In the first few years of a biz, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds — you’re just trying to avoid almost certain death.
But once you build a significant-sized team, say ≤10 members, it’s important to gain consistency with reflection. One way to do this is via monthly reports...
At @optemization (13 ppl), we added these in 2022.
We capture highlights from each department. A high-level summary:
💼 3 Projects completed
🏗️ 12 Projects in progress
💛 Moderate risk of burnout
🌮 158 Tacos given
💰 $64,181.77 revenue
🪝 4 deals closed
🕳️ 3 deals lost
Of course, it's created in @NotionHQ, and here's how it looks.
Two of our values are trust and openness, so the company's guts are literally opened up and presented to everyone on the team (and I guess Twitter now 😉).
We aim to share these reports on the first Friday of the month, once @Bench publishes our accounting.
Once ready, we create a Thread (also in Notion), which assigns everyone a task to review the reports and leave comments asynchronously.
The following Tuesday, we review everything and communicate the highlights synchronously.
The combination of the two comms is important.
If you're struggling with reporting, do not feel intimidated by this.
The act of publication, sharing, and reflection with your teammates matters much more than fidelity or presentation.
A benefit is that you're forced to think deeply about your company when reporting.
In our case, nearly all of our content is @NotionHQ, so linked databases make it a breeze to add the numbers and draw conclusions. For example, when adding the Sales numbers I have a database of all paid and upcoming invoices right on the same page:
Of course, we start with a template, which speeds up the process by a 1000%
I will share said template one day along with a detailed guide on how to customize this!
So please let me know, in the replies, if that's something that you'd like to get your hands on.