencies, how can we simplify it?
He wants something that he can change in half an hour.
This is how the three habits were born: Daily Habit, Weekly Habit, and Monthly Habit.
Monthly habit – the planning
Weekly Habit – the measuring
Daily Habit – time management
Has Simon’s framework been inspired by agile project management? And if so, how? [9:55]
They are standing on the shoulders of giants. There are decades of lean management, decades of design sprints on the product level, decades of rapid prototyping, scrum.
Their question was: how can we use those fantastic processes to run a business? What’s agile for the CEO? What’s agile for the digital agency that doesn’t want to improve products or test products before they build them?
They applied those agile things to strategy and applied them to sales and marketing.
Simon quoted David Allen: “There are no problems. There are only projects.”
In his world, a project is everything that is more than three tasks, three steps. If it’s just one task, it’s a next action. If it has three steps, it’s a project.
For Simon, everything is a project in terms of – what’s the difference between business and project when you run a digital agency? You just decide, “I’m gonna do this or I’m not gonna do this.” If you’re gonna do it, then it either has a goal or no goal. If it has a goal, it has a timeline and a definition of done.
There are just projects and programs when you run a business.
The strategy sprint process walkthrough [18:04]
A typical 90-day sprint is three months, three goals.
One goal is usually around shortening the sales time. One goal is usually around commanding higher prices for the offer. One goal is getting more of the right people and less of the wrong people into the sales conversation. Another typical goal is to have more documented processes and having more time, just less stress.
In the first month, that’s four sprints. So those four sprints will measure the progress every seven days. They have four times the chance to course correct and they have to solve four bottlenecks.
The first bottleneck is always time. The team—one person from ops, one from marketing, one from sales and the owner— are in a time crunch. So in Week Zero, they have to free up 10 to 14 hours of their time each per week.
The first thing that they do is the daily habit. Everybody writes down “this is how I spend my time today”. And then they review “what’s the one task that I will delegate tomorrow, either to a software or to a person”.
Second question is, “if I would leave more freely and more intentionally tomorrow, what would I do?” And informed by this five minutes review day, write down their day, their daily flow of tomorrow.
If everybody finds one task every couple days to delegate, now the whole system is starting to become documented. Because the first step of delegation is writing it down as a checklist, creating a short video, and then handing it over. Or directly giving it to a software, automating it.
From week two, they have to identify what’s the current bottleneck. It’s a process of eight minutes, and basically it answers the question: “if we take on five times more clients next week, which is the first part in our business that breaks?”
They have multiple loops of two, three days during the week and after seven days, there is measurement of all the activities. Which one did work, which didn’t? What do we learn? What’s the bottleneck for next week?
The relationship between strategy sprints and projects within an organization [28:17]
Good projects are end-to-end. There is no internal and external.
Things Simon considers in the hiring process: “Can they decide? Can they budget? And do they have a process for escalation if needed?” He wants them to move quickly end-to-end, and not to have to ask anybody. That’s a project that has the highest probability of success and can move on quickly.
Simon doesn’t want a separation between marketing, sales, and operations.
Every Friday, his team looks at one sprint dashboard with those three numbers. If they don’t do that, now you have marketing that’s creating brochures and sales that doesn’t even talk to marketing because sales says, “I don’t even know what you guys are doing.”
The biggest challenges agencies struggle with when trying to put agile strategy into practice [33:21]
One problem is not getting data every seven days.
The bottleneck in that week is obviously simplifying the data and tagging the data points in one place, which is usually the CRM.
Having a 2 million budget and a big team of 11 people for two years is helpful. Even more helpful is to have end-to-end processes, weekly measurement and daily execution.
Can strategy sprints work for larger agencies and other kinds of digital enterprises? [36:44]
Size is not a problem. Mindset is a problem.
For example, Google works exactly like a Strategy Sprint. Size is not the problem. They work in sprints.
What can business strategists learn from project management? And then the flip side: what can agile project managers learn from agile strategy? [39:33]
Strategy Sprints recently worked with the military and found that it’s the most agile. It’s a team of teams. They break down everything in teams, and they have bottom ups, end-to-end processes. And it’s full of micro-processes.
There are checklists for everything. There are processes for everything, and there is a culture of accountability and a culture of systems. And there is a culture of “you have to decide quickly, right now on the battlefield.”
Simon found all the principles of Agile and of Strategy Sprints there.
Meet Simon
Simon Severino helps business owners in SaaS and Services run their company more effectively which results in sales that soar. He created the Strategy Sprints® Method that doubles revenue in 90 days by getting owners out of the weeds. Simon is the CEO and founder of Strategy Sprints which is a global team of Certified Strategy Sprints® Coaches that help clients gain market share and work in weekly sprints which results in fast execution. He is also a Forbes Business Council Member and a contributor to Entrepreneur Magazine.
