This has been a hard year for all startups. Whether this is your first year, your second, or your fifth, chances are that you’ve experienced plenty of challenges when maintaining your company.
However, even if your startup experienced several (or many) bumps over the past twelve months, as long as it’s still up and running now, there’s a possibility that you can start next year even more prepared to face another twelve months of challenges.
In this blog post, you’ll learn some of the most important strategies and tactics you can implement now to make 2019 an even stronger, more productive year than 2018.
Schedule One-on-One Meetings with Your Team
The benefits of having individual meetings with each member of your team are plentiful and impactful; not only do you, as the head of your company, re-establish a meaningful professional relationship with every employee, you also get a better idea of their performance, and learn how you can help them achieve their goals, increase efficiency, reduce obstacles, etc.
Because your team members are directly responsible for the performance of your company, it’s essential that you have a firm understanding of their processes and what can be done to make the work environment more conducive for success.
Below are some questions you should ask each team member in your one-one-one meetings:
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What were your most important metrics this year?
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How well did you meet your goals?
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What support do you need to boost your success?
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Are there any tools or resources that can help you meet your metrics?
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What are the obstacles you regularly face in your processes?
Remember, come to these meetings with an open mind and a supportive attitude. Meeting with employees is a great way to discover problems within the company that you may have overlooked when caught in the tumult of managing a startup, problems that have the potential to grow in the long run.
And while it may be impossible to provide your team members with everything they need to succeed, investing in any kind of additional support for the new year can still keep employee performance and morale high.
Review Your Company’s Progress
Over the past year, you and your team members probably experimented with numerous strategies, techniques, and processes. Some approaches probably succeeded, while others probably failed, and still others probably still need more data. Set up a meeting with all of your team members and ensure that each employee conducts a thorough examination of the year’s experiments.
During the meeting, give everyone an opportunity to share their findings, and set aside time to openly discusses results to tabulate what worked, what didn’t work, and what is still up in the air. While this meeting may be time consuming, it is a great way to ensure that everyone is up to date on each other’s roles in the company.
Here are some questions to ask for a successful team-wide meeting:
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What were the various experiments you tried this year?
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Which experiments produced the best results?
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Which experiments produced the worst results?
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Which experiments need more data to draw an accurate conclusion?
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Are the successful experiments worth continuing into the new year?
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Are any of the unsuccessful experiments worth trying again in the future?
Similar to your one-one-one meetings, put extra effort into establishing an open and supportive environment into your team-wide meetings. By encouraging your employees to open up and share their thoughts, you will ensure that you get the best, most honest feedback possible.
To help create an even more comfortable environment for the team, getting food, drinks, and refreshments is a good idea. Plus, it’s an easy way to guarantee high attendance!
Identify Your Startup’s Main Strategic Goals
A startup’s goals are certainly liable to change as it grows and expands. As your company continues to progress, you’re likely to discover that the goals you worked towards a year ago have become less important or relevant. Once you and your team members have analyzed the results from your various experiments and tests from the past year, there’s a good chance that you may need to change your company’s course for the new year.
Of course, there’s also the possibility that some of your goals may not need to change; the only thing that needs to change is how you set out to achieve those goals.
Gather your team members to evaluate your company’s goals, using the following questions to help guide you:
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Which goals were achieved?
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Which goals were not achieved?
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Of the goals that were not achieved, how did you succeed?
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Of the goals that were not achieved, how did you fail?
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Were any of your previous goals too ambitious?
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Were any of your previous goals not ambitious enough?
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Based on the results of your experiments and tests from the past year, which goals should you keep? Which goals should you get rid of?
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What is the complete set of new goals for the new year?
Remember to make sure that your goals for the new year are ambitious but realistic. You should want your company to make progress, but not if it means that everyone has to work overtime to achieve it.
Establish Each Goal’s Strategy and Metrics
Having new goals for the new year is a great start, but they are incomplete without a strong strategy to support them. Once you’ve established your company’s complete set of goals for the new year, you must then determine who’s in charge of which goal and what each member needs in order to produce positive results. Refer to your notes from your one-on-one conversations, as these will be essential in ascertaining how to achieve each goal.
This is also the perfect time to outline how success looks like for each goal, as this will give you a clear end result that you should strive toward. Defining the metrics for each goal will also help guide your team members when testing their own strategies.
When establishing the strategy and metrics for each goal, start with these questions to help guide your planning:
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Based on your findings from the past year, what strategies should you put into place to achieve your goals?
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Which team members are assigned to each goal?
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Will you need to hire more team members to help you achieve your goals?
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Will you need new resources to help you achieve your goals? Technology, software, services, etc.
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What are the most important metrics for each goal?
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What does success look like for each goal?
Once you’ve established the right goals for your company, you and your team members will have a better understanding of why you’re doing what you’re doing, and will give you something meaningful to work towards.
Monitor Your Company’s Progress
So now that you’ve collected your team members’ feedback, reviewed what worked and what didn’t work, identified your new goals for the new year, and established the strategy and metrics for each goal, you’re set to start the new year with renewed vigor, right?
Not yet.
Here’s why:
Your plans for the new year need a plan. Once you’ve done all of the in-depth analysis of the past year’s successes and failures and determined what you need to work on next year, you need to establish a process for checking in on everyone’s progress towards their goals periodically throughout the year.
As you and your team wrap up your strategic planning meetings, consider the following questions:
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How often should we meet to discuss progress towards our goals? Weekly? Monthly? Quarterly?
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What should progress meetings consist of? Should meetings be short and to the point? Or should they be longer and more in-depth?
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Should meetings be one-on-one, team-wide, or a combination of both?
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How should we address obstacles as they arise?
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How can you increase collaboration between departments to foster a more supportive environment for everyone?
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Are there any tools, resources, or services that you need to ensure everyone’s progress?
By putting into place various methods of monitoring your company’s progress, it enables you to fix more problems before they arise, and gives you more time to create backup plans.
Final Thoughts
There are always going to be bumps on the road to success. But taking the time to arm yourself with a strong map for your startup’s future will increase your odds of traversing the challenges of running a company. Remember, in the words of Benjamin Franklin:
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.
