Building the Company Operating Cadence
Building the Company Operating Cadence
Proactively managing your company’s cadence allows you to operate more efficiently, enables your teams to plan more effectively, and is a forcing function for strategic planning.
I recently had the honor of presenting on Mapping Time to The Glue People Club alongside Molly Graham. Inspired by her article, I went into further detail on how you can map your company’s operational cadence to save time and energy. I’ve provided an adapted version of this presentation below.
Whether or not you’ve paid attention to it, every company operates on a cadence. As Molly says in her article, there’s a point in every company’s lifecycle where teams begin to notice (and resent) its existence if you haven’t been proactive about managing it.
Proactively managing your company’s cadence saves time and energy for the entire company. It allows you to operate more efficiently, enables your teams to plan more effectively, and is a forcing function for strategic planning.
Operate more efficiently
In most companies, the operating cadence includes a standard set of recurring meetings, e.g., board meetings, Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs), exec/leadership team meetings, and more. Each of these meetings normally comes with associated documentation and pre-work. If you haven’t been intentional, it’s likely that at a certain point, you will find that you are wasting time and resources duplicating reporting work, with multiple people writing the same information in multiple formats in multiple places. Proactively managing your company’s cadence allows you to systematize this work so that you only document once.
With a predictable calendar, you can structure your meetings so that you document key information one time, then cascade that information through to subsequent meetings & communication tools, copy-pasting the appropriate level of detail for each setting.
I used this principle in a prior role to cut our board preparation time from weeks to days, and to reduce the number of people required to write a board packet from seven or eight to one or two.
We instituted a bi-weekly cross-functional State of the Business meeting where we would review metrics. That meeting included a templated pre-read with commentary on lessons learned, active work to move metrics, relevant hand offs, and big wins. Directly Responsible Individuals (DRIs) for each metric would write a bullet or two for each metric, making the reporting lift light for each individual person.
Once we’d discussed this pre-read and added any edits live in-meeting, we pasted the contents of those pre-reads into our company newsletter, editing down to relevant information for company-wide dispersal. After that, one person was responsible for pulling that information into our monthly board flash reporting and all hands meeting decks. We could use these monthly updates to highlight key information in our QBR pre-reads, and then use the output of the QBRs to paste into our board packets. One stellar executive assistant could use all of the pre-written information to prepare 95% of the packet, with a final executive review and edit to finish the last 5%.
Plan More Effectively
Without an intentional cadence in place, you’ve likely experienced “Major Moment Overload,” e.g., performance reviews scheduled right on top of your annual strategic planning kickoff, and quarterly board meeting prep. Pre-plan your company cadence to spread out your major moments. In addition, when the entire company can see the year laid out in advance, people are able to plan their own department and personal work accordingly. As a bonus, having the annual calendar a year in advance can make it easier for your leaders and team members to plan their vacation times around major moments.
Having the year laid out can also allow you to pre-program reminders for all your big meetings in advance. In a prior startup, part of our cadence creation process included creating a year’s worth of weekly exec team agendas in advance, with all reminders and upcoming deadlines/conversation points needed to hit those deadlines included. It meant I didn’t have to be constantly remembering big dates coming up—the reminders were already built in for the entire following year. Some of our more organization-minded execs did the same thing at the department level, pulling the key dates into their team agendas for the year.
Hard-wire Strategic Planning
In addition to increasing efficiency and making it easier to plan work for the year, putting a calendar in place with clear deadlines becomes a forcing function for better strategic planning.
Prior to implementing a cadence, we had a difficult time getting the whole company moving on strategic planning and goal setting because every team had different timelines and opinions on how it should happen. Setting out the cadence in advance with deadlines, process, and pre-scheduled meetings meant that we had a systematic way of making sure we were reflecting on learnings from previous quarters and using them to inform future quarters, and doing it with minimal thrash—the bedrock of a good strategic planning process.
Building the Cadence
1. Get CEO Buy-In
Before you start anything, you need to get your CEO’s buy-in. Unless your CEO is bought into turning the cadence into a system, doing so will be a waste of time. CEOs drive company time, and CEOs can kill this cadence. In my own experience, getting my CEO onboard with this way of working was not difficult—we were in enough operational pain that it was a no-brainer.
2. Make a List
Start by making a list of your most important company moments. Things that should go in this bucket:
Big, recurring meetings (rule of thumb: if you or the team spends a decent amount of time preparing for the meeting on a regular basis, it should go on your list)
Any meeting with investors or your board
Company-wide meetings (in person or zoom)
Time-consuming company-wide programs (e.g., compensation reviews, performance reviews)
Company-wide shut downs
This list is going to look different at every company depending on your company size, funding stage, and type of investment, the maturity of your people programs, the maturity of your finance department, the size of your board, the size and makeup of your leadership team, etc. This list above is just to give you some examples—you need to make it work for your company.
