December Pulse - Maximize Your Year-End - Episode #80

The ROI of doing this is insane. You need to leverage this time to recharge. They will follow the lead that you give them. Welcome to Not Another CEO Podcast. I'm your host, David Politis. Every week we talk to inspiring leaders and get the true stories, the ups and downs, the lessons learned, and come away with actionable advice for our own journeys. Foreign David Pletus here. This is our last episode of the year. It's December 18th and there are 13 days left in the year. If you're like most CEOs, you've been grinding for the last 11 months, your team has been grinding with you. You're trying to close deals, hit your goals for the year and just sprint across the finish line. My guess is you're probably exhausted, your team is definitely exhausted and the temptation is to just collapse into the holidays and be done with it. But these last two weeks of the year are a perfect time for you to zoom out. For you, for any, really any leader, any person to zoom out and look at what you've accomplished, celebrate the wins and wind down intentionally so you're actually ready for the year ahead. So right now, before this holiday break, there are three things that I believe that every CEO should be doing. Reflect, rally and recharge. We're going to start with reflect. So look, usually most of us, we do not take enough time to just take a step back and look at what we've achieved and the progress that we've made. If you're like most CEOs, you're head down, you're grinding, you're really like, you just keep moving and you're always, you're never satisfied. You're just, you're, the goal posts are always moving and so you're constantly chasing that next achievement. And so you're really not taking that step back and looking at how much you've achieved. And even if you didn't hit all the goals for the years, like, you're still making progress, sometimes that progress just means understanding what didn't work. So now at the end of the year, it's a real forcing function for reflection, and I really suggest that you use it. Take a few hours and write down what you've accomplished across the year across three different areas. Your business, your team and yourself. So first of all, in the business, start with the quantitative stuff. How far have you come from a pure KPI's perspective? Revenue, customers, money raised, money in the bank, product usage, NPS, whatever those KPIs that matter to your business, look at that first, then look at the qualitative progress that you've made. Did you ship features that people have been waiting for for months or years? Did you change a company's entire like being with your product? Did you, did one of your customers get promoted or because they were using your product, did you land a key account? Is your brand more recognizable? What are the qualitative that you've done with this business? And then reflect on the team. Look at where your team was at the beginning of the year. Not just in terms of the numbers, but the quality of that team. Have you brought on those a players who have taken the business to another level? Have you removed the people who were holding you back and were slowing you down as an organization? Are you living your company values more than you were in previous years? Reflect on yourself. How did you do this year? Did you become a better leader? Are you better at managing your team? Are you better at 1 on ones? Are you better at strategy and decision making? The things that you came into this year we got, did you improve those things? Have you become a thought leader in your space? Did you fill gaps in your support system? And for me, when you do that and you do that reflection and you take that step back, it's always amazing to see how far you've come. It feels a little bit like watching a child grow, right? You don't, as a parent, you're not noticing them get taller every day, but when you look at a picture from a year ago or they see a family member who hasn't seen them in a long period of time, you, you can see that growth very clearly. And it's the same thing with your company. You're with your company every day, you don't see it. But when you take that step back, you do see it. And it is important. For me, I had to force myself to do this. And what I found is that when I started doing this proactively at the end of every year, it gave me perspective of what was actually possible in a year. And it gave me and I think the team confidence to achieve even more in the year to come. So that's reflect. Now, once you've reflected and written this down and contemplated and thought about it, I believe the next step is to rally to communicate all of this with your team, with your investors. They need to hear from you, they need to be energized as they go into the end of the year. And this moment right before the holidays is uniquely powerful. This Christmas to New Year's period is the only week when almost the entire World, literally, I mean, shares a vacation. I can't. There's no other time in the year that the entire world shares a vacation. Everyone is in the same headspace. There's a new year coming. They're with their family, their friends, they're talking about work and life. And if you can give people this rally point, this, this exciting update, this reflection right as they're going into that, it is really powerful. Think about yourself. Like you want to tell your family, your friends, the people you're spending the holidays with, that things are going well. You want to share with them how work is going, how, how well the company is doing. Everyone who's on the team wants to do the same. Investors want to brag to their friends that their companies are doing well, all of that. Like it's really powerful to give people that. So to do that, I strongly suggest writing a year end message to your team and getting it to them before the holidays, let's say by December 23rd. And this could take you hours. When I was doing this at Better Cloud, it would sometimes take me days to write this message and rewrite the message and read it and reread it. And it's a write up of reflecting on the entire year. Remind people where the company was on January 1, 2025. It's easy to forget again when you're in it every day. It's easy to forget where we were at the beginning of the year. We didn't have this feature. Our team was this big. Our