Aptify

In a new six-part blog series, Vice President of Customer Care David Frick dives into the Rock Habits, a business management system that enhances team collaboration, targets core values, and maintains a consistent drive toward achieving strategic goals.

Evolving Values Lead to a Better Process

I recently wrote about the importance goal-setting has had on my life—actually, my entire life. Do I achieve everything I set out to accomplish? No, but in the pursuit, I consistently wind up in a better place than if I’d just sat around watching TV. In the beginning, I often shared my goals with friends only to be told I was crazy and wasting my time. I believe deeply in the value of setting goals, especially for someone as average as me. If this stuff can work for me, then it will work for anyone. Imagine what you can do when you set your goals and achieve the “unimaginable.”

In my teens, I started with motivational books, tapes, and CDs by Earl Nightingale, Napoleon Hill, Edgar Cayce, Zig Ziglar, Og Mandino, John Wooten, Norman Vincent Peale, Brian Tracy, Tony Robbins, Christopher McDougall, Stephen Covey, and scores of others. Topics ranged from personal development, to financial security, to success, to happiness, to love, to marathon running and everything in between. Some ideas resonated with me, others didn’t, and occasionally the opinions of one contradicted with the advice of others. No matter—I kept what worked and didn’t worry about what didn’t. I also found what worked for me in my twenties maybe didn’t convey well into my thirties or forties, and likewise what didn’t work for me earlier became a core strength for me in my fifties. I now set goals for myself on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. Actually, I have goals for the next three years—they fall into three distinct categories: Family, Health, and Professional. I try to keep them simple, clear, and very measurable. Finally, I hold myself accountable to me.

So why am I sharing this? Because I think it is cool when my values intersect with the values of others—in this case, my company, Aptify.

Traditionally, Aptify would conduct an annual retreat with its senior managers where we reviewed the past year and planned the year ahead. We did the typical stuff: What did we do well? How did we do financially? Where do we need to improve? We conducted a SWOT analysis and prepared a game plan for executing our strategies for the upcoming year. We generally spent 4½ days in detailed discussions and then rushed to wrap up the week in the final two hours, said our good-byes, and then scurried back to business a usual. The exercise was actually pretty good—the company has grown, our products continuously improve, and our role as a sound corporate partner evolves to the betterment of our clients. So there is merit in our meeting, but I bet our approach to planning sounds familiar to many of you. It should because nearly every company I’ve ever been associated with goes through the same sort of annual ritual. It’s not bad, but it could be so much better.

Last year, better came in the name of Rock Habits via a guy named Andy Bailey.

Join me on my multi-part series as I describe how our planning process has evolved and flourished.

About David Frick

David is the Vice President of Aptify’s Customer Care department, which provides advocacy for the Aptify User Community at an executive management level. David has more than 20 years of experience working within the non-profit vertical from the perspective of an association executive, where his roles ranged from CFO, to Executive Director, to President of a startup PPO. He also served in the role of VP for a consulting firm specializing in the non-profit sector. His body of work includes assisting organizations in their selection of AMS systems, helping groups evaluate and redesign business processes, managing software implementations, and streamlining governance issues to improve the ability of an organization to better serve its members. David earned an undergraduate degree in science from the University of Maryland and his MBA from Loyola College. Follow him on Twitter @dgfrick.