We have started implementing OKRs to help us focus on things that add up to our long-term goals. It’s hard to keep your eyes at the end of the year when you constantly need to run daily operations. OKRs helped us define the milestones and revisit key activities every week.
Today each functional team at Neoteric has their own OKRs constantly improving the focus and delivering better results.
We have started to plan our cash flow 3 months ahead and when we realized how important financial management was, we hired a CFO advisor. I neither have skills nor heart for finance. Having people doing what they are best at is what I found to be the key.
I have also stopped to relying on “market standards” when projecting sales. Back in 2015 I have decided we need to pivot from building software for polish SMEs to building software products and deploying highly skilled teams for foreign customers. As great as this decision was I did it all wrong.
I set targets I calculated by (this-is-what-I-need X these-conversions-are-doable). Because I never make the same wrong decision twice but 5 or 6 times just to make sure I invested over $30k in building a sales and marketing agency. With no experience, skills or time for it. HINT: don’t do that. I’ve dropped our key activities instead of delegating. Again.
Today we update our sales projections weekly both for the current quarter (based on closed deals) and for the next quarter (based on customer’s declarations for contract extensions and deals that are in the pipeline). Extending our cooperation with the key partner, having content marketing generating valuable leads and focusing on delivering great to our customers we ended up 25% above the goal we found very ambitious.