2024: A Business Masterpiece or a … ?
Here are three questions to work through in 4Q 2023 to help 2024 be a masterpiece and contribute to your mission and short-, medium-, and long-term goals:
Corporate best practices are an oxymoron for most businesses, so always be learning but instead bring bold humility, curiosity, collaboration, and calibration to the heart of your business as you assess, map out, and implement in 2024.
Question 1. Vendor Performance - Do you complete a litmus test of your vendors (including your Board members) of “not too heavy, not too light, just right!”, and map out the action plan?
Question 2. Operations Resilience - are the core functions of your business (i.e. Sales, capital raising, Technology, Operations, People, financial reporting, sales reporting, etc.) consistently performing accurate, transparent, and timely work?
Question 3. Priorities and opportunity costs - Does your business effectively, efficiently, and authentically assess, map out, and implement to a set of priorities, while measuring progress, collaborating, and calibrating operations? And, don’t forget to keep a list of the projects you considered but are not going to do in 2024.
Here is a way you can crush each of these in 4Q 2023 and set your business for a 2024 masterpiece:
Vendor Performance
Everything is always in a constant state of change. So, an efficient, effective, and periodic review of your vendors - from your board members to your stationery supplier - can have a massive impact on your success. Some ideas (out of a myriad of options) that you can try:
Board Member Evaluation (<2 hours total, spread across 1-2 meetings):
For each board member you assign two scores:
TODAY: Before, during, after, and between board meetings is this board member Fully Engaged, Prepared, & Making an Impact on Business?
IN 2-YEARS TIME: if we achieve the goals we are pursuing will this person be great to have as a board member in 2-years time?
You can do a “Yes”, “Maybe”, or “No” response for each or a scale like 1, 2, 3, 4 etc.
Develop an action plan to reinforce the strengths and/or make the changes to resolve the weaknesses identified.
Example 1: Board Member Performance.
Use this template to execute Question 1.
Do you need help with this process? Share a direct message with me, I’m happy to help.
Vendor Evaluation (~4 hours total, across 2-3 meetings)
Create 2 lists to start:
Export to Excel your vendor list for YTD 2023 or (even better) the past 12-months (i.e. 1-Oct-2022 to 30-Sep-2023), sort it from the most $ spent to the least.
Gather lists from quick brainstorming and input opportunities from team members to contribute vendors that come to mind as being awesome, neutral, or frustrating and any nuggets of “why” they feel that way (time wasted, quality is great or terrible, great service, responsive, etc.).
Lead a discussion or two that identifies vendors that you want to ensure ongoing partnership, evaluate, or reduce/eliminate.
Develop a roadmap for each selected vendor to assess, map out actions, and (if needed) implement for each vendor.
Benefits can be enormous to the business directly and indirectly. Strengthening the key relationships, listening to team members, and reducing the drag on your business and team members.
The Vendor Evaluation exercise is often valuable for a business that has high customer concentration on facets like revenue, team members time, and/or resource usage.
2. Operations Resilience
Looking internally, objectively, observing, with curiosity. This is a massively nuanced skill for a business to develop.
Two of the hardest things to retain, let alone have flourish, in a business are competence and authenticity; unfortunately, they are often eroded away and replaced with ego and pride.
Internal turf battles and egos can make this a futile exercise and actually make things worse. But, burying your head in the sand and not working out how to do this in your business will result in, at best, ongoing massive drag on your financial and operating performance, and at worse, contribute to business failure.
A simple table can be the foundation for excellence (or a whole lot of feedback to grow from!):
Example 2: How we believe key parts of the business are doing in 4Q 2023.
Use this template to execute Question 2. Would you like a ready to use editable template? Request it by clicking on the button below,
Context matters. The story matters. Capture bullet points for each row to show the strengths, growth areas, new disciplines that are just starting, and the areas that are poor/struggling.
Review the results, be curious (be aware of being defensive), and explore the operations area (row of data) and/or a single cell of data. Move the rows into the order you feel can impact the business in 2024. Capturing your rationale - even if embarrassingly simple - as you do the ranking.
Assess, map out actions, and (if needed) implement.
3. Priorities and Opportunity Costs (4-6 hours across 3-4 meetings)
Importance shouldn’t be measured by how much time you or your business spends on something. This real or perceived “rule” and formal or informal “rewards system” is dominant in many companies - new, growth, and established - and we urge a different approach.
Impact and value to your mission and goals should be at the core of determining importance. Then working to be efficient to achieve the quality, transparency, and timeliness needed for your business (not someone else’s standard) will move your business forward with greater purpose and momentum.
Starting with the actions needed from the first two stages (Vendor Performance and Operations Resilience) what capacity does your business have left, if any?
Add other projects, initiatives, impact items that may not have shown up in the first two stages. Understanding why they were missing can be insightful - and feel free to update the first two stages as needed.
Often there is negative capacity for the identified list. That is ok, perhaps even great news. And will help focus your business’s behavior.
Assess, plan out, and set up the pathway to implementation based on the capabilities and capacity your business has.
Put the projects that are not set for implementation in 2024 on a separate list. Call this list whatever you want… the Parking Lot, Car Park, Graveyard, etc.
Set the meeting cadence for collaboration and calibration in 2024.
Conclusion
Assess, map out, and implement across the 3 stages of vendor performance, operations resilience, and priorities.
Know the opportunity costs - the projects you are choosing not to do.
Do these three stages with discipline, with the lightness of not being a big corporation, and within the time allocations suggested above +/- 20%.
Be bold, humble, curious, and observe and appreciate the friction everywhere.
Remember, you cannot process your way to honesty, integrity, and authenticity and you can weaponize any process or core value.
Understand the potential and the limits of your business today.
Lead, manage, and operate with bold humility, curiosity, collaboration, and calibration and your business can achieve a 2024 masterpiece.
-Michael Waite