Paul Cammisa | CEO Perspectives September 2016 | Like the elite sports teams this fall, be sure to prepare and plan

Paul’s Perspectives: September 2016

A monthly series by InnoVergent CEO Paul Cammisa

It’s that time of year when College football is in full swing, the NFL has already completed week 2 of their schedule and the NBA and NHL are starting their training camps. Baseball is preparing for the playoffs.

Needless to say the sports that are in play today have taken many man days since the end of their regular season last year – successful or otherwise, to determine how we can do things better moving forward. There have been hours of game tape, x’s and o’s on white boards and discussions with many of the associate coaches to prepare for the next season.

In your business at the end of your last fiscal year, how did you analyze your performance? What metrics, if any, did you monitor or track not only for the entire year, but as each month progressed? What did you learn from your performance of last year? Did you have a successful year, did you acquire another company, or did you barely get by and make payroll?

Whatever the scenario was, the real question is now, how you are preparing for 2017? It’s just around the corner and you can’t wait until the first week of December to start planning for the year. Planning and strategizing takes time, iterations and hours of review and data analysis. Speaking of data analysis, how you are performing that today. I know some of you are deep into complex Excel models where one or two of you control what goes into those models. Planning is not a 1 or 2 person exercise; it’s a team effort to really exploit the values of your organization.

Great organizations use superior planning tools that allow them to collaborate with team members, conduct quick “what if” scenarios, and allow information from disparate applications to be combined together to really understand how the business is performing.

So like the elite sports teams this fall, be sure to prepare and plan to the highest level you can to achieve the successes you so rightly deserve.