Bill Canady outlines three Day 1 actions for launching a course: tailor change management to your organization's size, collect profit-and-loss statements and employee cost data to calculate growth metrics, and run a stop-start-continue exercise to surface quick wins. Different teams handle each stream, and coordinated effort builds momentum through the first 100 days.
Hello everyone, it's Bill here. I thought I would walk us through how to start off the course, right? And, uh, this is really important, uh, uh, for everyone who's coming into the course. You'll find that while the overall process is the same, what you want to emphasize will be different based upon your need. But these 3 things you need to start right out of the gate, right? So the first one is the beginning of the course. There is a lot of documentation around change management. What the CEO does, what the CFO does, the meetings that you have, how you get the cadence, the top 4 meetings. I mean, it goes on and on. There's a tremendous amount of data with that. Depending on where you are in your journey will depend on how much of that you want to go through. If you're in a smaller organization and you and maybe a core team is doing all this, you may not need all that. It's interesting to watch, but it may not apply. If you have a global organization and you've got to get a lot of people bought into it, This could be really important for you. So it's critical around change management that you pick what's right for your organization. The first section that we start out with, with the introduction, everything really goes deeply in that, and you can assess all of that. Again, pick what's right for you. You can watch it at 1.2 or 1.5, or if you can take it, 2.0, and you can hear myself and others give you insight about how, about how to run it across a bigger organization, right? Then the second piece is data. Without fail, from day one, you're going to want to start pulling your data together. You're absolutely going to get that because we have to get into a form that's usable for us. It's typically just a flat file like an Excel that you're going to upload, but you want to get that in, get it submitted so the team can start working on that right from day one. A lot of people, sometimes they have it immediately, sometimes it takes them a week or two. Sometimes people really struggle with it. It'll just depend on your systems and what's available. We're going to need 3 types of data. We're going to need your P&L data, right? We're going to need— so your profit and loss, we'll need all of that. Your transactional data down to this product SKU level if possible. And finally, your employee data. In other words, what it costs you to have employees, how many employees you have, and that sort of thing. We don't need proprietary information in that, so we don't need to know that this person is doing this or that. It's really about the metrics behind it because we're going to look at the right-to-grow ratio, which is taking your fully burdened employee costs and dividing that by your material margin. It'll help us understand what, what value you get out of it. So it's important to have these 3 levels of data with it. And this page here, which is available to you, will tell you some of the pieces that you'll want to go through with it, right? Then the 3rd piece is what we call stop, start, continue. It's really like, what do you got to focus on right this second? So What I always say is you need some wins coming out of the gate. And there's obvious things happening in your organization that you need, you know, that you need to quit doing, start doing more of, or continue doing the way they have. As an example, you've got a customer you're losing money on right now. You may have to take pricing action. You've got products that you're having a terrible time with, you can't figure out. You may need to stop those things. Do the obvious, uh, situation. If it's not obvious, then don't do it. What I like to say, if your house is on fire, or, you know, put it out. If you have a boat and it's sinking, fix the hole in the boat, right? So do the obvious things. I know that that data that you— that we just talked about just before that, it will help us make a lot of decisions, but you're running this business every day. You know what's happening. Get some early wins. The stop, start, and continue is exciting. People go, oh my God, I've always wanted to do that. Now I've got permission to do it. So this is a big one here. So data and start, stop, and continue, you need to go, you go right away. Change management, make it appropriate for your company, right? So if you're a sole proprietor, you know, it'll be fun for you to read and you'll get some energy and excitement out of it. If you've got 10,000 employees across 50 companies, Change management is going to be a big deal for you in the way that you go through it, right? So on the stop and start and continue, it's just do it. Get everybody in a room. If you know you got a pricing problem, kick off the pricing problem. As you get data, it'll help you align around where you're going. Now, let me just say, by starting all 3 of these, it's going to feel like chaos. People are going to go, what are you doing? It's too much. I've done this so many times now. It is actually different groups doing each one of these. Typically, it's my leadership team that we're doing change management with. My finance, pricing, accounting team is pulling the data. And then my start, start up, and continue is kind of everybody. You know, they'll— we'll look at these ideas and bubble them up and then just tell the group, go do that, right? Where it makes sense. Make sure that you're in agreement on— don't, don't, don't stretch on it. If it's not obvious, maybe you got to wait till you get some more data with it, right? So, so these are the just go do it ones. This gives you momentum. Data is going to tell you where the opportunities are, and change management is going to get people buying in. So I hope this helps you as you go through here. But again, day 1, start these 3 things. Make sure that, that, that you get them aligned. People are going to think you're crazy because you try to do them all, but you're not. If you are, you're crazy like a fox. It allows you to get the pieces you need, and then you bring it back together. As you get through the 100 days. I hope this helps, uh, with it. If you have any questions, please reach out.
