Did you know that a Chief Operating Officer can run most business functions, making them the most efficient and effective tool for any growing business with a limited budget?
An early-stage COO is, on average, responsible for about 7 different business functions.
From the anecdotal experience of my peers and me, this usually covers HR, Legal, Finance, Fundraising, Sales & Marketing, Product, and Engineering.
A COO can be responsible for such a broad range of disciplines because they're also responsible for the business's Strategy - aka turning the Founder’s wild and exciting vision into a reality - which has implications for all departments.
In this new series of posts, I'll break down how a COO does this - how do I, a detail-oriented completer-finisher with an unbridled love of spreadsheets, turn a creative, forward-thinking, relatively nebulous idea into a structured and realistic roadmap for success (and how I keep the entire company following that roadmap).
We’re going to follow the same 6-Point Strategy framework that I developed for my best-selling book How To Write Your Strategy. If you’re (like me) someone who likes to read ahead, you can get the whole book for 50% off here for the next few months using code SUMMER24).
All the articles in this series
Part Four: The Key Results (this post)
In the previous articles in this series, we looked at how your end goal for a business can impact even your earliest decisions, how important a Mission Statement is to a company’s success, how to translate your wildest dreams into numbers you can achieve, and how a COO can help you through the hardest bits of all of those crucial tasks.
In this post, we’re going to look at your company’s Key Results:
what a good Key Result looks like,
why it's important to use them to break your Objectives down into more manageable parts, and
how a COO can help pin a Founder or CEO’s wild, ambitious vision down into something that’s inherently quantitative and measurable in order to increase your likelihood of hitting your goals and efficiently growing your company.
Below is the Pay As You Go COO 6-Point Framework for a Strategy that I developed for my best-selling book How To Write Your Strategy. We’ve been working our way in from the left-hand side.
What does a COO do in an early-stage company? How a ‘vision’ gets turned into a ‘reality’: how to design achievable Key Results.
Key Results are the final part of the goal-setting half of your Strategy. Where Objectives are big goals that stretch out across both time and space to achieve something big, Key Results are the Objectives broken down into more manageable, more immediate chunks.
In the Pay As You GO COO 6-Point Strategy Framework, Key Results, like Objectives are always quantitative in nature.
Here’s why.
Successful businesses are built on clear communication and quantitatives are the building blocks of clear business communication. A quantitative and objective measure of success is one that has only one clear definition, there’s no ambiguity.
If you want to efficiently achieve results in your company, you need to be clear with everyone involved what good looks like or you’ll end up wasting resources because people are chasing the wrong goals.
Objectives are huge numbers and they're often given a deadline that's pretty far in advance. This might seem like a good thing - you may be thinking you've got more chance of hitting a goal if you have longer to do it. It's actually not a good thing, so much as a necessary evil.
Humans are fantastically good at under-estimating how long something will take and over-estimating how quickly they can get it done. Ever rushed to clean the house before guests come round even though you gave yourself the whole morning to get it done? Then you know exactly what I mean.
Key Results will be the mile-markers that let you and your team know that your company is on the way to achieving the distant Objective. They keep the business on track by giving it smaller, more manageable and immediate goals.
What goes into a good Key Result?
Key Results are always objective and quantitative and should always take the form of
“Take figure ‘a’ from ‘x’ value to ‘y’ value by ‘z’ date”.
For example, if you have a Financial Objective that looks something like "Achieve revenue of £100k before the end of the year", then you might have two Key Results that look like:
“Take revenue from £0k to £50k in region A by the end of the year.”
and
“Take revenue from £0k to £50k in region B by the end of the year.”
This format is the best way to communicate to your team exactly what's expected of them. You want them to focus on a specific number (figure a), and move it from where it is today ('x' value), to a better level ('y' value) by a specific date ('z' date).
When you come to evaluate the progress of the team or to write your reports for your investors, there'll be no room for ambiguity - you know which number, where it needed to be, and when it needed to be there. The key question "Did we hit our goal?" has a clear 'yes' or 'no' answer.
How can a COO help you write your Key Results?
How do you set your own Key Results? And what do you do if these two sets of Key Results (the monetary and the mission-led, if you remember the two types of Objectives that every company needs) seem to conflict with each other? What if, for example, market demand is such that you can only bring in your desired revenue via a product line or approach that isn't entirely in concert with your Mission?
A good COO will know your Mission and Problem Statements inside out and will be adept at turning rough ideas into clear, achievable goals. This is their time to shine.
One of the key benefits for a Founder or CEO when they hire a COO is that they don't have to worry as much about how to make every single thing in the company work anymore - they now have an expert on board who can put the hours in to work with all the stakeholders to break down that big Objective into its measurable parts - by location, by product line, by service type. However the organisation is structured, the COO can work from both the top-down and from the bottom-up to bring clarity to what's expected.
The key thing here is that your company should know its Mission Statement and Problem Statement inside out before trying to set Objectives and subsequently trying to break those down into Key Results - you can't run before you can walk.
Put the work in to really nail your Problem Statement and your Mission Statement and then your company's Objectives and Key Results are then just a verbalisation of what you already know you can achieve.
What's next?
In the next part of this series, we’re going to look at the next step in the Pay As You Go COO 6-Point Strategy Framework - the Projects. This is where we move on from setting goals to setting plans - and it's the hardest part of the Strategy so it's unfortunately the place where a lot of companies fall down.
In the meantime, if you want to read ahead and learn more about Key Results via some great examples, get your copy of How To Write Your Strategy for 50% off using the code SUMMER24 here.
If you’re a Founder with big dreams and you’re looking for a partner-in-crime who can make those dreams happen, we should chat. At the time of writing, I’m currently taking calls with prospective clients for both Business Coaching and Fractional COO services (though I only take on 2 Fractional COO clients at once, so you need to get in there quickly).
Book a free, no-strings chat with me here:
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