Implementing an Actionable One Year Plan
Darragh Fitzpatrick believes in making things simple. As a partner and Executive VP at The Tabush Group, a cloud and IT managed services provider, his business is built on three key pillars:
- Simplify IT
- Promote productivity
- Help its customers scale
During his time as a fellow at the Birthing of Giants program, Darragh realized that keeping things simple applies to his role as well. He saw that there was a need to extricate himself from core parts of the business’ day-to-day operations in order to focus on growth.
The Tabush Group has doubled in size in the last seven years. Today it has 28 employees and close to $7 million in annual revenue, a growth of 20% every year. Darragh says the key to the company’s success is its focus on recurring revenue, which makes up about 65% of its sales.
Scaling was on Darragh’s mind when he set his one year plan at the Birthing of Giants program in April 2017. But that plan is made up of three parts, and he recognized that the first part – trusting his team to take over the running of things he had previously handled himself – is by far the hardest. Joining fellow business leaders at a Gathering of Giants event the following January offered him some much-needed distance to recharge and reflect.
“I think it’s so necessary to take yourself away from it all, be around people who are all doing the same things, so we can all have clear minds and just focus on those things,” he says. “This pit-stop allows me to look back at what I’ve done in the last eight months.”
Encourage Ownership From the Top Down
Talking to like-minded entrepreneurs helped Darragh see the missteps he’s taken along the path to his one year plan.
“I made some mistakes that I identified by talking to some people,” he said. Some were beyond his control, like a complicated partnership that came with some unexpected challenges, despite being positive overall. Others he’s dedicated to working on, refocusing his energies on finding the right people to lead the processes that are a drain on his time.
The Gathering of Giants event also gave Darragh a chance to reflect on his company’s culture. To extricate himself from daily processes, he realized that a culture of accountability was vital.
“What came out of that was, it’s not my job to hold people accountable,” he says. “It’s to make them understand that they’re accountable themselves to the standards set.”
The first and most important step to achieving your business goals to is pinpoint what those goals are. That’s where #oneyearfromtoday comes in. It’s a best practice tool for strategizing and implementing where you want your company to go.
Birthing of Giants is an advanced education fellowship program for small and medium sized business owners and entrepreneurs. Each carefully selected group learns how to take their business to the next level via strategy-planning programs led by a team of leading entrepreneurs in American business. Our programs, including the One-Day MBA and the Birthing of Giants Fellowship Program, allow business owners and entrepreneurs to learn from the wisdom of thousands of experienced business leaders. We help you implement proven strategies for sustaining and enhancing business growth.
