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Here’s what we will cover today:

• How top companies prioritize milestones to scale fast

• Get investor-approved strategies at your fingertips

• Latest insights on AI and Super Bowl advertising

Quote of the Day

"If we win the hearts and minds of employees, we’re going to have better business success."
~ Mary Barra

Today’s Tip

One of the absolute keys to a successful business plan is to create the right business plan milestones. Doing so is essential to securing investors and making real progress toward achieving your goals.

Let me explain.

Your business is currently at point A. Where you want to go is to point B. Now getting from point A to point B requires you to complete milestones.

And the most important milestones are what I call “risk mitigating milestones” or RMMs. These are the milestones that help eliminate the risk of your company failing.

Let me give you some examples. For Google in its early days, risk milestones included completing its initial result ranking algorithms, getting customers to start using its search engine, and generating revenues.

Once Google was generating a lot of revenue, it was not a very risky investment. But before customers started using Google.com, it was very risky. And before its initial algorithms were developed, it was even riskier.

Every business has risk-mitigating milestones. Investors prefer to back businesses where more risk milestones have been removed. I know I do.

Would you prefer to back a restaurateur who just has a vision for a new restaurant; or would you rather back that same restaurateur after the ideal location has been determined, the restaurant has been built, the staff has been hired and trained, the local newspapers have given it a great review, and the restaurant now has 250 loyal patrons and is booming every night?

It is your job as an entrepreneur to identify your risk-mitigating milestones. And not only do you have to identify them, but you need to prioritize them. So that every day you are spending quality time working to accomplish them (and not spending time doing things like replying to emails that seem to be adding value; but which don’t put you closer to accomplishing your risk milestones).

But you can’t work on completing your risk-mitigating milestones each day until you break up each of these milestones into much smaller projects. For example, Google creating its initial algorithm and a restaurateur finding an ideal location are great milestones, but way too large to accomplish daily.

Each milestone needs to be broken down into numerous chunks; chunks that can be completed every day, and progress made. It’s like writing a book. If you write one page every day, by the end of the year, you’ll have a 365-page book.

Developing RMMs is an essential component of your business plan, and belongs in your Operations Plan section. Investors need to understand these milestones and your projected timeline for accomplishing them. You need to understand them to prioritize your time and hire the right people at the right time.

Today’s Resource

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Trivia

Today’s Question: Mehndi is a form of body art and temporary skin decoration that originated in ancient India and is still popular today in many countries on the Indian subcontinent. The practice uses a paste made from the leaves of what plant?

Previous Question: This common manufacturing philosophy is the combination of a number and a Greek letter. Together, they refer to a set of techniques and tools for process improvement. Jack Welch made it central to his business strategy at General Electric in 1995. What is the two-word name of this technique?

Previous Answer: Six Sigma

"Six Sigma" comes from the bell curve used in statistics, where one Sigma symbolizes a single standard deviation from the mean. If the process has six Sigmas, three above and three below the mean, the defect rate is classified as "extremely low."

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