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Unboxing the B-HAG

What is a B-HAG?

A B-HAG is your Big Hairy Audacious Goal.

It is long term, it’s challenging beyond what you can currently do, it will move you from good to great. Specifically the term came out of a book, ‘Good to Great’ by Jim Collins, focusing on what businesses needed to be great and the key ingredients to know where you’re going in the future.

That’s your B-HAG. 

What is the mountain analogy and how does it relate to B-HAG?

The mountain analogy is a way to visualise this whole concept of planning.

The B-HAG is getting to the top of the mountain. How we climb that mountain, that’s our strategy and how we are going to survive on the mountain and the route and milestones on the way to achieving our B-HAG is the plan. There are key incentives along the way that may take 90 days, 60 or 30 days to get us to our base camp, along the line to our B-HAG. 

What’s a good strategy to find the B-HAG?

There are 3 key elements involved finding your B-HAG

  • Be passionate about what you are doing. If you get up in the morning and don’t want to go to work or you’re not feeling motivated, you may find you’ve actually got a job rather than a business.  You are actually working for the business rather than the business working for you.
  • Drive your economic engine, you want to get some money out of this.
  • Define what you can be the best in the world at. It’s no longer OK to be best in your suburb, or town, we are a global society. 

How do you keep the B-HAG alive in the business?

Communication. There’s no point in having a B-HAG that works for one person but not another. That’s why the planning process needs to involve all interested parties. It’s difficult to set up a B-HAG that works for you and not anyone else.  Communication with the team is crucial and keep checking in that it’s working for the business. Meet on a regular basis, review the strategy to make sure it’s still heading in the right direction. If you’ve deviated a bit, work on plans to bring it back. Communication, communication, communication. 

What are SMART goals and how do they affect the B-HAG?

I have added another letter to the end of SMART and that’s an ‘i’ creating SMARTI for Inspirational. Motivate the team to achieve that B-HAG. By making sure the goals you set are aligned with the five SMARTI criteria (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-Bound and Inspirational), you have an anchor on which to base all of your focus and decision-making. 

If you could choose maybe 2 or three of the above, what would be the most critical?

Measurable or time bound. What you can measure gets measured and what you can manage gets done. Time bound, we find businesses that can procrastinate, can get pulled offline and deviate from their strategy, those would be 2 of the most key elements. 

KPI’s can you give us some help on using those?

I’ve talked about business being like a car, we have the Co-Driver which us your business coach, she has the numbers on the dashboard which is our forecast from the plan (GPS).  Think about critical numbers as being like headlights that shine out in front of your company or car and let you know what is ahead,  we can call them predictive KPI’s. The critical letter being the I, it’s an indicator, and doesn’t have to be 100% accurate measure. Keep it simple – take about 2-3 minutes to figure it out, and you can recalculate once a week or once a month, whatever suits your business. And to be focused on something that is key, that’s the K. The people, that’s the P.  If you are being measured with influence to your KPI’s there is no point in setting someone a KPI that they have no influence over. 

Can you explain the benefit of communication in a business?

Communication is the key. Think more meeting; not more time in meetings. Break down the meeting rhythm into three parts, daily, weekly and monthly. 

  • Daily – have a 5-7 minute meeting daily, held at a bit of an oddball time at 11:08, focus on 2 or three elements that will help that specific person to achieve today and tomorrow.
  • Weekly we focus on the key incentives that will help us achieve our B-HAG. That weekly meeting should take about 30 mins. 
  • Monthly meetings, here we are going to get some numbers about KPI or business performance. 


So, let’s make some BHAG’s!

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