High stakes negotiations, collective intelligence, the job of a CFO & quarterly goals failure advice

20th March 2022 Evolution Partners Newsletter

“I am sorry to imprison you in this long meeting, as I did not have time to prepare a short one.” – Jim Collins

Hope you’re Thriving!

It’s been a productive week with a great workshop, many meetings, and an excellent learning event from Dr Victoria Medvec.

High Stakes Negotiations

The good doctor (or should I call her Victoria?) presented information from her book Negotiate Without Fear: Strategies and Tools to Maximize Your Outcomes.

I’ve seen her present before, and I love her concept of BATNA and MESO, and she went a little deeper this time, as she does in the book.
In essence, the key to successful negotiations is planning. If you’re going to a negotiation, you must be prepared.

Here are a few of my key takeaways:

• Be the first person to make an offer, don’t wait for the other side to go first. If you’re entering negotiations prepared and understand their needs and alternatives, it gives you a massive advantage by framing the discussion, establishing the right issues and anchoring value.
• Make it more than only about price. Often customers want to discuss one thing, price. You must frame the negotiation around multiple issues, not only price.
• Say it. Don’t send it (via email). Only present proposals in person, and see them when you say it (video is OK).
• Understand how you are different from the competitors – your differentiators. Use differentiators to make the negotiation about more than only price.
• You want five to nine storytelling issues – things that stem from your differentiators.

Even though I’d seen her before, it was a sound reinforcement on negotiation from an expert. So if you undertake any negotiation, I’d encourage you to check our her book.

Collective intelligence

In the past week, I’ve come across a few leadership teams who aren’t discussing or solving big issues throughout the quarter. Team members are having problems build-up, and they aren’t ‘clearing the decks’ of issues as they arise. This means that we have many problems to work through when we get to the quarterly offsite meeting.

That’s where collective intelligence comes through. It’s one of the least well-understood aspects of the meeting rhythm, yet it forms 50% of each weekly meeting in recommended time allocation.
If you find that you’re not resolving issues through the quarter, I will encourage you to listen to the podcast episode on collective intelligence.

The synopsis is below:

“The collective intelligence agenda item inside the weekly meeting is one of the most valuable parts of the weekly meeting. This is where decision-makers learn all the data and facts, debate the merits of ideas and most importantly, make decisions to help the business pulse faster. But there are seven important aspects to making collective intelligence work well in your company.
We discuss these and detail how you can make weekly meetings more effective using the power of collective intelligence.”

Listen to the full podcast here: Collective intelligence, the key to a successful weekly meeting ‎

The Job of a CFO at a Scaling Company

One of the questions I encounter so often is about the CFO role. We can get by in the beginning with a bookkeeper or accountant, and perhaps an external accountant, but at some point, we need to get deeper financial insights. We need to get the right data to the right leaders at the right time to enable them to predict, delegate, and succeed in their role.

This week I came across a 30-minute video (thanks to Michael M for this), which is a Y Combinator panel discussion with Sarah Friar (CFO of Square) & Jason Child (CFO of Opendoor) talking about the job of a CFO at a scaling company.

Topics discussed:

• When should you hire a CFO?
• How should a CEO and CFO work together?
• When’s the right time to IPO?

Here are a few highlights for me from the panel discussion.

• The CFO should be one of the tightest and most trusted relationships of the CEO.
• The CFO should be quite different to the CFO, perhaps like a yin/yang.
• The job of the CFO is to look around corners and think about all the things that could go wrong.

And here’s my favourite question… “how do you get really accurate forecasting?”

Watch the video here: The Job of a CFO at a Scaling Company

This week on The Growth Whisperers podcast

What to do when you are failing to achieve your quarterly goals

Sometimes, it’s mid-way through the quarter and you realise you are failing at your quarterly goals. As you look across at the goals the team set out to achieve, you get this horrible feeling in your gut that you aren’t going to achieve many of your goals. And this sense of dread won’t disappear if you ignore it!

In this episode, we provide 7 important things to do if you find yourself in this situation, to ensure you can reset and make the most of the quarter, with renewed confidence!

What to do when you are failing to achieve your quarterly goals

Episode 101 – The Growth Whisperers

Listen to The Growth Whisperers
Apple podcasts
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Or watch it on YouTube

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Keep Thriving!
Brad Giles