Build The Airplane As You Fly It

All enterprises, even the most innovative, strive at some level to become efficient creatures of habit. At some level the aim is to transform the business into a money-making machine. Switch it on and it knows what to do and how to do it. In fact the objective of the first 100 days is to move the business to a money machine status. This is the mountain that the four steps of the first 100 days are designed to climb.

Step One: Set the goal

It’s the executive leadership team that convenes to set this target which is expressed in dollars, margin, and a measure of time. For example, reach 2.5 billion in revenue, have high teen margins, and 300 million in ebaada by this day, five years from today. That goal is the what. The harder part is to figure out, the how. Fortunately if you dig into your wish list to build a money-making machine there’s a set of four how’s that give you a head start on reaching the goal you’ve set. The first is how to grow. This, in turn, implies another how – you earn the right to grow. And how do you do that? Simplify your business. This of course is another how that implies yet another. You simplify your business by applying the 80/20 process. 

Step Two: Frame your strategy

Your executive leadership team or as we call it, the ELT, or whatever you may choose to call it must build the strategy to achieve the goal. Framing the strategy requires assessing the current state of the business and then separating what’s working from what’s not. The picture that fits inside the strategic frame is a portrait of what works. Left outside of the frame are the outtakes – elements of the picture that do not work. Some of these may be capable of repair, redesign, and rehabilitation. You’ll worry about that later, for now just set them aside so that you can focus on what is within the frame. This is the basis of your strategy – it’s your first pass at simplification.

Step Three: Build that structure

Now that you have framed what works, organize your business into segments well defined by performance so that you can be sure to focus on the customers and the products most likely to propel you to your goal. 

Step Four: Launch the action plan

Here you need to define the how’s of the how. The tactics and the initiatives required to execute the plan to transform the business into action. In that first 100 days you strive to do something now that you have reason to believe will work at least more or less to how you move towards your goal. You need to act now so that you cannot even try to imagine perfection. If you really want to make that money machine, the sooner you act the sooner you are likely to build it. So don’t wait for perfection. You will never achieve perfection, you might get close enough to call what you do perfection but that’s all and thats pretty good. You will however never get anywhere at all without action – action produces results that can be measured. What is measured can be improved. Now you can’t imagine a great deal of doing much without anything but you cannot know anything without acting and evaluating the results. Agree to act, agree to observe, to assess, and to make sound informed decisions based on measurement and evaluation of your performance. You make these decisions, not in the quiet of your closed door office, but right out in front where the rubber hits the road. Where the results can be seen, measured, and queried and improved continuously.

In the first 100 days you will build the airplane as you fly it. It’s going to be bumpy at times but by monitoring and evaluating performance, you will know what works and what does not work. Experience will teach you, at first your flight will be rough and you will be uncomfortable. The discomfort is your ally because it will motivate you to make the plane perform better and better. If you talk yourself into being satisfied too soon with too little, you will crash and burn or run out of fuel and just crash without burning.

Remember: Together, We Will Fly.