Narrow your options
The most important business decisions you’ll probably make are the things that you’ll say no to, not the things to which you say yes.
“If you have a vibrant organization, there is a great deal of opportunity,” Milenthal says. “Narrowing it down is a team sport. Generally, the process of having your team approve of your priorities and buy off on moving those priorities forward, that process itself helps to winnow down the number of priorities. The team is only going to want to be accountable for what really can be achieved over this period of time. The key is really pushing for that and really holding each other accountable for success on priorities. That in itself will bring it down to three or four priorities or tasks.”
The vetting process is critical to helping you make those judgment calls effectively.
“All opportunities aren’t right for you as a business,” Milenthal says. “You might want to be exposed to it. But be careful that what you invest in and bring into your company is true to your culture and that it can make you better.”
You need to make sure there is direction behind the vision you have or a point behind what you’re doing to be certain it aligns with where you want to go as a company. What areas are you looking to improve, and how will they be improved by this opportunity you are considering?
“Focus on your direction in th
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context of the vision,” Milenthal says. “We intend to be the total engagement agency that really brings together the right brain and the left brain, the creativity and technology together. We intend to be the best agency in our industry. We begin to define that by the kinds of clients we intend to have. We are also very prescriptive of where we intend to be financially.”
By taking the broader ideas that you have and placing them into more concrete goals, you give your people something to latch on to and something they can see themselves contributing to.
“With change is opportunity and usually there is opportunity for your people,” Milenthal says. “Many people who embrace what is going on can actually use a changing marketplace as a great time to build their careers and build their lives and actually build quite a bit more confidence and optimism about their future.”
Use quarterly benchmarks to add a time element to initiatives and hold yourself and your people accountable to make them happen.
“If you have an energetic group like we do, the problem is you have too many tasks and too many initiatives,” Milenthal says. “But by the second or third quarter, you get pretty good at getting to really achievable tasks and goals that can be accretive to the value of your company.”