5 Steps You Can Take Right Now to Improve Your Company

December 19, 2017

Here are five things you can do now to improve your company:

1. Take a complimentary 4 Decisions Assessment and decide which of the four (People, Strategy, Execution, Cash) to pursue first. Go to that section in the book Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It … and Why the Rest Don’t by Verne Harnish and commit to reading and implementing that chapter in the coming quarter.

2. Form a weekly Strategic Thinking Council. In addition to your weekly meeting, assemble a few key leaders to discuss longer term (3 years and beyond) issues and bigger opportunities and challenges facing your company. A great place to start is where you want to be in three years as it relates not just to key financial and operating targets, but also what you want to be selling, where you want to be selling, and who you want to be selling to. With this information, identify a handful of strategic chess moves for the coming year focused on plugging the gap between where you want to be in three years versus where you are now.

3. Choose a measurable goal that addresses some chokepoint in the business you can knock down in the coming quarter. Develop a detailed 13 Week Race Plan (every quarter has 13 weeks) and get the company involved. Make it challenging but doable. Celebrate the win at the end of the quarter.

4. Have your team meet daily for 15 minutes or less. The agenda should be the same every day and it’s just three items long. First, each person shares what’s up in the next 24 hours of KEY activities, decisions, meetings, etc., NOT a review of their to-do list! Second, is there a key daily metric the team wants visibility into? The metric can change over time. Third, and most important, is constraints and concerns that can prevent them from having a great next 24 hours.

5. Plan your quarterly offsite (best if facilitated) and start preparing the following: customer and employee surveys; results of prior quarter and lessons learned to carry forward; results of performance management (what is retention plan for top employees, what is coaching plan for those with potential to be a top employee, what is the plan for the rest, which may include exiting some); and a team exercise, such as what hassles and roadblocks are getting in your way and what demotivates you.

Whatever you do, don’t try to do too much at once. It’s critical to pick someone to drive the implementation and it’s best the CEO not be that person.

Do you want to take your company beyond its inflection point? Click here to contact me.