The cycle is preparation, execution, and review, thirty days each.
What you'll learn in this chapter: How do you avoid starting every peak month from zero? Link preparation, execution, and review into one continuous 90 days, and carry the Three Lines of review forward.
Chapters 2 through 11 looked at each idea and method one by one. This chapter connects them into the flow of time for a single peak month.
Try, review, move on. It's a learning loop that keeps a stretch goal from being a one-off. Before asking whether you reached it, you record what you learned. In digital marketing terms, it's running a campaign in a cycle of preparation, execution, and review. These 90 days are the unit in which Annual Quota Optimization is run once for each peak month.
Scene: A Peak Month That Starts from Zero Every Time
Every time a peak month arrived, one president thought the same thing: "What did we do last year?"
There were no records anywhere. All he remembered was how busy it had been. So each time, he worked out from scratch what to prepare, and while he was still thinking, the peak month arrived.
One time, the week after a peak month ended, he tried leaving a memo of just three lines: Was the preparation ready in time? How far toward the goal did we get? Next time, which photo will we prepare first?
When he opened that memo before the next peak month, the president was a little surprised. What to start with was already written there.
A peak month doesn't end with that month alone. The 30 days of preparation before it, the 30 days of the peak month, and the 30 days of review after it: run these 90 days as one continuous loop.
The results of a peak month are mostly decided in the 30 days before it. And unless you leave the Three Lines in the 30 days after it, the next peak month starts from zero again. Don't separate preparation and review from the peak month. Then, each time a peak month comes, you can start where you left off. The difference should be greatest for top executives who replan from scratch every time.
Ninety days may sound long. But you look at only 30 days at a time. Look calmly at just the 30 days you are in now. It's fine to set the other 60 days quietly aside. By the time those 30 days are over, the next 30 days will naturally be in front of you.
Figure 14. The 90 days for running one peak month
The first 30 days: preparation. These are the four weeks in Chapter 3. The assigned employee puts in place the Sheet in week 1, the Line in week 2, the Closing in week 3, and the Entrance in week 4. The top executive checks just one thing every Friday, and if the previous week is empty, doesn't move on to the next.
The next 30 days: the peak month. Run deliveries and quotes with the Line and the Sheet published in advance. Don't rebuild pages. Once a week, the top executive looks at the four items in the Weekly Memo.
The last 30 days: review. The top executive leaves the Three Lines. If these Three Lines are still empty when the next regular month begins, there will be nothing to open in the first week of that regular month.
The condition for starting the 90 days is that the name of a Sheet has been left in the Folder. The top executive opens the Folder on the Monday they start and checks. If there isn't one, the 90 days don't start, and you continue running regular months as described in Chapter 2.
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