Get a Goal: The One Number That Runs Your Company

Bill Canady: in one line. Not a page, not a pyramid with three pillars on it. We've all made those and yes, they're really cool. Pinny. Not a page, not a pyramid with three pillars under it. We've all made those. They look like cool houses. One line written down in your own handwriting. Then say it out loud. Two constraints. First, no conjunctions to add a second goal. The moment you write, while also you now have two goals. And two goals is the beginning of 25. So second, say it out loud before you accept it. If you stumble reading your own goal, so will everybody else. And they'll stop trying by the second week. Format it to start from. Improve in certain measure. By number, unit by date, right? So I'm improve my margin by the number of units I sell by this date. That's the shape. Fill it in with your business. Move two. Pressure test it against three questions. Take the line you just wrote and run it through these ninety seconds. One, can a person picked at random from your business recite it? Not this week, you haven't installed it yet. But could they, once you've said it fifteen times? If it takes two sentences to say, the answer is no. Length is the enemy here. The company can hold one sentence and cannot hold a paragraph. Two, does it have a denominator? Is it a ratio or a dollar figure tied to a ratio? If it's a pure numerator. Revenue, units, headcounts, bookings. Somebody can hit it by spending your money. And eventually somebody will. Lord knows I have lived this. I always come back to regret it. Three, does it name a date, an actual month, not this year, not over the planned horizon, a date you can be behind? Does it actually line up with where you're going? And here's an informal fourth one I'd apply before I sign my name to it. Does achieving this goal require you to say no to something? If the goal can be reached without stopping anything, without walking away from any revenue, without disappointing anyone, it's probably not a real goal. It's a forecast. They're trying to make too many people happy here. Goals to win. Real goals cost something on the day you set them. Remember that. Move number three, put the meeting on the calendar with a written agenda as ends in unnamed owners. Gotta have names against them. Tell you the amount of meetings I come out of, and we have all this stuff, and there's no date, no one that owns it. So you can imagine what gets done. Half a day, your direct report, send the agenda in advance in writing so that nobody arrives planning to present. Four blocks, block one, the situation in numbers only, 20 minutes, delivered by the CFO. That's got to own the numbers, right? We trust him. Where EBADA is, where it has to be, and the gap in dollars. Block number two, the goal. Proposed by you. You're the CEO. You're the one that's got to get it there. And argue it for real. Let them fight it. A goal that survives an argument gets carried. A goal that was received gets forwarded. Boy, I tell you, this is super important. You have to put your number out there and not through force of personality, not through saying you're the CEO. Teams got to own it. In order to do that, they got to believe it. They got to touch it, feel it, taste it. understand what it is and know they have it. All right, block three, two or three moves that close the gap, and you cap it at three before anyone speaks out loud at the top of the block. So the meeting is a selection process rather than an accumulation process, right? We are not expansive thinking here. We are coming together. And block four is the one that makes the other three matter. Named owners and dates, not functions, not committees, a human being's name against each move. Boy, this is important. And that human being is in the room. In the room, and their name goes on it. We've assigned lots of people who were not there. Make sure they know what the heck's going on. You do not leave that room without block four finished. If you run out of time, you cut block one. The situation can go in an email. Ownership cannot. What it looks like when it's working and when it's the air. Here's the adoption test, and it's the adoption test, and it's the only one I trust. You know a new standard is taken when people who don't report to you start citing it back to each other in rooms you're not in to settle arguments you've never heard about. When a plant manager tells a salesperson that order doesn't help the three hundred basis points, and you weren't there and nobody told you it happened, and you found out about it six weeks later by accident, now that's adoption. Things are happening. You gotta be in that room. They understood, they got the message. Until then, it's just a thing the CEO says. Happens a lot, doesn't it? And it takes time, realistically, two or three months of consistent enforcement. And that will be fast. Consistent is the operative word. It means you open every meeting with it, you ask about it when you're being briefed on something else, and you decline at least one attractive opportunity out loud, on the record, because it does not serve that goal. The last one is what converts it. People don't believe your priorities because you announced them. They believe them the first time you pay for one of them. That decision got to cost something. Theory looks like the opposite, and it's easy to recognize because it's more fun. The goal goes on the wall, goes on a mouse pad. There's a banner in the lobby and a hashtag on the internet site. Hashtag focus. And nobody ever uses it in an argument. Nobody has ever killed a project with it. And it's never cost anyone anything, which is how you know it's not real. The wall is not installation. The wall is decoration. Installation is when the goal starts making decisions that you didn't make. Three things worth keeping from this one. One, you get a goal. Twenty-five initiatives is arithmetic arithmetically. Twenty-five initiatives is the same as none because your organization will sort the list for you and it will sort for comfort. One number and everything else is in the service of it. Two. A goal has to be a number, a unit, and a date, and it has to have a denominator so it can't be bulk. It's critical. Improve EBADA margin by 300 basis points in 12 months. If your goal doesn't have all four of those parts, what you have is a wish. And I've never seen a wish moving income statement. Number three, you're not done when you say it, you're done when they say it to each other. That's the adoption test. It takes two or three months of constant reinforcement. And the thing that converts it is watching you turn something down attractive because it does not serve the goal. Or to do. It's on you though. And when you get to the end of your hundred days, and when the goal is set, the strategy is chosen, the structure is aligned, and the cadence has started. ⁓ it's like music, isn't it? There's one line to close on. I use it every day in the 100 meetings that I ever run and I don't dress it up. Now, this is our plan. We're going to execute with discipline. No one else will do it for us. No one's coming to save us. We have to do this. That last sentence is the one that matters. Nobody is coming. The sponsor isn't going to operate the business. The board isn't going to fix your product line. The market's not going to hand you 300 basis points as a favor. You got one goal and about 900 days left to hit it. On the next one, we're going to go through days 30 through 90, and we'll find out where your profit actually lives. Because I'll tell you right now. It isn't spread evenly, and your PL is an average that's hiding two different, completely different businesses inside of one set of books. I'll give you the four quads, the single best question I know to ask a leadership team, and the answers I got when I asked it at a $310 million industrial business. The lowest answer in that room was 18%. The highest one, 41%. If you want the one-page worksheet for today and the goal format, the test. The Meeting One Agenda, you can find them in the 8020 Institute. Same place you'd go if you want to find others in your own business. So get out there and go find ⁓ I'm Bill Kennedy. Now go do the work. You've been listening to the 1000 Day CEO with Bill Kennedy. Follow the show for more decisive leadership, sustainable growth, and strategies that build enduring businesses. Until next time, make every day count.