David Cummings on Startups

Category: Leadership

  • Quarterly Off-Site Recap

    Today we held our quarterly off-site and developed a plan for Q4. We usually hold it two weeks before the end of the quarter, but tradeshow season and our user’s conference delayed it. The quarterly off-site is part of our meeting rhythm and comes from Patrick Lencioni’s Death by Meeting book.

    We hold our quarterly off-site meetings at the new Gordon Biersch in Buckhead (previously Rockbottom Brewery). As for an agenda, we don’t come with a formal one, rather everyone brings ideas and we decide on it in an ad-hoc manner. We typically cover the following:

    • Results of our company quarterly effectiveness survey
    • Any notes from our quarterly performance reviews
    • Financial performance review
    • The theme, rocks, and celebration for the upcoming quarter

    I highly recommend getting out the office for a day to focus on making strategic company decisions.

  • Office Scoreboard

    One of the things we have in our office, which people always comment on when they come in, is a large LCD scoreboard in our reception area. The scoreboard, which is color coded based on percent of goal, and based on Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, shows our quarter-to-date score card for the following metrics by product line:

    • Recognized revenue
    • Percent of goal
    • Percent of goal relative to percent of quarter complete
    • Monthly recurring revenue

    We update the Google Spreadsheet that powers the scoreboard twice a week by hand. I’d recommend a similar scoreboard that is simple and concise for your company to always show the health of your business.

  • More Quarterly Performance Review Thoughts

    We’re deep in the process of our quarterly performance reviews, and, I must say that I really look forward to these every quarter. There’s something rewarding about sitting down one-on-one and talking about what was accomplished, what’s coming up next, how we/they can improve, and then discussing anecdotes about how we/they followed each of our three main values (positive, self-starting, and supportive). Here are a few more thoughts that come to mind about the process:

    • Things can often get so busy that setting aside 30 minutes to fill out the performance review and then 60 minutes to discuss their performance feels great just reflecting one-on-one as to the progress that’s been made
    • Doing a quarterly performance review is more frequent that most companies that do an annual review, but even then we usually spend more time on things that happened in the last month because it is hard to remember what happened 60 or 70 days ago
    • Looking someone in the eyes and telling them how they can improve, and then getting their feedback, is great for strengthening the relationship

    I recommend simple quarterly performance reviews for all entrepreneurs.

  • One-Page Strategic Plan Templates

    The Gazelles website was recently redesigned, and as part of the redesign, the One-Page Strategic Plan (OPSP) templates and examples have been updated. The OPSP is an extremely valuable tool for articulating all aspects of your company on a two-sided piece of paper. Here are direct links to download different formats for yourself:

    I hope you find these resources as useful as I have. They really will make a difference!

  • Monthly and Quarterly Meetings

    Following up on my previous post about our weekly meeting rhythm, I wanted to make sure and capture what we do for our monthly and quarterly meetings. I’m a big fan of Patrick Lencioni’s book Death by Meeting, so we’ve implemented a schedule that is a hybrid of Lencioni’s recommendation combined with our own adaptations. Here are my monthly and quarterly meetings:

    • Monthly
      – Financials review
      – All hands meeting (company-wide update)
      – Leadership strategic meeting (on occasion)
    • Quarterly
      – Celebration
      – Leadership off-site

    Having a consistent rhythm, with different, special purpose meetings, has proved to be very effective for us and I recommend it to other entrepreneurs.

  • Doug Tatum: No Man’s Land

    Doug Tatum, author of the book No Man’s Land, was the guest speaker yesterday at an intimate EO event in Norcross where he talked about his recent research and book. This No Man’s Land is unrelated to my No Man’s Land post from two days ago and is a complete title coincidence. Doug did a great job at outlining his experience building a company from scratch to 1,000+ employees and revealed some of the insights he learned about entrepreneurial companies. The firm he built was an outsourced CFO firm for fast-growing businesses, so his experience makes him uniquely qualified to be an expert on the subject.

    I have not had the chance to read the book but Doug went through a PowerPoint presentation that hit on the major points. The idea behind No Man’s Land is that when a company reaches 20 employees, it has outgrown being completely dependent on the founder(s), and has entered a period where it isn’t big enough to have scale, which is typically at 100 – 150 employees. This transition period from 20 to 100 employees is the most difficult, with many companies never making through it.

