Stay Classy San Diego

So the blog has nothing to do with San Diego...it has to do with reporting. But not that high level of reporting Ron Burgundy is use to. It has to do with something far more boring than that. We're talking about monthly reporting!

I've met with a handful of small companies this year on the verge of eruption, but all had one issue in common. Not one of them had monthly reports via their department heads. All of them had weekly meetings and some had monthly summaries. Here's the thing, weekly meetings are great to shoot the shit, but if you're the chief indian/head honcho/captain of the ship you should want to be able to look at something that quantifies the individual departments growth or progress.

This is beyond just dollar signs, but yes, everything adds up to either dollars coming in at the end of the day or going out. If your engineering department is working on a project, what % of the project are they complete? Create that timeline at the beginning of the project so two months from now it isn't a question of where you are, it is a question of where you are on the timeline. What % of the timeline have you completed? Are you behind? Well guess what, it's going to affect your overall burn. Make hard deadlines for your department and make that department accountable.

Everyone is hiring a digital agency or an in house digital marketer, and their month to month goals are quantifiable so get a report from them so you know where your money is going. Take a look at your goals of annual growth, break those down into months, then into weeks, then into days. What's that? Did you just put another $3k per month into Facebook and are still selling 10 widgets a day? Oh you don't know because you don't get monthly reports that you can compare to your weekly and annual forecast because your finance team didn't put one together either? That's not good. How do you know if you need to pivot your campaign? Change your target audience?

I'm telling you, life get's a lot easier when you can get in a habit of reviewing progress by applying quantifiable goals. It works with products and it works with services and it even works in life.