A tool that helps your team make smarter decisions and avoid sunk costs.
Maintaining an open dialogue with your employees is key to running a winning agency.
Your people should feel comfortable coming to you with ideas and initiatives.
The only problem?
Some of those ideas are going to be terrible!
Perhaps they won’t have the intended impact, or would be too expensive, or would take too much effort.
But, dismissing suggestions out of hand will just demotivate your team and stifle creativity.
That’s why in these situations, I love to use a tool called:
The Effort / Impact Map.
This is a great exercise that will teach your employees how the business works, while also cultivating smarter decision-making.
The Effort / Impact map
The four quadrants of this matrix are:
- High impact, low effort (top right)
These are “easy wins” — whatever offers the greatest ROI, for the least effort.
Anything in this quadrant should be a top priority.
- High impact, high effort (top left)
These are long-term, high-reward, high-risk projects.
All items here will require significant investment, but potentially have a big payoff at the end.
- Low impact, low effort (bottom right)
These are simple to knock out, but won’t move the needle much in the business as a whole.
Some tasks might be necessary to support higher-impact projects.
But don’t spend more time here than you have to.
- Low impact, high effort (bottom left)
These are the “time-wasters.”
Avoid whenever possible.
Have your employees sort their idea(s) into this matrix.
And, here’s the key step:
Have them try to come up with dollar amounts for both the Effort (expenses) and the Impact (ROI)!
This is extremely hard for most people.
But stick to your guns here — really force them to think through it and come up with both numbers.
In the end, they’ll either talk themselves into their idea, or out of it, all on their own.
This exercise will train your employees to think like an owner of the company, and to intelligently use resources, without just throwing more money and manpower at every problem.
It’s also a fantastic tool to help you get clarity about what to focus on, and prevent sunk costs into unproductive projects.
Most importantly:
Choosing to educate your team on the “big picture” of how the business works can be an incredibly profitable strategy.
Because when your employees understand what’s actually going on behind the curtain, they’ll trust your leadership and make more productive decisions across the board.
And that’s what Open Book Management is all about!
At Open Book CFO, we make implementing OBM straightforward and effective by:
- Helping you identify your most important KPIs + creating scoreboards that make them clear and actionable
- Showing you how to share financial data in a way that motivates and empowers your team
- Implementing incentive programs that encourage employees to take ownership of their goals
Interested in learning more?
Book a free 30-minute strategy call here.
The Winning Agency will be back with more team-building tips and strategies on Thursday — stay tuned!
— Nick Kringas
Founder of Open Book CFO
