We failed with OKRs for years, then, we sold for 8-figures...

Foreign. Welcome back ladies and gentlemen. Today we're going to be talking about OKRs or objectives and key results and CFRs. I had never been exposed to OKRs until we went to Techstars and it was extremely challenging. It took us probably two or three years to actually get these implemented to where they added an insane amount of value to our company. If you're building a business, you are absolutely going to need some sort of strategic framework of how you manage all the tasks that you're trying to accomplish. Traction's another one. There's eos. EOS implementers that you can go and hire. They use big rocks, small rocks and sand. It depends on how you want to fill your glass and what format you need to tap tackle those. But OKRs were what worked the best for us. So I'm going to dive right into this. There's a ton of resources around this as well. So if you go into the comments below this, not only is there the presentation, there's the estated data nerds slash my personal OKR bible, there's the Measure what Matters book and some highlights from it. And then there's also a TED Talk from John Dewar, who is the founder of this, who originally implemented it within Google. And it's one of the reasons that Google has become what Google is today, arguably one of the greatest business businesses ever built. So let's dive right in. What are OKRs? Objectives and key results are a management methodology that help ensure that a company focuses effort on the same important issues throughout the entire organization. Straightforward. There's an objective, you know, what are we trying to achieve here? No more, no less. And a key result. It's a benchmark that you monitor of how we get to the objective. Key results are specific, they're time bound, they're aggressive, they're realistic, they're smart, and they're verifiable. You could also use the framework of smart goals for that if you're interested. So some famous quotes on it. It's not a key result unless it has a number. Marissa Mayer Hard goals drive performance more effectively than easy goals. Second, specific hard goals produce a higher level of output than vaguely worded ones. Being specific and simple on this is absolutely key and I'm telling you the first few that you do. Like I said, it took us two or three years to really get this running in our company. But once we got it going there was no stopping it. And it gave me so much freedom when we had to go from an in office company to a remote company because I Could communicate with my employees through our OKRs and make sure that they were achieving and doing exactly what I needed them to do. So it always starts from the top down with okrs. Your leadership or yourself are going to create these at first. A really good example that's used in the book is the football team. The objective of the general manager is to make money for the owners. Key results. Win a Super bowl, fill the stands to 88%. Then the head coach has objectives and key results. The public relations have objectives and key results. You can see win a Super bowl, fill the stands. There are key results. And then offense, defense, special teams, new staff, scout. Each of them have objectives and key results. So everyone in the company can have their own key results. You can do it department. You can do it by person. Depends on the size of your team. I personally like doing it by person so that they could own it. Whereas I saw with the department you can kind of hand it off to someone and it might not actually get done. So there's superpowers with OKRs as well. Focus and commit to priorities. Align and connect for teamwork. Track for accountability. Stretch for amazing. We love stretch goals. You never want to get 100% on your okrs either. You really kind of want to be in that 70 to 80% range. Because if you're achieving 100% of your okr every single time, that means it's not big enough and you're not pushing yourself. So remember that. Why do we use them? Well, I believe we succeed and fail because of okrs. This is the strategic plan we talked about in Blue sky. Planning how we implemented these. If I can give everyone a really clear direction, I can also track all the experiments and objectives that we've run. If we failed what we learned through it, and we can continuously improve. Kaizen this is the freaking bible. Anytime someone came and worked at one of my companies, I made sure that they read this book. Just because it fit in with the culture. It's how the company ran. How do we use them? We review and present them on the first Friday of every single month. You can pick the day. We did the monthly. Monthly was a good cadence for us. As we grew our team to about 30 people. We started to move to quarterly and depending on the size of the projects that we were working on and the objectives that were involved, we could push it out to be 90 days. But honestly, I really like the monthly cadence. It helped me keep a good pulse on everyone to see what they are doing. We also had annual OKRs. Now depending on the size of your company. I wouldn't say you need to have annual OKRs, because when you're in a startup mode, things are constantly changing. And that's why I really like the monthly timeframe. Because even quarterly in a startup environment, things are changing way too freaking fast. So do what works for you at the end of the day. This is honestly meant to be customized to your business and I would love to help you with it. If you have any questions about this, please, please reach out to me. Now. The templates, these are really, really simple. The objective, you would write the objective in that box, who owns it, what the result is. It's as straightforward as that. Now I took this template as well from Techstars. These were weekly OKRs, which I thought was too fast paced. It created a level of management and an amount of touch points with too many people within my company. But here you can see main objective, expected key result, actual result, and the gap. What did you miss it by? What are your reactions and learnings from it? I really think one of the things you saw in the Blue sky document, we