June is the perfect time to stop and assess and create a 6 month strategy
Firstly, you need to take your plans out and take note of what you
have achieved.
Questions that should be asked are:
- did you hit your six month milestone
-
did you manage to pull off what you needed to do in Q1 and Q2.
You need to take into account that Q1 and Q2 are normally slow, strategy and budgets are off, it is also slow consumerism and unproductiveness because of April. However, we are now in the throngs of it.
Moving forward-
- what is July looking like,
- what are your goals for Q3 and
- how are you monetising to give yourself the biggest buffer as possible to ensure that you smash your Q4 target.
You need to start planning on how you are going to leverage media and your profile within the industry as well as upcoming events that you can capitalise on. More specifically, there are major events that are being set up from July onwards in terms of conferences, expos and concerts that are coming to South Africa. All of these represent opportunities and represent massive brand exposure for short periods of time. Therefore, you need to know how you are going to be tackling these in terms of a very detailed plan. This plan needs to be broken right down, to ensure that there are deliverables on each item.
At LIVEOUTLOUD and VAULTLife we sat down to create our 6 month strategy, this is how we break it down.
- A month by month strategy of department goals, figures and the critical objectives.
- A review of our culture and values, to remind the team who we are, what we stand for and how we achieve success the VAULTlife.com way.
- A flow chart of business coming in and moving through the company, to highlight departments that naturally bottle neck and to ensure they are as efficient as possible.
- A detailed cash flow, budget and income projection plan- startups burn through funds. Knowing what and when we can spend forces innovative behaviour without over extending.
- Critical thinking- the whole company had to read the first 100 pages of a book which is relevant to what we are experiencing in our company right now, and were given tasks to present back to us. The team then presented back to the company in different roles, eg. Donovan Black became the CEO and he had to re-present the 6 month strategy with changes he would make to the plan. They were amazing and over half have been implemented. Developing critical thinking in a startup is crucial to success and takes away the natural inclination of employees to lean on the entrepreneurs.
Having non tech people in key tech positions ensures usability and simplicity in areas that intend to become over complex.
Simplicity is the greatest form of genius.