Welcome everyone, Gavin McGahey from Planning Plus Software. During the month of October, I participated in the Great Cycle Challenge and what I’d like to do today is to see what correlations there are between how the Great Cycle Challenge came about and how we can relate that to business in certain ways. Stick with me for the next few minutes and let us see how we can break this thing down. I am going to start with a, how, why, and what. Simon Sinek said, start with “WHY” If I look at some of the keywords that come into my why, they are that I felt strongly, there was a good purpose here, I knew I had the passion to participate in this. I felt I could contribute, and I knew that it would be impactful. So that’s the real key to it, start with why first, because you can set up other things but if you don’t have the passion and the purpose and feel that you can make an impact, why are you doing what you’re doing? Makes sense, doesn’t it?
What made me want to complete the challenge.
Then we went into the how, how does this all come about? Then what, what are the results or what is the impact of it overall? Let us have a look at how it all came about. The Great Cycle Challenge put out some social media posts and sent some emails to us. The social media posts and the emails were professionally done, and they got me curious. They evoked some curiosity straight away and from there, I started to give it some consideration and I thought this really resonates with me, so what was my decision? My decision was, count me in. I signed up straight away.
We made the commitment and I then needed to go about setting some goals. I had some financial goals on how much money did I feel I could raise and how far could my little legs take me for the month of October? My goal was to raise $2,500 and I was going to ride 1000 kilometres. With my goals set, I then needed to create a plan. The plan was how was I going to achieve that? What resources did I need? The first resource that I needed was a bike, which I already had, and other resources including my team around me to help me plan it out. I had to decide how am I going to promote myself, the same way that the Children’s Medical Research Institute did? We went about creating some emails and some social media posts. We started to promote ourselves well in advance of the event, just to give people the awareness of what was coming up and give them some time to consider whether they would like to be a part of it.
Then came the training. I was not going to get to the 1st of October and then get the bike out and see if I have got air in the tyres. I came up with training plan leading up to the 1st of October so when that date arrived, I could hit the road pedalling and I was more than ready to participate.
Let us look at the whole event, how was it playing out for me? I needed a daily plan. I needed to work out how many kilometres I felt I was going to ride and how much money I would like to see being raised each day. I needed to work out how far am I going to ride before I need to refuel myself? What energy is it going to zap out of me? That was a daily plan and it then comes down to the weekly plan where we still have the same things to consider, possibly even more.
I then needed to start factoring in rest and recovery, because if I don’t rest and just slow down and give my body time to recover, I’m not going to set myself up well for the next few rides over the next few weeks. To help with this I booked in for a massage at the end of each week to aid in my recovery. I was also stretching because when you are doing those types of kilometres, the glutes can get pretty tight.
To get to the end of the month I had to ask myself what is the kilometres that I’ve done and how much have I raised against my goal? I know fuel wise how my body responds, what I was needing and how much energy I was burning during each ride, I made sure that I monitored and maintained my working heart rate zone so that I wasn’t expending myself too much, too early. I was also looking for feedback from my sponsers on how I was going. It was daily, weekly, monthly on the feedback and promotion.
What are the results & rewards for completing a challenge.
Then we look at the results and their rewards. One was my well-being, what did it do for my state of mind, keeping my mental health strong. That was a big reward for me personally. I had good cognitive function because I was looking after my body, always fuelling my body with great food. I was not just filling it up with garbage, it was repairing well, it was resting, and it meant that my health was strong. I had better concentration, I had better clarity and I was communicating well, all of that is a sign of great wealth, wealth of myself without anything else. Looking after the mind and body creates wealth which comes back to wellbeing. Knowing that I was contributing to a greater cause really resonated strongly because that is building compassion and empathy and knowing that you can contribute to something outside of yourself.
If we look at it from a rewards perspective, that all these clearly are results, they just correlate and they link together so seamlessly. All that combines to say, well, this is the results and the reward.
Let us break it down even more in relation to a business perspective. Remember we started with why, and then we looked at how it was all going to come about. The why was the marketing, the marketing to us, we made the decision. We set the goals. We did some planning. We set about training. We promoted ourselves to encourage sponsorship. We participated and we foucused on goals to achieve the desired results.
We then looked at setting the definitive plan. So that was me at a granular level. We started to break it down to look at the things we were going to do daily, weekly, health, wellbeing, funds raised, promotion, et cetera. These were our key performance indicators, drilling down on our KPIs in the same way that we do in business.
We then look at our results and reward, and the results being that, was I able to ride over 1000 kilometres? Yes, I did, I managed to ride 1,031. What was the reward for that? I set a goal of raising $2500 and I can proudly say that we raised just under $4500. So that was a fantastic effort. Once it got to $2500, we did not stop there. People kept donating. Why did they keep coming in and donating to the cause? Because we kept giving them feedback all the way through the month, every day, we’re feeding back to them saying, here’s where we’re at, here’s a write-up and here’s where we are at with our fundraising. We also set up a podcast interview with one of the researchers at the Children’s Medical Research Institute so we could share more of their information on how they do things. Where does the money go? We were feeding back on a continuous basis; we were constantly reviewing what was taking place. Listen to the podcast here.
We were having thanks and gratitude for the people that were just helping us out on the journey Thanks to my team for helping me to get to this point because that is a team effort as well. I have to say every day I was on that bike I felt great.
From a business point of view, think about your key performance indicators, your goals, your team, your values, what are you doing it for? What is your greater purpose? If you went back and looked at one little part of your business and then broke it down and asked yourself, why is this so important to me? How do I need to go about it? And what is it going to achieve? Start with a small task and you can then build towards bigger things.
So, what happened at the end of it, after the 31st of October? Did I pack the bike up and go to McDonald’s? No, I am pleased to say that once you get to that level of fitness and wellbeing that things like fast food will not do you any good. I have managed to stay on the bike. I am out doing more rides. I am still eating healthy. I am still looking at maintaining my own plan for my fitness and wellbeing, because I know that it is going to help me in business as well so it was really important for me to keep that up.
These are the lessons from the Great Cycle Challenge and the correlation between that fundraising event and what we can break down and what are the key takeaways that we could apply to business. So maybe take some of that back for your business.
If you would like to give us any feedback, please contact me gavin@planningplus.com.au. You can text me on +61 0409 152 314. I would certainly like to hear from you. Thanks very much