The Internal Memo is the company's record book of decisions (a decision log), in which the top executive's decisions are written down. It serves as the single basis for all decisions. The fields to fill in are summarized in Chapter 14.
What you'll learn in this chapter: How do you keep going when the assigned employee changes? Fill in seven fields in a set order, and leave any field you don't know as a Blank.
This is the last chapter of the book. Here, everything decided in the previous chapters is gathered into the Internal Memo and handed over to the next peak month and the next assigned employee.
Keep what you learned from stretch goals in records, not in people. This chapter is about being able to set the next goal where the last one left off. In digital marketing terms, it corresponds to knowledge management: recording decisions and handing them over.
Scene: The Year After the Assigned Employee Left
At one company, the employee who had long been entrusted with the website and peak-month preparation left the company.
Before the next year's peak month, the successor was at a loss. Which photos had been used last year? Which sentences had been revised, and why? How had the order-acceptance conditions been decided? None of it was written down anywhere. It had all existed only in the predecessor's head.
The successor had to rethink, from scratch, the very same things as the year before.
If last year's decisions had been kept in the Internal Memo, how different would the successor's first week have been?
Keep peak-month decisions in the Internal Memo, not in the top executive's head.
If decisions exist only in people's memories, then when the assigned employee changes, the decisions disappear along with the history behind them. If they're gathered in the Internal Memo, the next person to take over can start from the same place. Your future self, next year, may in fact be one of the "next people to take over." One more important thing: don't fill empty fields from memory. A number filled in from memory becomes the foundation for the next decision without anyone knowing where it came from.
Seven Things the Top Executive Writes (in a Fixed Order)
1. The name of the next peak month, and how many times a regular month it is (Chapter 2)
2. The actual number of orders in the same peak month last year (Chapter 2)
3. The preparation start date (30 days, 6 weeks, or 8 weeks ahead) (Chapter 2)
4. Who is responsible for this month's Sheet (Chapters 2 and 3)
5. How the opened hour will be used (Chapter 5)
6. The checkers for the four items in the Weekly Memo (Chapter 5)
7. Who may make corrections during the peak month, and which line may be corrected (the exception to the Chapter 2 Rule)
This order is fixed. Leave any field you don't know empty. Don't fill anything in from memory.
Check the multiplier against last year's number of orders. If a peak month you wrote down as 2x had the same number of orders as a regular month last year, don't use that multiplier. Leave that field empty, and leave a Sheet for that month as a regular month.
You've made it this far.
Think back for a moment to Chapter 1, when you read the Line on your homepage aloud. Back then, nothing had been decided yet.
Now there are fields to fill in. The order is set, too. All that's left is to go from the top, one at a time, filling in only what you can.
Material Left from Each Chapter
Copy what you left in each chapter onto the same page.
• The Line on the homepage (Chapters 1 and 6)
• The names of late documents (Chapter 4, for peak months fixed by the calendar)
• Three scenes in which you were thanked, and the before and after versions of abstract claims (Chapter 7)
• Sentences kept and sentences set aside from AI drafts (Chapter 8)
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