Book Excerpt: 'Double Double: How to Double Your Revenue and Profit in 3 Years or Less'

Don't Miss: An exclusive AllBusiness.com interview with Cameron Herold on how to make it happen for your business

In his book Double Double: How to Double Your Revenue and Profit in 3 Years or Less, lifelong entrepreneur Cameron Herold, former COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK? and current founder of his own business coaching and mentoring firm, shares his plan for 100% growth. The process of doubling your revenue and profits starts with what Herold calls the Painted Picture, a written document that vividly details "what your company will look like and feel like three years hence." Looking forward, however, is just one element of the equation. As this excerpt from the book shows, working backward is just as critical:

To make your Painted Picture a reality, you have to take action. And in order to take action, you have to focus on setting goals for that action. It's curious, but instead of focusing on the future as you set goals and create an action plan, you have to work backward. What that means is that you have to first identify and articulate your goals, and then find the means to achieve those objectives. You are, in effect, "reverse engineering" your successful business. Instead of flying by the seat of your pants, you can use reverse engineering to align all of your daily tasks and operations with overarching objectives.

Start with your current strengths and weaknesses

Before you start putting the plans for your company into action, you have to have a clear idea of your starting point. Where you are with your business and where you want to be are two entirely different things for most organizations. One of the best tools for getting started in the process of reverse engineering your Painted Picture is to begin with an inventory of your company or business areas as they stand today. It's not easy, but one of my favorite ways to determine the current state of your business is through a SWOT analysis. And it needn't be arduous at all. I've helped some companies do theirs in 30 minutes.

SWOT stands for "Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats." Sitting down to analyze each of these terms as it relates to your company can be extremely eye-opening. Give all of the key people in your company or leadership team a stack of Post-it notes (or any small pieces of paper). Give them ten minutes at most to write down one idea per note pertaining to the four areas represented in the SWOT. When time is up, have each person read each of his/her notes out loud and post them up on a wall according to the four categories. After everyone does this, start taking stock of the current state of your company, and then compare that with where you want to be in the future. This will give shape to the key projects you need to complete in order to make the future happen the way you want it to. Those projects will serve as the starting point for your own process of reverse engineering.

Establish SMART goals

Once you have an idea of the key projects you wish to undertake, establish goals for each of those projects. Remember, your Painted Picture is your ultimate objective. However, to keep projects and tasks in check and in alignment with the Painted Picture, you need to streamline the list of projects by making sure that the goals for each one are SMART. I use these guidelines to help me evaluate each goal (mine feature a slight variation on the popular business acronym):

S = Shared—Sharing goals with a coach, mentor, or team member adds a little extra pressure to hit them. I even share them with suppliers and clients.

M = Measurable—Put a number on each goal so you can easily see whether the goals were hit or missed. Make the goals clear; hazy goals produce hazy results.

A = Attainable—Your goal has to be at least remotely possible for it to be included.

R = Relevant—Ensure that all goals are worth working on.

T = Time-based—Put a specific date on goals if they're due before the end of the quarter or fiscal year. For example, why not set December 12 as a deadline rather than December 31?

Every company will have projects related to these four fairly standard goals:

1. Revenue. Determine a solid revenue goal for the next 12 months. This is easy. Your goal should be a yearly 25% increase for the next three years.

2. Profit. Employees need a profit goal to guide them. So, to grow successfully, your company needs to tell the employees how much money the company needs to make. That way they are clear on what decisions they need to make.

3. Customer Service. Tie this to a measureable outcome. For instance, what is the Net Promoter Score (the percentage of your company's promoters versus its detractors) among customers going to be—40%, 50%, 60%?

4. Employee Satisfaction. Again, tie this to a measurable outcome. For instance, what is the Net Promoter Score going to be among employees—40%, 50%, 60%?

As you establish SMART goals for these four areas, you should also consider goals for the various other categories in your Painted Picture. The company needs a total of four to five main goals. Once these goals are picked, you can break them down into sub-goals for other business areas, people, etc. Those same goals determine which projects need to happen first.

Set your boundaries

Once you have the goals set and the team is committed to hitting them, the next thing you need to do is discuss boundaries. That is to say, yes, you want to hit these goals, but at what expense? Would you work 90 hours a week to hit them or, at maximum, 45? Would you give up equity in the company to raise money to help you hire people to hit the goals? What won't you do? Are the things you are committing to do within your company's core values?

Here are some topics worth discussing while you create your list of boundaries:

Amount of debt you'll take on
Number of hours you'll work
Number of days you're willing to travel
Percentage of profits you will share
Percentage of equity you will give up in the company
Number of acquisitions you will make, if any
Willingness to fire "C" or "B" players

From goal setting to task identification

Once you've done your SWOT analysis and clearly know your current state, identified your key projects, and set your goals and boundaries, it's time to create an action plan. Too often people set great goals, but they don't take five minutes to think about what tasks need to happen to hit each goal.

