Report: “Company”
Month: April 2018
April
On a high level, what did we accomplish in April?
1) April was our biggest month of sales to-date, with a revenue number of more than $24k.
2) We achieved lock-in with 3 clients for the very first time.
3) We rolled out our new training system, vastly improving the quality agents receive when joining the team, and weeding out bad hires before they officially join the action.
4) We launched our own timetracking and agent payment tracking system, improving the efficiency of our CFO by 85%.
5) Along with the timetracking and agent payment tracking system, the integration of Stripe data into our database has allowed us to track and integrate more data than ever before.
6) We hired 6 more partners, greatly increasing our team’s DNA — all that we’re missing is a marketer.
7) We doubled the size of our engineering team.
8) Our Operations Team gathered for a “lock-in” in Utah, while our Technologies Team prepared to gather for a “hackathon” in Florionopolis.
You can find all partners’ reports here for further details: inv.tech/reports
Narrative
April, oh April,
Another month that felt like a year;
And yet, every day flies by faster than I can blink.
“I am going to write the Company report” I said on May 1st,
And again on May 2nd and 3rd and …
Time goes by too fast in a rocket ship, too fast,
Even though each month is a year, and each day is a month.
Do you hear that?
It is the sound of a busy, growing company.
It is noisy.
It is scattered.
It is shouts across the (Zoom) room.
It is thoughts, different in each one’s mind.
How do you move at the speed of light and not lose your course?
Every decision and action forward must source from a strategy.
In March, we pursued our paths with an aging strategy. We were heads down fighting tactical battles, trusting in the strategy previously set forth.
Now, we cannot forget that our body must move, our legs must stride, our fingers must grasp, our head must duck — our instincts must be tried and kept sharp. But we must also dedicate time to move beyond the present and think into the future. What comes after the swing of this sword? Where do our batallions move after the enemy is in retreat? Where do we corner the enemy to crush them? We must question the future, and then make it our bitch.
Our plans must not only be decided upon, but they must also be implemented and seen through. The battles we fight in our heads must also be fought by our bodies on land. We must do, whilst we think. We must be tacticians, whilst we strategize.
Invisible’s organization is arranged by degrees of strategy-to-tactic ratios. The commander must be the most strategic, the private must be the most tactile.
Strategy informs tactics, and tactics inform strategy.
In March, we lacked tactical coordination. To solve this, I spoke with each team leader every day, going over every little detail of their teams. Confidence in our tactics was reached. Just as the seasons change, we had to turn our focus on improving our strategic coordination.
Instead of having daily calls with the team managers of the company, as I did in March for tactical reasons, I now only have weekly calls with the team managers. Yet, with only one fifth of the meeting time, so much more is accomplished. These calls are solely dedicated to strategizing. We review projects, team members, and the high-level mission on of these calls.
The “Strategize Syncs” are followed by a Friday “Alignment” meeting with all the team managers (see calendar here). This is a time to bridge the strategies of all teams and find improvements that can be made or holes in the plan. The Friday alignment call is also a time to surface misalignments. The Management Team (consisting of the team leaders of each primary team in the company’s Org Chart) manages the rest of the company. The Management Team must have alignment. We are all different people with different brains and different opinions, so there will always be some amount of misalignment. These calls are designed to reduce that misalignment more and more and more as time goes on — forging a stronger bond between the team managers.
Along with calls, we’ve also greatly improved our organization of our data and projects, and have created a Company Dashboard that each team manager references. The Company Dashboard includes roadmaps for our Operations and our Technologies.
In April, not only did we continue our rocket ship growth, but we also strategized in a greater capacity than ever before with more alignment than the company has experienced since the start of our explosive growth.
May
May is filled with many game changers. To name just a few: 1) we have defined a sales machine that is sourcing and reaching out to all contacts in our target SMB demographic, 2) we launched our Assistant Line (talk/text service), 3) we are launching our first security-centered technology, offering a safer password-sharing environment than any other assistant service, and 4) we are starting and nearly finishing the construction of our very own platform for the Digital Assembly Line.
Ultimately, May will be a month of expansion.
Below is the outline of our strategy, literally copy/pasted from our internal documentation.
Revenue
1) Get to $50k in revenue.
2) Create and maintain a stable revenue channel (LinkedIn) while experimenting with others.
3) LinkedIn — defined a sales machine to send emails out to 50,000 prospects to close $50,000 at a $250 CAC per $1000 (not including LTV).
4) Get at least half the revenue from new clients.
5) Achieve lock-in with 3–4 more clients.
Agent Efficiency
1) Set-up efficiency dashboard.
2) Get average agent efficiency (time spent on clients) to 50%.
3) Cut standby and internal times.
Dashboards
Get everyone to manage from dashboards.
1) Overall Company Dashboard,
2) Client Spending Dashboard,
3) and Agent Efficiency Dashboard.
Investment in Technology
1) Invest in technology with DAL 2.0.
2) Some time dedicated to dashboards, security, and agent efficiency.
Tighter Security
1) Launch Stronghold to control password viewing.
2) Implement tighter security controls.
You can find all partners’ reports here for further details: inv.tech/reports
