The Best Laid Plans, Part III Once you’ve finished the Input Phase and the Analysis Phase of producing your strategic plan, you’re ready for the final Output Phase, which goes something like this: Vision articulation. Get it right for yourself first. You should be able to answer “where do we want to be in three years?” in 25 words or less. Roadmap from today. Make sure to lay out clearly what things need to happen to get from where you are today to where you want to be. The sooner-in stuff needs to be much clearer than the further out stuff. Resource Requirements. Identify the things you will need to get there, and the timing of those needs – More…
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Entrepreneurship
The Best Laid Plans, Part II
The Best Laid Plans, Part II Once you’ve finished the Input Phase (see last week’s post) of producing your strategic plan, you’re ready for the Analysis Phase, which goes something like this: Assemble the facts. Keep notes along the way on the input phase items, assemble them into a coherent document with key thoughts and common themes highlighted. Select/apply framework. Go back to the reading and come up with one or more strategic frameworks. Adapted them from the academic stuff to fit our situation. Academic frameworks don’t solve problems on their own, but they do force you to think through problems in a structured way. Step back. Leave everything alone for two weeks and try not to think about it. …
The Best Laid Plans, Part I
The Best Laid Plans, Part I One of my readers asked me if I have a formula that I use to develop strategic plans. While every year and every situation is different, I do have a general outline that I’ve followed that has been pretty successful over the years at Return Path. There are three phases — input, analysis, and output. I’ll break this up into three postings over the next three weeks. The Input Phase goes something like this: Conduct stakeholder interviews with a few top clients, resellers, suppliers; Board of directors; and junior staff roundtables. Formal interviews set up in advance, with questions given ahead. Goal for customers: find out their view of the business today, how we’re…
Picking Professional Services Firms
Picking Professional Services Firms One of the most important things you can do as an entrepreneur is to surround yourself with a great lawyer (as I mentioned in my posting on negotiating term sheets) and a great accountant. Brad’s advice here is excellent: Choose professionals carefully: It may be tempting to use your wife’s brother’s friend’s neighbor as your lawyer, because he will give you a great rate and you see him at the neighborhood barbecue, but you get what you pay for. The same is true for accountants and other services that your business will use. Find professionals who know what they are doing and have experience with young companies. I echo that and would add to it a…
Learning to Embrace Sizzle
Learning to Embrace Sizzle One phrase I’ve heard a lot over the years is about “Selling the sizzle, not the steak.” It suggests that in the world of marketing or product design, there is a divergence between elements of substance and what I call bright shiny objects, and that sometimes it’s the bright shiny objects that really move the needle on customer adoption. At Return Path, we have always been about the steak and NOT the sizzle. We’re incredibly fact-based and solution-oriented as a culture. In fact, I can think of a lot of examples where we have turned our nose up at the sizzle over the years because it doesn’t contribute to core product functionality or might be a…
Outrunning the Bear
Outrunning the Bear Did you ever hear the joke about outrunning the bear? It goes something like this: Two friends are in the woods, having a picnic. They spot a bear running at them. One friend gets up and starts running away from the bear. The other friend opens his backpack, takes out his running shoes, changes out of his hiking boots, and starts stretching. “Are you crazy?” the first friend shouts, looking over his shoulder as the bear closes in on his friend. “You can’t outrun a bear!” “I don’t have to outrun the bear,” said the second friend. “I only have to outrun you.” Sometimes, it’s easy to get caught up in doing something absolutely well as opposed…
Building the Company vs. Building the Business
Building the Company vs. Building the Business I was being interviewed recently for a book someone is writing on entrepreneurship, which focused on identifying the elements of my “playbook” for entrepreneurial success at Return Path. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a full playbook, though I’ve certainly documented pieces of it in this blog over the years. One of the conversations we had in the interview was around the topic of building the company vs. building the business. The classic entrepreneur builds the business — quite frankly, he or she probably just builds the product for a long time first, then the business. In the course of the interview, I realized that I’ve spent at least as much energy over…
The Limits of Perseverance
The Limits of Perseverance My Dad has a great saying, which is that It’s ok to chip away at a brick wall, but not if you’re using a toothpick Entrepreneurs are famous for persevering in the face of adversity, a trait more commonly known as stubbornness. And generally, that’s a good thing. Breakthrough ideas aren’t easy to come by, nor is leading the market. If those things were common, they wouldn’t be breakthrough. But perseverance doesn’t go anywhere without amassing the proper resources to do the job at hand. Just as you’d never chip away at a brick wall with a toothpick, you’d never willingly go up against a fierce competitor without a great product or sales effort, or you’d…
Retail, No Longer
Retail, No Longer I’ve evolved my operating system as a CEO many times over the years as our business at Return Path has changed and as the company has scaled up. I’ve changed my meeting routines, I’ve delegated more things, and I’ve gotten less in the details of the business. But there’s one specific thing where I’ve remained very “retail,” or on the front lines, and that is the interview process. I still interview every new hire, usually on the phone or Skype and in most cases only for 15-30 minutes, and then I also do an in-person 15-30 minute check-in when someone is around the 90-day mark as an employee. For me, these have both been great mechanisms for…
You Have to Throw a Stone to Get the Pond to Ripple
You Have to Throw a Stone to Get the Pond to Ripple This is a post about productive disruption. The title comes from one of my favorite lines from a song by Squeeze, Slap & Tickle. But the concept is an important one for leaders at all levels, especially as businesses mature. Founders and CEOs of early stage companies don’t disrupt the flow of the business. Most of the time, they ARE the flow of the business. They dominate the way everything works by definition — product development, major prospect calls, client dialog, strategy, and changes in strategy. But as businesses get out of the startup phase and into the “growth” phase (I’m still trying to figure out what to…
GEOITS
GEOITS This is another gem that I picked up years ago from my boss at MovieFone — the “Great Employment Office In The Sky.” It’s a simple but powerful concept: the organization is grappling with a difficult employee situation, and the likely path is that the employee needs to leave the organization either immediately or sometime in the future, and it’s impossible for the organization to figure out how to get from A to B for whatever reason, then the employee resigns of his or her own accord, or the employee does something that leaves the organization no choice but to terminate him or her immediately with no gray area This has come up time and again over the years…