Make sure that the action plan you outline for each goal answers each of the following questions:

What precisely has to happen?
In what order will the steps be taken?
Who will complete each step?
When will each step be done?
What is the cost?
What other business areas are involved (and do they know you need them)?
Will a check-in with a supervisor or subordinate be needed?

I compare this to planning a dinner party. Think about all the little things that have to happen when you are the host: inviting guests, determining the seating arrangement, finding out in advance if anyone has food allergies, planning the menu, chopping the ingredients, preparing the recipes, setting the table, and, finally, serving the wine and the sumptuous meal. All of these tasks do not happen simultaneously, of course. It takes planning in order to figure out which are the high-priority tasks that need to be done first so others can be completed later.

Put the action steps in chronological sequence so that you can see the logical work-back plan, the reverse engineering. Remember, you need to start with a vision in mind and then work backward to make the vision a reality.

Choosing key projects

Now the fun begins! You're going to outline all of the projects that will make your Painted Picture a reality. Now, before you get started, keep this in mind: While this list is exhaustive, your resources probably aren't. This list will serve as a starting point from which you'll determine the critical projects to undertake, and in what order they should be taken, to move the company forward in making the Painted Picture a reality.

Before committing to a project to meet a goal, make sure you spend time thinking about what the potential return on investment (ROI) is going to be in terms of time, money, and resources. Is each project really worth it?

Give the team input into which projects are chosen

It is critical that you involve your leadership team. A great way to involve the team in coming up with a list of potential projects for the year or quarter is through an exercise I learned at General Electric called WorkOut. Have them put together a list of all the projects you could complete as a company in the upcoming year. Categorize all the projects that you touch on by business area (sales, marketing, and so on). Next, have each person vote on the projects they think will have the most impact on attaining the overall objective and are the most urgent in terms of the annual goals you've outlined.

Once that's done, tally up the votes on each project. Throw out any projects that don't get any votes. Rank the remaining projects for each category based on ROI: return on time; return on money; return on resources. I usually try to limit the projects committed to annually to two to three per area, and 15 to 20 for the whole company.

Remember: Focus on the "critical few" versus the "important many."

Map the key projects

Once the most critical projects are identified, place them into a simple spreadsheet with these columns for each project:

Project name
Project number
Goal supported
Number of votes (Note: This helps to get rid of a few more when you see how overwhelming it looks to get a few done in one year.)
Quarter start date
Month project ends
Cost/savings (Note: This does not include current staff salaries.)
Days until completion
Business areas (one column for each; e.g., IT, finance, sales, and so on, to be marked with an X that shows which areas will be impacted by the project)
Areas that will have to be built or implemented

Once this task is completed, everyone on the team should have an overall view that will allow them to remove—in conjunction with other members of the leadership team—a few more projects that looked important but can wait a year in the overall scheme.

Milestones

Each project in your strategic plan can be broken down into a number of tasks. Even a project that seems relatively simple on the surface, such as "Hire a VP of sales," can require the completion of as many as 15 smaller tasks in order to ensure the project's success. Each of those tasks will end up having a due date assigned to it. When you review all of the tasks, sorted by date, you can see the milestones for the project. Each task's date effectively becomes a milestone to show whether the project is on course to be completed on time. The person who owns the project is responsible for ensuring that all these milestones are thought out, assigned, and supported to make sure the project gets done.

Leadership's role

The role of leadership is to align, support, and enable teams to do the work they were hired to do. When the right people are hired and the right plans are in place, employees can execute the action plans effectively and leadership can support them without excessive follow-up.

Leaders focus on ensuring that people are working on projects and tasks that are aligned with the Painted Picture for the company. They ensure that team members have the commitment or emotional support to do their part in the process. Leadership can assess well in advance whether skill development is necessary on any of the individual tasks in any of the projects, because they know what everyone is working on. In addition, leadership can ensure that the proper bandwidth and resources—money, people, time, supplies, and more—are available to complete the outlined projects.

At 1-800-GOT-JUNK? we circulated a document each quarter that outlined the top three things each business area and each person was going to do in the quarter. That way, every person in the company saw what everyone else was committed to during the year. It was an easy way for us to see if we were out of alignment anywhere, long before any little hiccups became big problems.

And don't miss: An exclusive AllBusiness.com interview with Cameron Herold on how to make it happen for your business

The following is excerpted from Cameron Herold's book Double Double: How to Double Your Revenue and Profit in 3 Years or Less. It is presented by AllBusiness.com courtesy of Mr. Herold and Greenleaf Book Group.