would put why are we doing these OKRs? I would highly recommend that because then it explains to the person who's the owner of the project the objective, why are we actually doing this? And then advice, if can you help them with it? Who can? Who? What other touch points might they need? Who can they reach out to if they need help with something? This week's objective, key results. Why unknown risks, obstacles? I never really added in the unknown risk and obstacles because if they didn't achieve the result, we were going to reflect on it and figure it out anyways. So this is another framework you guys can use. We gave you this in a template, grading and scores. The quote from Marissa Meyer, if it doesn't have a measurable result, it needs to be time bound and specific and it should be achieving a number. Now I noticed in marketing and sales it was extremely easy to be like, hit your quota of 100k for this week for marketing, get us 500 new leads this week, get us 2000 new leads this month, hit your quota of 400,000 for this month. Very specific, very straightforward, easy to measure. Now in engineering, for example, we were like, collect the property data from county A and county B and if we didn't know how many properties were going to be returned from that county because we didn't have enough information at that point, it was really hard to get time specific. So there's, there are departments where you're just going to have to work through this. And it might not be as specific as you'd like to be, but like I said, after a couple years of doing this on a monthly basis, you'll have done it 24 times. You're going to know exactly what needs to happen. So customize it to your business, but make sure that you're grading it at least on a monthly basis. Now the learnings. This entire everyday entrepreneur course is coming from my learnings that I had from OKRs. Over the last 10 years of building businesses, I would always do annual reflections. Even before we had OKRs, it was like, what were we trying to achieve this year? I didn't have it in an OKR framework, but I had a pretty good idea of what we were trying to achieve every single year. And then I would reflect on it at the end of the year of how far we got. Then I started doing it quarterly. Personally, my cadence that I really liked was monthly. I felt like I could keep my investors updated. I felt like I could keep my team updated. I felt more on top of things. And I was just tracking it on a monthly basis and. And on the next video, I'm going to show you guys one of our scorecards that you can just go through. There's no presentation for it. It's only going to be a couple minutes. But really, the scorecard was a weekly updated document that had all the KPIs key performance indicators that I was tracking in the business that if, if it turned into the red or it wasn't at a number that I wanted to see, I could dive into that, go to the owner of that objective, dive right in. Why isn't this number the way that it should be? This was our target. We missed it by this. We overshot it by this. Did we plan wrong? We. What's going on? And I always would try and reflect and then keep a document of all my learnings that happened with the OKRs. Stretch key results. Like I said, you really don't want to hit 100% all the time. If you notice that your marketing department's getting 100% every single month, you're probably going to want to change some things. So stretch key results. You can literally add these into the key results are say, your targets to get 2,000 leads this month, let's say that the best month ever, or, you know, you have some seasonality because one of our products has incredible sales pretty much from February 1st until the end of April. And I always know it's like our goal is to get 2,500 sales this month. But if we can push it up to 3,500, that's going to be our stretch goal. And if we only get to 3,000, we're still 500 sales ahead. So you can also include stretch key results in here as well. And especially if that department's hitting 100% a bunch of the time, you keep making them bigger. Make them specific, but make them bigger. Go for your goals. You guys are trying to win right now. You're entrepreneurs. You need to win. That's how your business will continue to grow. CFRs, conversations, feedback and recognition. One of the things that we did at Data Nerds back back in the day was every Single Friday at 4:00pm, I would pretty much make everyone shut their computers off and we had a little box that people would put post its in about gratitude that they had for the week. We would recognize each, we would have conversations and we would give each other feedback. And that hour was you could grab a beer, grab some snacks, we'd order pizza, we'd all hang out and we would talk about how the week went. And we would not only just give each other gratitude, hand each other flowers, but we were really diving into like, what the hell is going on? This is very much for the manager of whoever has the objective. They should be checking in at least every two weeks and having a CFR with them. It's really easy. Have a conversation, ask them for feedback, give them feedback, and then recognize a win. I used to call it the shit sandwich. Good news, give them the shit, good news, keep them happy. All they're going to hear is the shit. So you have to look at it that way. You want to give them good feedback about things that they're doing well and then kind of slide in the part that you're like, okay, this is a little dodgy. It's going to be a harder conversation that we're going to have to talk about. So that's a cfr. Again, it's pretty laid out because my designer is trying to make these look nice for all of you cfrs. They help us enhance communication within the company. It allows us to be transparent with each other and allows us just to keep a good pulse on what the hell is going on. Right? All right, that's it for okrs. Like I said, dive into the links below. We created a ton of content around this so that you guys could really figure it out for yourselves. And if you have any questions, please reach out to me. Here's all the places you can reach me. Thanks for tuning in.