The Backwards Strategy

The Mutual Growth: Backwards Planning Strategy

At The Mutual Growth, we believe that the best plans start with the final outcome. We’ve taken our insight from marketing and productivity gurus like Franklin Covey as one of their seven habits: Begin with the end in mind.

MG adopted this working backwards mindset to keep people from being distracted during the development process and maintain a singular focus on the ultimate goal. This mindset has been exponentially helpful when dealing with the changes in business today. We’ve seen strength and passion come from the pandemic; creating lifetime relationships with a propensity for ultimate success.

Working backwards is all about starting with the desired end result in mind and then figuring out how to get there. This may be selling a multi-million dollar company or passing it on to your kids. The key to working backwards is solidifying where you want to end up. The MG Team strategizes into the details of what the desired end result should be (more sales, happier customers, easier workflows, etc.), and outlines the steps to get there and what success would look like.

Our concept isn’t a novel one. Looking at Apple’s slick and popular product line, it’s obvious they were listening when Steve Jobs said “you have to start with the customer experience and work backwards towards the technology.”

Apple had vision and listened to what their customers wanted, then a product team took all the required steps to reach that final destination. At MG Co., we don’t take the exploratory, iterative, “let’s see where this takes us” approach, or simply building stuff for the sake of building it. We take the end game and make it happen.

Working backwards creates a more efficient and focused development process. With a clearly articulated endpoint in mind, teams don’t get distracted with silly media results, undesirable messaging or wasted meetings while always fumbling forward. Instead, they know exactly what the finished result must happen so they’re far more likely to get it right the first time.

When you’re working backwards, the WHAT has already been very well-defined and no one will have any questions about whether the final goal meets expectations. This not only gives clear guidelines to development; it also provides our team with precise things to look for during growth while it gives a head start for sales and marketing since they know what needs to be done. For example, if the intention is to grow a multi-location, multi-million dollar business, we will need to work on the brand, the sales, investors, partnerships, mergers and acquisitions to obtain our ultimate goal. Those parameters differ depending on the goals of the individual(s). But one thing is for certain, everyone has agreed on the end result.

Prioritization also benefits from this approach; if a particular strategy doesn’t move the business or individual closer to the desired finish line, then it takes a backseat to the items that do. It hones everyone in on satisfying customers and delivering value accordingly.

Working backwards is a state of mind, sign up for our Brain Hack 1 Hour Course. TheMutualGrowth.com under the course tab.