    A big theme in the book is how companies outgrow the four Ms:

    • Market
    • Management
    • Model
    • Money

    Doug did a great job presenting thoughtful evidence along with interesting anecdotes. I’ll leave it to you to read the book and learn more.

  • Weekly Meeting Rhythm

    We recently updated our weekly meeting rhythm by moving our weekly leadership tacticals from Fridays at 2pm to Mondays at 10:15am. After doing Friday afternoon tacticals for several years, we decided that Monday morning made more sense in conjunction with our KPI dashboards. Now, we start the week with our daily check-ins and then go right into our leadership tactical.

    Here are the weekly repeating events on my calendar:

    • Daily – Check-ins
    • Monday – Leadership tactical
    • Tuesday – Sales workshop
    • Wednesday – Manager workshop

    Everything else I do is scheduled on an ad-hoc basis.

  • More Thoughts on KPI Dashboards

    We made another round of tweaks to our Google Spreadsheet KPI dashboard today, and I wanted to share them here. As you might remember, I’ve talked about using Google Spreadsheets for KPI dashboards two times before on this blog. My excitement for them hasn’t waned at all. Here are the next set of changes that we made:

    • Added a new column where the rows represent the running average of each of the KPIs so we can see how our average compares to our goal
    • Updated the cell conditional color coding so that values that are empty show up with a light gray background, but only if a value of zero isn’t allowed (e.g. one KPI is the average number of billable hours per person for our services team, which will never be zero)
    • Took the average value from the first few weeks and made that our goal for this quarter, as our main task right now is establishing a baseline for the different KPIs

    I encourage all entrepreneurs to start tracking different metrics in their business and capture them weekly in a color-coded spreadsheet.

  • Google Spreadsheets for KPI Dashboards

    My main project this week has been redoing the tracking of our key performance indicators (KPIs) so that they are centralized in a shared Google Spreadsheet with automatic color coding to indicate where we are in relation to our goals. We’ve been monitoring KPIs for years but never had a system that was as transparent and simple as I would have liked. With that said, our existing One Page Strategic Plan does contain our goals for the current quarter, current year, and next three years in a readily digestible format.

    Google Spreadsheets proved to be a logical choice as the framework for tracking our KPIs on a weekly basis due to its flexibility with conditional formatting as well as its team collaboration functionality. The spreadsheet has the following three tabs and content:

    Data

    • Department in column one
    • KPI categories in column two
    • Columns three and beyond each represent a week, with the current week in column three
    • Each row with the KPIs has a corresponding row beneath it with the calculated percent of goal in a color coded cell (based on percentages outlined in a previous post)

    Goals

    • Similar to the Data tab with departments in column one and KPI categories in column two
    • Columns three and beyond each represent the goal for that KPI in a specific quarter, with column three always being the current quarter

    Explanation

    • Columns one and two are the same as in the previous tabs
    • Column three has a paragraph explanation of the KPI and why we track it

    I’m excited about tracking our KPIs in this new dashboard format and seeing how it helps us focus on areas where we can improve our business. Please let me know how your organization implements KPI dashboards and any ideas for improvement of ours.

  • Preparing for a Sales Call

    During our weekly sales training workshops, we pick two topics and go around the room sharing our experiences and personal best practices on the topic. The goal is for sales managers, cold callers, and sales reps to learn from each other in a collaborative, peer-to-peer environment.

    Today, one of the discussion topics was how to prepare for a sales call.  We broke it down into two sub-categories: cold calls and scheduled demos. The following best practices emerged for cold calling:

    • Look up the person in LinkedIn and record relevant pieces of information in your CRM (we use Salesforce.com)
    • Google the person’s name and spend no more than two minutes looking for additional information
    • If possible, stand up when making the call
    • Smile when talking
    • Think positive thoughts about how the call is going to be a success once the phone starts ringing

    Of course, this amount of preparation is for selectively calling companies that fit your ideal customer profile; it is overkill for trying to make 80 calls per day.

    Preparation makes all the difference between success and failure, assuming you put yourself out there. Making a sales call is already a challenge and going into it with these tips will increase your odds of success. Stay tuned for part two – talking about preparation for a scheduled demo.