How to Crush a Quarterly Offsite

What's up, everyone? This is Alex, the host of Founders Journal. As you may know, I built Morning Brew from my senior year of college until we sold the business in 2020. And now I'm building a variety of businesses in different spaces and different stages. I'm basically averaging 1 to 2 new businesses per year. And because of that, I have had the opportunity to test a ton of different products and services, ultimately landing on a core software stack that serves as my business operating system whenever I start a new company. I have my go-to banking service. I have my go-to formation service. I have my go-to domain hosting service. But probably the most important of them all is my HR service, Gusto. If you're a longtime Founders Journal listener, you know how much I think about people in the context of business. A business is nothing without its people, which means a platform that helps me manage and take care of my people is invaluable. And that means I've tried every HR platform under the sun, always with the same exact goals in mind. First, I want a product that's intuitive and delightful to use. As a non-HR person, I find the intricacies of payroll, benefits, taxes, compliance, and expenses to be painful. So I just want something that makes my life easier. Second, I want it to be affordable. I'm a bootstrapper at heart. I started Morning Brew with $0 and I started StoryArc with $0 as well, which means I don't have infinite dollars to drop on SaaS products. And third, I want a platform that acts as my one-stop shop for all things people. I want it to handle payroll, benefits, hiring, onboarding, and taxes, all while integrating with all of the other tools in my business stack, whether it be QuickBooks, Slack, or Google Workspace. Well, Gusto hit the trifecta, which is why I am a customer and use it for every single one of my businesses. Yes, this is a paid sponsorship by the amazing team at Gusto, but I would sing their praises even if I wasn't being paid to do so. So if you're looking for a platform that takes the pain out of payroll, benefits, and HR, I highly recommend you check out Gusto. And if you sign up at gusto.com/alex, you will get your first 3 months free. Now on to the episode.

What's up everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal, my personal diary made public for the world. I'm Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew, and today I am talking about quarterly offsites. Let me tell you about quarterly offsites. I freaking love them. They are misbranded as shitty corporate get-togethers, but they're actually one of my favorite parts of business. Especially in the early stages of a company where working on the business is very hard, given most of your time is spent working in the business, and offsite forces you to think and reflect more than you probably do on a week-to-week basis. I also find them wildly motivating because they force me to think deeply, which always feels satisfying, but they also allow me to be pushed intellectually by people that I respect in the business. We just had our first quarterly offsite at StoryArb, my executive personal branding business, which has been growing like crazy. So I thought it'd be helpful to share the run of show that we use to run our offsite. And make it specific by sharing examples. Now let's hop into this episode on crushing quarterly offsites. Let me start by saying there isn't one method to running a quarterly offsite well. The only right way is a way that you can commit to and stay consistent with over time, and that allows you to reflect on the past so you can learn and do better as you set clear goals that allow everyone to row in the same direction into the future at your company. For me, this is especially important because I don't consider myself a naturally operationally minded person. So I just need a system that I know works so I can follow a framework without having to think much more about it. The specific method that I love is the quarterly meeting, which is one part of the Entrepreneurial Operating System, or EOS for short. The specific method that I love is the quarterly meeting, which is one part of the Entrepreneurial Operating System, or EOS for short, which I've talked about many times on this podcast. And like any framework, not everything will apply to you. So pick and choose the things that make sense for your business. To illustrate this, what I'll do is I'm going to take you through the EOS quarterly meeting agenda as it is, and then I will let you know where I have remixed it to work better for me and for StoryYard. A few things to keep in mind before we hop into the meeting run of show. First, quarterly meetings are typically a full day offsite for the leadership team of a company or a department's leadership team. Second, while these meetings are for reflection and alignment within your business, they're also an amazing opportunity to strengthen relationships across key members of a company. This is why I think it's awesome to do the quarterly offsite in person if you can, and I highly recommend doing a leadership team event or dinner afterwards. And third, don't be afraid to take breaks, especially with a virtual quarterly meeting like the one that Abby, who's StoryArc CEO, and