The PIP Checklist

Before you even determine your goals, determine your WHY. Why are you in business? When you ask WHY, you not only have a goal, you have a purpose. Answer these five questions to find it.

• What is your primary product or service?
• What are the features of your product or service that are unique to your company?
• What are the benefits your customers uniquely derive from your product or service?
• Looking at your unique features and benefits, develop a statement to your customer: your unique customer promise.
• Shorten that promise to a statement you and every employee can memorize, then check it for emotional impact. This is your Mission Statement. This is your WHY.

Now focus on what it means to achieve the level of success to which you aspire. What is your ultimate goal for your company? What is your VISION? Answer these five questions to clarify and quantify it.

• What is your revenue goal for the year?
• How many products or services do you offer?
• What is the average sales price per product or service offered?
• What percentage of sales will be derived from each product or service?
• Based on the two previous answers, what is the unit sales goal for each product or service?

While your product or service is essential to your success, it is critical to recognize that your employees are the foundation upon which your success is built. They must produce, market, sell, deliver, and support your customer experience.

Consider also that, for the most part, compensation to employees is the largest line item on any income statement. It is imperative, then, to inspire the greatest productivity possible out of every employee.

• An engaged workforce is a productive workforce. To start increasing productivity today, increase employee engagement.
• To increase engagement, give your employees a sense of accomplishment.
• To give them that, give them clear goals (from steps 1 and 2) and an objective standard to measure their performance against (step 6).

Capital sources require a business plan because they want to know if you are building on solid ground. They want to know the prospects for making money by investing in your venture: not just what you plan to do, but the return they can expect, when they can expect it, and the risks to their investment. But if you are not seeking outside capital, do you need a written business plan?

Spoken or not, your employees have questions about your company too. How is it doing? Will they still have a job in a year? What are your plans? Where do they fit in? Without regard to any outside influence requiring it, EVERY company benefits from developing a strategy before taking action. Avoid emotional decisions during a crisis by anticipating problems and building them into a comprehensive strategy.

• Start with the goals identified in Step 2 (Clarify & Quantify Goals).
• Identify the performance metrics required to achieve each goal.
• Based on those metrics, establish budgets for every department.
• Having identified what needs to be done, go back, determine what could go wrong, and build contingencies into your strategy.

All business strategies must be executed through people. So holding people accountable to the strategy is essential to optimizing profitability and maximizing the valuation or bankability of any company. Holding a person accountable to a goal works better when they derive a sense of accomplishment from it (Step 3 above).

To create alignment, you must build a structure that every member of the team can readily understand. By taking the VISION of the company and allocating the goals across these six functional areas, you begin creating the alignment necessary for efficient, effective execution of the strategy.

• Product or Service — someone owns the conceptualization, refinement, and development of your product or service so it meets your customer promise.
• Marketing — you can have the greatest product in the world, but if no one knows about it…
• Sales — awareness of and interest in your product needs to be converted into revenue.
• Operations — the product needs to be produced, warehoused, distributed, and supported.
• Finance — revenue must be collected, bills must be paid, and cash must be managed.
• Administration — strategic planning, legal, risk management, and human resources support the entire organization.

You have clarified your goals. You have gained the buy-in of your team. Together you have developed a strategy, and the appropriate members of your team have accepted responsibility for their respective areas. Now it is time to monitor performance.

Much like the scoreboard at a sporting event lets everyone know the status at any given moment, your system must ensure the company’s goals are no longer an abstract version of performance. Whether you buy the latest business intelligence software, the most advanced ERP system, or just rely on documents and spreadsheets, make sure your monitoring process is:

• Objective — performance measured in quantifiable, numeric terms.
• Transparent — everyone knows how each other’s performance impacts the team and the overall goal.
• Consistent — in the information monitored and in the intervals at which you monitor it.

Just as common sense dictates that the foundation of a house must be built before the framework, the framework before the walls, and the walls before the paint, so must every function of a company be coordinated for it to reach its full potential. And the one resource that ties every function together is time.

Adding a time element to ALL aspects of your operation, including your performance monitoring system, is absolutely crucial to the effectiveness of the system. Build consideration of time into every aspect of your operation, including:

• All Goals — have a deadline and a review date.
• All Tasks — have a deadline and a named owner.
• All Meetings — have an agenda, a start time, and an end time.
• All Schedules — are honored and monitored.