Lay Out Your Road to Startup Success Like a Game of Dominos (Video)
Photo by Tamara Gak on Unsplash
The key is to think in an 18-month rolling vision process.
Just last week, I put a very simple question to an entrepreneur I know.
“What’s most important for your business right now?”
For about 10 minutes, I listened as he proceeded to list a dozen or so things — sales, marketing, new retailers, key hires, the kinds of things that are typically on the mind of startup founders.
“No, no,” I replied. “What is the most important thing?”
After some time, we were able to boil it down to maybe five or six things. And I said, “Buddy, you’ve only got 10 people in your company. You really have to focus on what’s most important.”
There’s an old African proverb, I know all of you have heard of, that basically says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Well, when you’re an entrepreneur with one or two people, feel free to bite off more than you can and then chew! But once you’re at five or 10 or 20, or once you begin bringing in key stakeholders, like investors, angels or VC, or even Findaway Adventures, you need to focus and take a brisk, but maybe a bit more measured, approach.
Why? You have to make your employees and your key stakeholders and investors believe that you have prioritized your business.
Allow me to introduce the rolling, 18-month vision process. Here’s how it works. The process is built on the strategic retreat framework that founders take with their teams. At your quarterly retreat, you draw six vertical lines on a whiteboard — this represents the next six quarters (see video). Using Post-It Notes that represent initiatives in your company — e.g., new product launch, new channel, new key hires, new customer acquisition, fundraising, technology implementations, etc. — you plot out your priorities over the next six quarters or 18 months.
At first, you’ll probably put everything in the first and second quarters, but as your team warms to the task of prioritization and asks the hard questions, you will see the initiatives begin to spread out over the six quarters of the grid as everybody sees how one thing leads to another.
So, for example, before you can “initiate” a hiring plan, you have to initiate a review of your financial plan to ensure that the company can afford it. With each of your initiatives, you can either delegate or have a conversation with your team around the P&L related to an initiative, what’s the ROI and what hiring would we do to support each one of these initiatives.
Your corporate strategy leads to your discussion on what’s most important, leads to your six quarter initiative discussion, which leads to a key hiring plan to support, then finally your 18 month financial pro forma! This is way over-simplifying but hopefully you are picking up that you can not lead simply with your financial pro forma plan!
Now the beauty of doing this is that once you’ve got it done, everything flows from this. It creates a cause and effect sequence that acts like a game of dominos. Now, if you’re growing fast, you might hit 60–75% of these initiatives. That’s okay. But you need to come back every quarter at your retreat and realign behind it and reshuffle the deck. Because this “rolling six quarter plan” process is a continual one; once you’ve checked off your priorities for a quarter, a new quarter is added on to the end.
Creating this grid is akin to creating a roadmap that your stakeholders will understand and be able to follow. Far from slowing things down, being able to share your big “vision” of the priorities will allow others to follow along with you (and each other) at a faster pace.
And it all begins with your willingness to do the work to decide that important question: What is the most important thing? Followed by the second most important question: When can we effectively do it?
What is your company doing to prioritize its initiatives and build confidence in your employees and other stakeholders?
Sincerely,
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All credit to my ghostwriting partner, Dave Moore, who is instrumental in getting my thoughts out in a coherent manner & into these blogs. Thanks Dave!