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).

BUY THE BOOK

All the articles in this series

1. Part One: The End Goal

2. Part Two: The Mission Statement

3. Part Three: The Objectives

4. Part Four: The Key Results

5. Part Five: The Projects

6. Part Six: The Tasks (this post)

7. Part Seven: Performance Management

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, how to set more manageable bite-sized goals, how to identify and prioritise your key outputs, and how a COO can help you through the hardest bits of all of those crucial tasks.

In this post, we’re going to deep dive into all of the Tasks you're going to need to tick off on your path to your goals specifically:

• How to write a good Task list

• The benefits of breaking things down into the smallest measurable parts

• The three key things every Task needs - a measure of success, an owner, and a deadline. 

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. 

We're now into the middle of the right hand side. This is where things are starting to get really specific - you've identified some big, exciting numbers to hit and now you need to be really methodical about how you're going to hit them.

Would it surprise you to know that this is actually the hardest part of executing a Strategy?

In my experience, it's comparatively easy for a leadership team to set goals (the Exit Plan, Mission Statement, Objectives, and Key Results); being able to sit down and thoroughly map out all of the individual steps to achieving those goals requires a completely different skill set that isn't always a priority in the very product- or mission-led founding team.

If this is a gap you see for you and your business, it's a great sign that it could be time to work with a Chief Operating Officer.

What does a COO do in an early-stage company? How a ‘vision’ gets turned into a ‘reality’: how to write a good Task list and make every hour of every day count

Where your OKRs are your goals, your Projects and Tasks are your plans that take you to those goals. These are individual pieces of work designed to take you from a clear starting point to a clear end point.

To complete a Project, you’ll need to tick off a number of different Tasks.

You’ll clearly be familiar with the concept of ‘a task’ as it pertains to the ‘doing’ of ‘something’; just existing as a human in society means you’re familiar with the general idea of getting things done.

Tasks in a Strategy share similarities with the general life admin you complete day-to-day, but they take a very specific form that’s really important to understand if you want to set yourself up for success in your business. Let’s dive in. 

Tasks in a Strategy are all the things that you’re going to be doing, day-to-day, to make sure that your Projects get completed so that you can deliver on your Key Results, hit your Objectives, and achieve your Mission.

Tasks are the smallest building blocks of your entire Strategy; they’re single, individual items that can’t be broken down any further.

Like Key Results, with their ‘take figure ‘a’ from ‘x’ value to ‘y’ value by ‘z’ date’ format, Tasks must take a specific form to be properly useful in driving the actions of your business forward to success. We’ll look at this shortly.

Why are Tasks important?

When you’re building a Strategy from scratch and you’re starting out by writing the grand, sweeping, world-changing Mission Statement, your Tasks can sometimes seem like they’re insignificant in comparison. 

When you’re setting your big Objectives and dreaming of what it’s going to feel like when you’ve hit your financial goals and your mission goals and you’ve made the world a better place through your ideas and hard work, it can be so easy to think of your Tasks as less relevant, as small considerations in the grand scheme of the amazing results you’re going to deliver.

The truth couldn’t be further from that. Your Tasks are the most important part of your Strategy.

If you fail to lay out your Tasks properly you significantly increase the chances that you will fail to complete them in the right way by the right deadline, and you will never finish a Project, you will never hit a Key Result, you will never deliver on an Objective, and you will certainly never live up to your Mission Statement. 

Think of your Tasks like single steps.

When you’re setting out on a journey, you’re likely thinking about the destination and what you’re going to do when you get there, not the steps that you’re going to take from the sofa to the wardrobe to pack your clothes, or from the front door to the car to get to the airport, or from the plane to customs, from baggage claim to the hotel. But without all of these single, tiny, seemingly insignificant little steps, you would still be on your sofa just dreaming of your destination. 

Without the Tasks element of your business’s Strategy, your Mission Statement is nothing but a distant dream.

I want you to achieve your dreams, so I’m going to teach you the benefits that Tasks can bring to you. 

What does a 'good' Task look like?

Each Task should have three things: an owner, a definition of success, and a deadline. Here’s why:

• Without an owner, there would be no clear accountability for this vital piece of work. Adding an owner is an example of the kind of objective, clear communication that is a building block of business success. You have clearly stated who is expected to do this work. Even when you’re working alone, it’s a great habit to get into so that you’re ready for when your team grows.

• By adding a definition of success you’re further reinforcing the objective, clear communication. For example, if you have a Task in which Salesperson 1 must ‘call client A’, then you have clearly stated the action ‘call’ and the subject of the action ‘client A’ - you definition of success is 'client A having been called'. Writing out Tasks in this manner will help you avoid confusion and ambiguity. Again, even if you’re starting out by yourself, it’s a great habit to get into in preparation for when your business grows and brings on employees. 

• Deadlines drive completion. Deadlines are not only another form of clear and objective communication, they’re also a powerful driver of progress. It’s really easy to push a Task back by a day, and then by another day, and another, until you’ve waited a week, then a month, then you’re too late to bring the revenue from this client in on time. 

Why do I need to break Project down into Tasks, into such small parts?

I say this a lot - building a business from scratch is really, really hard. How often have you found yourself stuck, unsure where to start or what to do next? How many times have you set yourself a goal (in life or in business) and found yourself missing the deadline you thought was very far in the future? In how many of those situations was it because you never even started?

If you can relate to any of these things, if you ever find yourself procrastinating or extending deadlines or giving up on Projects when you’re halfway through because something new comes your way, then a really solid Task plan could have a huge impact on your productivity and on your life. 

We are all fantastic at getting distracted; the modern world is designed to suck us into distraction because a lot of those distractions were built by companies that make a lot of money when we stop working on what could be life-changing for us and start scrolling or spending. 

Add to that the fact that ‘entrepreneurship’ comes as a package deal with things like ‘uncertainty’, ‘fear’, and, my personal favourite nemesis ‘imposter syndrome’. If you never start something then you can never fail at it, right?

Wrong - but it’s not your fault if you think that way. 

The only surefire way to fail is to never even try. By not starting something, you’re keeping yourself in the safety and comfort of the current, familiar, situation. It’s natural to seek out comfort and safety, that’s an evolutionary mechanism that kept your ancestors alive and led to you sitting there reading this article, dreaming about success. 

It would be great if the brain could recognise that the evolutionary need for safety, whilst super useful when your ancestors were trying not to get eaten by bears, is somewhat less useful when it’s stopping you from sending that email you’ve proof-read 16 times already, but, unfortunately, I’m an organisational expert not a therapist so I can’t give you a clear framework for that one. 

In the midst of the stress and anxiety, Tasks help you make the move from the comfort and safety of where you are now into entrepreneurship and onwards to success.

What's next?

In the next part of this series, we’re going to look at the final step in the Pay As You Go COO 6-Point Strategy Framework - how to manage the performance of your organisation. Your people are your most expensive and important resource and managing their time whilst maintaining their motivation is both a science and an art. I'm going to show you how to build the best foundation for getting the most out of your people.

In the meantime, if you want to read ahead or learn more about Tasks 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:

Pay As You Go COO Discovery Call

Book Now