A friend of mine is the CEO of a rapidly growing funded company. A couple weeks ago, catching up briefly on a call, he mentioned he was totally over-bandwidth. Almost drowning, even.
So we blocked out some time today, starting with the always-key question of, "What are the key actions that ensure your company's success?" Not the nice ones, not the bonuses, but which are really the make-or-break stuff?
And here's where things got interesting. As he walked me through success at his company, his "absolutely must-happen" list was about… 30 things long.
Do you know what that means?
It means his "absolutely must-happen" list is actually zero things long. In the event of an emergency, actions will be picked haphazardly and erratically, just like someone didn't have a must-do list at all.
Good times and bad times can both throw you off. A new opportunity comes your way and it's terrifically huge. Or a major setback happens in your business or personal life.
At those times, sometimes you can't do everything. So what are you going to cut? Customer/client relations and satisfaction? Marketing? Training your team? The ambitious growth project? Fundraising? Measurement and looking at the numbers?
Are you going to skip the gym?
You need to know the answers to these. Walk yourself through these four steps to greatly reduce the chance a crisis hitting, and the impact if one does:
1. Start by setting MINIMUM STANDARDS which are ABSOLUTELY INVIOLABLE NO MATTER WHAT.
This can't be more than a few things long. Five, max.
This might be --
*Go to the gym 3x/week
*Send out the weekly update to the entire team
*Make sure every new client/customer/partner is having an excellent experience; spot check that at least a little if you're not personally on top of it
*Write two blog posts per week
…and that might be it.
That doesn't mean that those are the most important things, in the abstract. But you need to draw a line and say "this line will be not crossed" -- and don't cross it. This keeps you sane and keeps everything from falling apart. Inevitably, there will be more short-term important things than a piece of writing, the gym, or making sure customer experience is consistently excellent. But if you start skimping on one of those that was key to your success, soon you're in a real rut.
2. Create smart fail-overs.
Ideally you'd do this during good times, but we're always optimistic that the good times will roll forever so we don't. But okay, crisis has hit and you've seen the need for change. Now, it's time to take functions that are essential and that rely on you, and create elegant solutions for them to happen even if you're not available.
If there's a series of meetings you need to have with different parts of your team each week, start figuring out who can chair that meeting if you're not there. No-one can chair it besides you? Well, start finding or training that person.
Oh, but you say that REALLY no-one can run it besides you? Answer: get over yourself. It's simply not true, except in perhaps one or two areas where you're a world-class expert. But you're not a world-class expert at everything, so get over yourself and find a way that things can simply not go off the rails when you're indisposed. It doesn't have to go as well when you're not able to handle it; but it should refrain from completely breaking.
Test this from time to time. Intentionally skip a meeting and see how it goes. Find someone that can pick up the slack for you if human intervention is involved, or build up a backlog you can release if you're dealing with writing or content creation. Make it so that if things get very bad, things keep running and keep their momentum, at least.
3. Break things into Satisfice, Maximize, and Minimize categories.
Assign everything in your current workflow to one of these three categories.
Satisfice: You set a minimum standard, and ensure it's over that standard. You're not trying to build to amazing at this; you're trying to set a minimum bar and clear it. With these sorts of actions, you define the minimum standard you need for success, and ensure you're over that standard. Gym is actually a great example of this -- the majority of people aren't doing serious athletic training, so what amount of working out do you need to meet your health goals and reap the lion's share of benefits? Server speed and uptime for non-tech firms falls in this category, and credibility/collateral assets for closing deals might fit in here if the sales process is very interpersonal oriented.
Maximize: These are the areas you want as much as possible, so long as it doesn't infringe on the areas you need to satisfice. These are the core competence of you / your organization, and what you spend every free moment thinking about. It's great to explicitly define what you want to maximize, because the answer sure as heck ain't "everything." What you'll tend to find is that two actions you've assigned relatively equal priority -- like PR/media and turnaround time after a customer orders -- have wildly different value to the organization. PR/media might be your very best marketing channel, and should be maximized constantly, and maybe turnaround time isn't critical because people in your industry are comfortable as long as you're within some standard. Or the other way around -- perhaps the PR is mostly vanity and you only need a bit for credibility reasons, whereas fast turnaround is a key part of success. Think this through carefully; don't seek to maximize too much. It's vanishingly unlikely that every core function of your business has equal say on your success.
Minimize: This is the stuff you hate, you're bad at, and that you want to stop doing. This is getting rid of problem clients and customers, busywork, senseless bureaucracy, and things that produce no value. It helps to explicitly define that you want to minimize it, and often only an emergency or otherwise massive-over-bandwidth time will make you see the cost of whatever-it-is. You'll have to think carefully about how to minimize -- perhaps by hiring someone to staff the area, having an external firm take it over if possible, or redesigning your business so the problem goes away -- higher prices and different marketing position, no free trial, no low price tier, etc, might be the answer if a small subset of customers generate lots of headache and not much economic value.
4. Cross-check all your assumptions so far, then turn these into projects.
Make sure your minimum standards and Satisfice/Maximize/Minimize list works logically together.
Start defining out projects to create fail-overs and start getting the relevant people trained, or the backlog created, or however you're doing it. Brainstorm on this with your business partner, staff, or a trusted external party if you're not exactly sure how to do it. You need to keep asking the question, "If I'm laid up in the hospital for a month, how can I ensure the business doesn't break?"
Make campaigns around minimizing the stuff that's hurting the most. If your bank is awful and causing you lots of admin and headache, it might be worth making list of interview questions and sample scenarios, and then looking for a sympathetic business banker that meets your needs. If your accountant is disorganized and that's a no-go for you, start asking for referrals to good accountants. If a sub-set of customers is causing you problems and costs far in excess of what they bring to the table, brainstorm how to redesign the business to cater less to those customers, or charge them accordingly for the time.
Explicitly define the objectives of the project ("lower customer support inquiries by 50% while preserving same level of customer satisfaction"), then the steps how you'll do it (better FAQ, more clear user interface / user experience, sample data pre-populated the first time they log in, videos, having the contact page emphasize the great knowledge base you have, etc), and then set timetables for getting all these done, and make sure they happen.
You must explicitly make these into projects. Fail-over plans, de-risking, and minimizing bad-time notoriously gets left undone once a crisis subsides. But the next crisis is lurking around the corner unless you improve the underlying set of the business.
Don't this fall off once the crisis subsides -- by taking this smart action, you're left with operations that are more fun, more stable, and with more time to spend on the highest leverage activities that delight you and your customers.
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