It’s helpful to have your leaders review the list at this stage. Ask questions like, “What’s missing?” and “Are there meetings that can be combined or deleted all together?”
Once you have alignment, grab an annual calendar and start to lay out the year.
3. Lay Out Blockers & Orientation Points
I like to start with foundational items: Blockers & Orientation points.
Blockers: What are the things that will get in your way? Do you have company-wide holidays or shut downs? Does it take your finance team fifteen days to close the books? Does your business have major seasonality? Block these in first.
Orientation Points: Next, start thinking about where you need your story to be the cleanest. Ideally you’re setting yourself up so that you can get full internal alignment before you start talking externally about things like revenue projections, performance, etc. I like to start from the most polished story points (in my experience, this is usually board meetings or investor reports) and then work backwards.
4. Layer in Strategic Planning Markers
As you’re adding in strategic planning markers, tie them into the timing of your blockers & orientation points. In my most recent experience of laying out a cadence, we put our quarterly board meetings three weeks into the month following the prior quarter’s end. We’d put our internal QBRs two weeks before that. This gave us time to refine and align on the story of our performance, pull the relevant details out of the QBR pre-reads, and ship the board packet to the board a week before the meeting.
It’s also useful (particularly if you’re remote) to think about where in your planning cadence it makes the most sense to host offsites for your exec/leadership teams and your whole company. For us, we kicked off the year after finishing annual planning with a company wide-offsite soon after to set the tone.
You also want to think about how soon things need to be done in order to be useful—this is going to be unique to your company and your planning cadence. For example, in my company we realized we needed to start drafting goals earlier in the final month of each quarter to give ourselves time for dialogue on priorities while still getting goals out before the next quarter started. Occasionally, things changed slightly after the QBRs, but starting to draft the next quarter’s goals before finishing our QBRs meant that goals were mostly set going into the following quarter, reducing thrash. There is no perfect way to do this, but the objective is to sequence these events in the way that is most useful and applicable to your company’s stage and needs. As a reminder, make sure your leadership team & CEO are aligned on the order you put in place!
5. Add in People Programs
At this point, you’ll have a calendar including Blockers, Orientation Points, and Strategic Planning markers. The final calendar building stage is to layer in your People programs. I was fortunate to work in a company that had a very mature People department in terms of our programming, with engagement surveys, bi-annual comp reviews & performance reviews*, ongoing training, and more. I paired closely with our VP People to plan the timing of these programs in slots that were complementary to the rest of the calendar to avoid the aforementioned Major Moment Overload.
*If your company does comp & performance reviews, make sure you’ve considered their timing as they relate to major planning sessions, e.g., 2H planning and annual planning kickoffs. All of these require significant time & preparation from your leaders.
6. Build Templates
Once your calendar is completed, start thinking about the documents that go with your big moments. What is the information you’re sharing over and over again in these meetings? Decide how you want to display it, and build a template (or a few). In my experience, almost all documents I’ve created for recurrent meetings have included:
Top Metrics Performance
Executive Summary
Wins
Lessons Learned
What’s Next
This is also going to be company-specific, but the key message here is to build your formula for reporting and then templatize it so that you can copy-paste information from one company moment to the next.
This is another important buy-in point. Get your leaders on board with:
The level of information they need to see at each meeting
How they want to see it
How they want to deliver it
You’re likely to iterate your templates over time as you use them, but agree upon these three points at the outset to avoid a lot of headache.
7. Communicate
Once your executive team has signed off on the cadence and your templates, introduce it to your company. The more people who know, understand, and interact with what you’re trying to do with the cadence, the less you’re going to have to be chasing people for things. I’d recommend being upfront about the fact that you’re likely to iterate on this over time to set expectations. In my experience, the first year of releasing a proactive cadence was rocky, and stuff moved around a lot. The second year was relatively simple to put together based on the prior year’s learnings, and by our third year, putting together the cadence took one person less than a week from start to finish.
8. Iterate
As I said above, you’re not going to get everything right the first time you release a company cadence. Start simple and iterate. Get rid of what doesn’t work and double down on the things that do. Solicit feedback from your broader teams on what’s working, and use that to guide future versions.
To sum it up:
Proactively building a company operating cadence will increase your operational efficiency, allow you to plan more effectively, and create a forcing function for strategic planning. When you’re ready to implement it, follow these steps:
Get your CEO bought in
Make a List
Lay Out Blockers & Orientation Points
Layer in Strategic Planning Markers
Add in People Programs
Build Templates
Communicate
Iterate