I did last week. It is impossible to stay focused on a meeting for a full day over Zoom. My general rule of thumb is that you should take a break every hour if it's virtual and every 2 to 3 hours if it's in person. Now for the agenda. Every quarterly meeting starts with a 15-minute segue, or as my co-founder Austin calls it, a segoo, which is a fancy way of saying just shooting the shit. There's no need to create structure because it's literally meant as a warm-up and meant to get leaders relating to one another on a personal level. But if you want some sort of structure so there isn't this awkward silence, the easiest thing to do is to go around the horn and have every person in the meeting share their best personal and professional news from the last 90 days and what's working and not working within the organization. EOS says to also have people share their expectations for the meeting, but I've generally not found this to be a great use of time because people say pretty similar or generic things. That's the first step, the segue. The second step is reviewing last quarter's goals for 30 minutes. To review your last quarter, you need to know a few things that EOS teaches you to track while running your business. You have rocks and you have your scorecard. Rocks are the 3 to 7 most important actions or goals to accomplish over the next 90 days to advance your long-term goals. There are company-level rocks and then there are people or leader-specific rocks. Each rock should have a specific owner and a clear articulation of how it furthers large company goals. And your goal as a company is to hit at least 80% of your rocks or goals in a given quarter. So that's rocks. Basically, they're just your 90-day goals that you assign to the company, and then people can be assigned rocks as well. Then you have scorecard, and your scorecard is a list of 5 to 15 activity-based metrics that are forward-looking. They're reviewed weekly in your weekly leadership or weekly department meetings, and by doing these activities on a weekly basis the right way, they lead to desired outcomes. So as an example, for StoryArb, A few of our company-level rocks include hiring and onboarding a new content strategist, securing 8 new clients, and moving our client management system from Asana to Notion. So those are 3 examples of company rocks that we had last quarter. And then our scorecard includes things like tracking impressions weekly, tracking new leads that our clients are getting weekly, and tracking new MRR or monthly recurring revenue weekly. As you review your rocks and your scorecard, you can discuss why rocks were missed and then have that discussion turn into learnings or to-dos. Or if there are, say, big issues that are created or rocks that you think you still need to focus on and they weren't hit last quarter, you can then turn them into next quarter's rocks. So that is the second step. The third step is to review and revise your long-term plan for 60 minutes. EOS calls your long-term plan as a business VTO, or the Vision Traction Organizer. And the reason you review your long-term plan as a business is that so you know exactly where you're pointed before you start setting your goals or rocks for the next quarter, right? In order to set your 90-day goals, you need to know what your 1-year, 3-year, 5-year, 10-year goals, et cetera. And so for EOS, the VTO or Vision Traction Organizer is comprised of several things. It's comprised of your core values, which at StoryArb includes keep it humble, keep it real, and be a force. It includes core focus, which includes your purpose for being and your specific niche that you're doing business in. For StoryArb, that is sharing expert knowledge with the world, and our niche is being a modern executive's personal media company. Then your VTO also includes your marketing strategy, which includes your list of ideal customers and your 3 uniques. And then finally, you go through your long-term goals, which are in your VTO as well, which are your 10-year target, your 3-year picture, and your 1-year plan. Just to give you an example, the 1-year plan for StoryArb is having a $10 million annual run rate business with 120 clients and average client retention 24 months. For this step of our quarterly meeting, Abby and I spent the most time discussing a potential new core value that places emphasis on building deep trust with our customers. And we thought this was important to think about as the company scales. How do we keep a white glove level service but at scale? And then we also discussed our 3 unique advantages as a company and if we currently have the right ones in place. That's the third step. So the third step is looking at your long-term goals, or as I said, EOS calls it the VTO. And by the way, EOS has all of these resources for free online, so I can include what I've mentioned here, but you can also look up, for example, VTO free template, and you'll see what's in the VTO. Next up, the 4th step establishes next quarter's goals or rocks, and then the 5th step tackles key issues. This is a tweak that I've made to the EOS process because I believe tackling key issues is the best way to inform your next quarter rocks. So my 4th agenda item for the quarterly meeting is tackling key issues, and then I go on