Happy Holidays: Cancel Your Vacations. There are Plans to Write!
Action Items for Startup Leadership at Year End and into the New Year
In startups, later stage, and public companies, CEOs, ELTs and Board members all get busy in December and January producing corporate plans and schedules, and doing lots of analyses. It’s one of the delights of the holiday season.
First, there are basic financials and operating plans that have to be drafted and, in some cases, such as companies preparing for an IPO in the first half of 2022 and public companies, done by early December.
In order for the budget to be completed, the budget planning process should have been outlined and agreed upon in September, started in October and completed in November. That gives the Board enough time during December to confirm the resource allocations prior to the January Board meeting at which the budget will be approved.
Secondly, the CEO and ELT should do a separate set of objective analyzes. These are sometimes done in privately, and will include analyses that answer key questions such as the following:
Sales: What could be improved? How can the company sell more? Where are the strengths? Where are the weaknesses?
Competition: Where did the competition win and move ahead of us? Where is the company vulnerable? What are the future threats?
Company Optimizations: Where could the company make performance improvements? Which organizational changes can the company make that would result in performance optimizations?
Exits: As a result of our 2021 performance, who are our likely acquirers in 2022, 2023 and 2024? What is our projected enterprise valuation?
Then there are “year-end” communications. For many startups, there is the year-end investor newsletter that both summarizes the past year’s achievements and articulates the coming year’s goals. Then there’s the partner newsletter which communicates to executives, sales and marketing personnel in channel and technology partner companies.
January is when “kickoff meetings” typically occur. These usually have an obvious title (e.g. “The 2022 Sales Kickoff Meeting”) along with an obligatory, goal-centric subtitle, such as “Breaking $100 Million in Sales”. There are equivalent marketing meetings in many companies, but usually the sales meeting has a bigger budget and involves many marketing personnel.
Fourth, then there is a set of special decisions and plans to be made. These include:
Development plans for rising stars
Board self-assessments
Performance reviews
The CEO’s annual performance review, and
Succession planning
And if that’s not enough planning and planning meetings, for companies that have scaled and emerged from their startup phases, there’s a review and updating of their long-term plans, and measurement of the progress they’ve made against those plans.
Fifth, in planning for 2022, the CEO, ELT and Board should coordinate and agree on the following important meetings and other schedule items:
BoD meeting schedule
Comp committee and audit committee meetings
Company holidays (including scheduling in Federal and State holidays)
Obviously, there's really no let-up for CEOs, ELTs and Board members during the holidays, and in some ways, they need to be even busier than they are the rest of the year. This reality just goes with the territory.
And last but not least, there are holiday cards that need to be sent out to thank the many people who have given their support. So, get busy on your plans and cards...and have a Happy Holiday season everyone.