Quick! Show Me Your Value

Let ‚ s Review:

• To manage the urgent and important of today, Senior, Mid, and 1st/Ops managers learn to ignore anything that is not immediately relevant to their priorities. Step 9 of the financial value plan helps you ensure that your value communication is timely and relevant.

• In addition to managing the core of the business, your audience must also constantly be working on new initiatives to keep the business profitable and competitive. Because of tax and reporting laws, your audience will be driven into a quarterly behavior pattern to accomplish these initiatives.

• There are three primary organizational lifecycles that operate within the quarterly nature of a business. These lifecycles enable you to plan your relevance in advance. The three lifecycles are the fiscal lifecycle, the new product introduction lifecycle, and the seasonal lifecycle.

• The fiscal cycle consists of the first quarter or implementation quarter, the second quarter or validation quarter, the third quarter or vision-setting quarter, and the fourth quarter or budgeting quarter. Especially in publicly traded companies, your audiences report the status of their activities within each of these quarters up through the management chain.

• You need to be a part of the quarterly status information flow. It is easier to communicate your value when you get others to do it for you.

• New product introductions and seasonal sales fluctuations can create great stress and cash flow strains within an organization. They also create predictable activities that become urgent and important within specific quarters of a year.

The last thing that you will need to communicate your value is what you are going to say. Even with all of your preparation, your audiences still have very little time. How can you summarize your value each quarter in 30 seconds or less and in a way that your audiences can communicate their value (and by default yours) as well? Read on.