customer base looked like this. Our product looked like this. Then fast forward 12 months and show them what's changed. Show them the trend lines, graphs, screenshots of the product before and after. Photos of the team at an off site or events with customers. Show them what's different with the company before and after and tie it back to their work. Because that's who made this happen. Even in a small company, it is not you who's driving all this. This is the team. And make it a high energy, exciting message. It should not just be the reflection and, and the hardcore data and all that. It should really be driving excitement for what's coming next, going into next year being stronger, better with this massive opportunity ahead. I would put this wherever you can, wherever you communicate. Email, Slack Notion. I've had some CEOs who record a video to go along with the message. You do you, whatever makes sense for you. And for me, I would actually take these every year and I would save them in my own private Google Doc. And after 10 years it's amazing to go back and read year one, year two, you start to understand what is possible at a company and, and I'm so happy that I saved those down. And ultimately you want to make sure you're not just sending this with your to, to your, to your company. You want to make sure that you're sending this to your investors too. Make sure that you're get. Maybe you give them a little bit of context when you send the message, hey, I'm forwarding the message I sent to the team. I just want you to see how I'm communicating with the team. And it's a really, it's been an exciting year. Thank you for your support. And those investors are going to love that because most CEOs are not sending them those messages. And they again, they are just as in this as you are. They want this company to be successful. They want to tell their partners that they made a good investment. They want to feel like they, they're in this with you. And so sharing that with your investors is really powerful. And then the last part of rallying, and this is equally if not more important than the other part, which is reach out directly to top performers. Don't skip a lot of CEOs. You may think about it, but, but it's busy and it's the end of the year and you skip this. The ROI of doing this is insane. Send messages, personal messages, right? Emails, text messages, slack messages to the people who have really moved the needle this year for the business. Not, I'm not saying just your direct reports. Anyone at the company who really made a difference, call the top sales rep and tell them thank you for closing those two big deals that, that made the year for us. Call the engineer who worked all weekend, five weekends in a row to ship that new AI feature that put you on the map in your space. Reach out to the person who's no. 1, thanks. But is the that high performer who's doing collections for you at the company and just keeping the machine running and they're in the background. If you reach out to those people, if you email those people, if you personalize those messages, those things are going to stick with those people forever. People want to be acknowledged. These messages matter so much more than you think. They will tell their friends, they'll forward them, they'll remember it for years. And the next time there's a big challenge that they're facing, the company is facing, they will go the extra mile because they know that you see them. They know that you acknowledge and recognize their Contribution. And then the last is recharge. One of the most important things at this time of the year, when the world slows down and email volume drops to the lowest that it, it ever is. I look at this every year. The email volume is the lowest. The, the, the most people are on pto, your customers, for the most part, depending on what industry aren't asking you for help. Fewer demands, fewer expectations, fewer fires put out. In this time, you need to leverage this time to recharge. We all run hard every day, like right almost at red, at burnout, but recharging is so important. And this is the most efficient time to recharge because you're not going to be interrupted. You don't have that fear in the back of your head. It's Christmas Day and someone's going to be emailing me about, you know, this deal that they're working on. And it, whatever recharges you is the thing you need to do. Whatever that is. For me, it's sitting on the couch, watching just shitty TV shows and drifting in and out of sleep. Some people I know, it's. It's hiking, you know, it's, it's traveling. It's just hanging out with family. It's. It's doing nothing. It's laying in bed. Whatever it is, whatever truly recharges you. Prioritize that in that period between Christmas and New Year's, and look at the end, your company works off of your rhythm. If you don't recharge and you show up on January 2nd and you're not energized and you're still feeling sluggish and need to rest and everything, your company will follow that. They will follow the lead that you give them. And that's obviously not what we want, to hit the ground running. So for me, when you show up, if you've recharged two, three days, you can recharge more than you think. And you show up, you're ready to work, ready to go. Make clear to your team that you're done recharging. Make it clear that it's time to, to, to hit the ground running. That makes a massive, massive difference. So, look, none of this was that complicated, fancy kind of thing other than it's, it's pretty simple. Reflect, rally, recharge. If you're listening to this, on December 18, you have 13 days left in the year. Use them intentionally. Reflect on how far you've come. Rally your team, your investors, your top performers, and recharge during the only week when the entire world is doing the same thing with that. I hope you have a great holiday season, a great new year, and we are going to come back early January. We're going to hit the ground running. We're going to help support you in any way that we can. We appreciate your support. This past year, things have really taken off in a way we could never have imagined. So thank you very much. Happy holidays. See you soon. That's a wrap for this week's episode of Not Another CEO Podcast. Thanks for joining. For show notes and more, please Visit not another CEOPodcast.com we'll see you next week. It.