to setting next quarter's goals or rocks. This step is the most important part of the meeting, and it takes the longest at 3 hours. And the step I'm referring to is tackling key issues. The way that we approach going through company issues for StoryArb is for the first 20 minutes of this step, Abby and I stayed on video on Zoom. We went on mute and we wrote down what we believe to be the biggest issues at the company. And we did it in this way to make sure we weren't being influenced by each other's opinions. And then after 20 minutes, we came together And we used a system that EOS calls IDS, which stands for Identify, Discuss, and Solve. Basically, it's just a framework for how do you tackle issues. Very simply, you identify all of the key issues at your company. And so that's during the 20 minutes Abby and I each wrote down probably 10 issues each. Then you discuss these issues and you prioritize the top 2 to 3 issues to problem solve. So for example, uh, I think the 2 or 3 top issues that Abby and I talked about were being clear on what our product offerings were, customer retention, and Alex being too involved in the business. And then finally, you solve these issues by assigning to-dos if they're quick fixes or creating rocks or quarterly goals to solve these big issues. So one example of this for StoryArb is, like I just mentioned, me being too involved in the day-to-day of the business. We think that me being too involved in the day-to-day of the business is acting as a bottleneck. It's enabling things that should be handled by someone else in the company, and it's not allowing me to work on kind of my unique abilities. And so To use this as an example, there are a number of action items that we came up with during this step of the meeting that will allow me to get out of the weeds of the business. And one of those action items is a long-term action item because it involves hiring and training someone. And so a rock of mine for the next quarter, for the next 90 days, is hiring and training an editor because this is going to take me out of the weeds of editing and giving feedback to content that we're ending up posting for clients. Next step is establishing next quarter's goals or rocks, and you spend 120 minutes or 2 hours on this process with your leadership team. As I mentioned earlier, rocks can be established at the company level as well as at the individual leader level, but you should always have between 3 to 7 rocks that are some combination of solutions to key issues as well as important subgoals that ladder up to your long-term goals that you discussed during the VTO or Vision Traction Organizer section. The other thing I want to say about rocks is they need to be unfuckupable. It's a great word. Meaning if you pulled someone off the street who wasn't in your leadership meeting and you showed them your rocks, they should be able to clearly state what you're trying to accomplish and by when. A classic way to litmus test a goal or a rock is to ask yourself if it's SMART, which is just an acronym for is it specific? Is it measurable? Is it attainable? Is it relevant? And is it timely? This coming quarter, 2 of my rocks include: 1, closing 18 new clients for StoryArc, and 2, developing and deploying an organic marketing strategy such that 25% of our leads don't come through my social media channels, given 100% of our leads come through my social right now and we want to become less dependent on it. Next up is step 6. Step 6 is a 15-minute period dedicated to next steps. This is where you make a list of to-dos and action items that came out of the meeting that are necessary to get rocks going and to assign to specific people. You're also figuring out who will be communicating the outcomes from this meeting and who you want to be communicating it to at your company. At StoryYard, because the team is small, Abby and I presented all of our key takeaways from each step of this quarterly meeting process to all of the members of our company at the all-hands that came right after our quarterly meeting. And then finally, step 7 is the conclusion. During the 15-minute conclusion, each participant shares one thing that went well, one thing that didn't go well, and one thing they would do differently next quarterly offsite. If this meeting overall is successful, your leadership team will feel closer to one another personally. You'll feel alignment on the long-term vision of the business. You'll have learnings from the last 90 days, and you'll have a game plan for the next 90 days based on discussion around key issues as well as your long-term goals. And then finally, you'll have action items that people have had assigned to them coming out of this meeting. So that is the EOS quarterly meeting that I use for all of my businesses, and I definitely encourage you to try it out if you don't have a go-to framework for planning your business quarterly. That is it for today's Founder's Journal. As always, thank you so much for listening to the pod, and I will catch you next episode. And if you have any questions, you want to say what's up, or you want to recommend a future episode or topic I should talk about, shoot me an email to alex@storyarb.com. That is alex@storyarb.com. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time.