Team Memos That Helped Me Grow 3 Businesses to $200M
This simple habit helped me grow 3 businesses to $200M in revenue.
Here’s how it works:
Every week, I send a team memo that outlines exactly what we need to move the company forward, with or without me.
By reading this memo, my team knows what to work on, what's a priority, and why. It helps them make big decisions without my input.
Here’s how to create a team memo to keep your team aligned and focused on moving the business forward.
Align Your Team Around The Business Model
Everyone in the company should be rowing towards the same goal.
Unfortunately, most companies fail miserably at communicating the right information to their team.
A lot of useless information leads to frustration and wasted time. Too little information causes confusion, leading to poor decisions.
When you communicate with your team you should have one simple goal: to align the team with the business model.
To achieve that alignment, my team memo is broken down into three main sections:
Mission & Values
Where We’re Going
Week Update
I often envision a team member reading the memo while I’m out on vacation, unable to ask me to clarify a key point. I’ll do my best to keep it concise and digestible.
Our path should be achievable, too.
Let’s dive into each section.
Mission & Values
I used to wonder how often you need to talk about your mission and values, until I realized you can't ever stop talking about them. You should be repeating this so often that you’re tired of hearing yourself.
Where We’re Going (and how we’ll get there)
It’s not enough for your team to hear this once a year, or worse, only on the day they were hired. You’re likely on a long, challenging journey ahead.
Inspiring your team should go beyond what you want to achieve, but also what path you will take to get there.
Company KPIs
When I worked for my first startup, I remember the CEO throwing up a slide that had at least 12 KPIs during each all hands meeting. To this day I have no idea what we were trying to achieve. “Growth” was thrown around, but it was hard to know where that growth needed to happen to make the most impact.
Instead we tried everything, and achieved nothing.
You should have two or three company KPIs. I start by outlining the KPI that has the biggest impact on the business (usually a growth metric), with a metric that helps us measure our efficiency second.
For example at Butlr Health, our growth KPI is # of booked therapy sessions, and our efficiency metric is revenue per consumer.
Everyone in the company is aligned around these two metrics, so they can determine which initiatives make sense for the company.
Business Problems To Solve
Teams that tend to make the most progress, are ruthlessly focused on solving one or two business problems at a time.
These are critical problems that will unlock the business to move into another phase.
Company Roadmap
Your team can better understand your vision when they can see how the business will get there.
The company roadmap changes over time, the vision does not.
Engineering/Product Roadmap
Now that we know where we are going, and how we’re going to get there, the engineering roadmap helps us understand what technology we need to build to get there.
Week Update
As you can probably tell by now, the two sections above are what keep our team aligned on what to work on, why, and how to take action on it.
This next section highlights what we learned from the previous week, as well as what we achieved (or didn’t achieve).
We’ll use this section to determine:
Do we need to cut initiatives that are no longer a priority?
Are we using our resources effectively?
Are we working on the right things?
Is the team aligned?
Are we making high-quality decisions?
Here’s a snapshot of what I include in this section. I won't go into detail on these, as this is all pretty straight forward data:
Wins/Didn't Go Well
My Insights From The Week
Business Problems We Solved
Revenue + Customer Acquisition #s
Team Achieved/Working On
Product Shipped/Working On
Our team needs to see the whole company picture, not just the slice of the area they work on. With this weekly team memo I've been able to keep my teams aligned to move the business forward, with or without me.