Create your own Manifesto.
Last Fall, Nikki and I attended a two-day retreat held by my former boss, Hannah Paramore Breen at a cool little resort outside of Nashville. The goal was to plan out your 2024 for your business. We put our own twist on the process and planned out our 2024 with respect to our businesses and our personal life. We also did some long-term planning and goal setting for the next 5 to 10 years.
One of the items we developed was a “Butler Manifesto.” Basically, it is a set of priorities that we vet all major decisions against. It is a way to try to ensure that our decisions match our priorities and work into our long-term goals and plans.
What seemed like a silly exercise has turned into a valuable tool for us. I share it in hope that it may help you make better decisions and stay on track for your future goals and dreams.
Butler Manifesto
This document outlines priorities for spending and investments of money and time.
1. Our marriage - nothing comes before our partnership. Our marriage is the most important thing. Everything else happens because of our partnership. It must always come first.
2. Maintaining successful businesses. If we are not financially sound, we cannot do the things we want to do and support the people we want to support.
3. Supporting immediate family and nurturing those relationships. We want to be able to help where we can and focus on growing and enjoying the relationships with our kids and their partners, and our grandchildren.
4. Personal health and fitness. If we don’t take care of ourselves and make it a priority in our lives, we cannot get the most out of life.
5. Maintain and improve our home. We love our home and we want others to always feel welcome in it. We spend a great deal of time in our home and we want it to be our favorite place.
6. Enjoy and develop our personal passions - golf / yoga. You have to have something in your life that is just yours. We support each other’s passion with time and attention.
7. Invest in meaningful relationships. We want to create opportunities to strengthen important relationships and spend more time with those that we love and respect. These relationships bring us joy and make us better people.
8. Responsibly plan for future needs and goals. Always keeping future goals in mind as we make daily decisions. Invest wisely. Regularly review our progress.
The Butler Manifesto is part of a monthly Sunday morning meeting over coffee when we review the spreadsheets we created at the retreat. We have a personal/business goals sheet for 2024 that we track and review. We have a family budget that we review. And, we review our 2024 business budgets each month. It takes us about an hour and it always stimulates good discussion.
Communication is key to a good partnership and this process has helped us to determine together what is important to us, our short term goals, our long term goals, and a plan to achieve them.