When it comes to money, I’m a planner. Every month I put together a “Krieglbert Equity Chart” and share it with ACbert. Finances are easy when everything is mapped out, but life is more complicated than a spreadsheet.

For the past two days our cat, Layla, has been throwing up and refusing food and water. All signs of trouble. The cost of an emergency vet visit started at $600 with xrays. Last time our other cat was sick, it ended up being a Urinary Track Blockage that cost around $1800 to fix. The short is you just never know.

While it’s a great habit to financially plan, it’s unhealthy to obsess over a plan because life is guaranteed to throw a curve ball. Mentally, and emotionally, fixating on unexpected expenses in which there is nothing I can do will probably cause me more in personal medical bills down the road than if I just let the feeling pass like clouds in the sky.

In my business financial planning I use an 8% monthly cash buffer to anticipate the unexpected. It not only helps me better guessimate my cash flow, but now I realize it also helps me better manage my emotions when the unexpected comes up.

I need to add a monthly cash buffer to my personal life budgeting as well, so next time I’m sitting at a vet’s office at 3am, like I am now, with an unexpected bill in hand, I’ll know it’s ok because I accounted for it.

4:35am Follow Up: Vet suggested an ultra sound and additional support costing around $1500, just to figure out what is wrong. And if something is wrong, expect the bill to top $4000. Ugh.

We have a lot going on right now and while some things are fires in the kitchen that need to be handled right away, other things are longer term projects that have incremental pieces that add up over time to a lot of stuff. This is where project management comes in. Set the milestones, tasks, deadlines, and resources needed, then execute. A great project manager sells..and gives piece of mind to the rest of the team. Through piece of mind comes planning ahead so it doesn’t come to a last minute crunch of sloppiness.

Kevin’s been calling me out over the past week on not giving him piece of mind on the projects I’m heading. It’s tough to hear and accept because I’ve done a lot of work both on the planning side and the “doing” side. But there is still sloppiness leaking out in my work. Each piece of sloppiness adds up over time and manifests itself as a lack of piece of mind for Kevin and the rest of the team.

It’s easy to just say I’ll make sure there won’t be any more sloppiness, but that’s a lot harder to make happen. I’m spending some time today to go back to my planning and see what I can do to better deliver that piece of mind. I suspect it’s going to revolve around prioritizing my upcoming projects better and dropping everything but the most important stuff. That includes the possibility of dropping a project or two. Right now I feel overwhelmed and I know, based on my past work, if I try and take on too much, then everything suffers.

I left my weekly meeting with Kevin today on a frustrated note. I went into the meeting with an outline of what I wanted to cover, however after an hour we hadn’t covered anything on my list.

We started the meeting recapping our respective work weeks. I had a busy week working on a plethora of things including our branding/marketing strategy and customer care timeline. But in recaping my week to Kevin I told it in such a way that it seemed like I didn’t have clear outcomes and tangible results. Based on my retelling, Kevin reacted with frustration. For the next hour we didn’t really talk about any of the stuff I planned to, but rather focused on defended myself from the frustration he was feeling. 

Normally, to plan my week I look at our project management tool (Basecamp), our CRM (Highrise), our Gantt Chart (Tom’s Planner), and our Calendar (Google Calendar). My hope is that by looking at these four areas I am blending together enough short term (fire in the kitchen) work with longer term (important, not urgent) work. At the end of the weekly planning I get an outline that looks like this…

It all sounds nice, but then I went into the meeting with Kevin and you’d think I twiddled my thumbs all week. Thus he gets frustrated and I get frustrated.

In thinking this through more I’m going to try two new approaches:

1) Turn my weekly to-dos into tangible actual goals – Last week I was working on our company principles to present at our monthly Team Huddle. On my plan for the week, I just wrote down “Principles.” If I were to go back and turn that into a tangible actual goal it would’ve been “Present Polished Version of Company Principles at Team Huddle on Friday.” That then becomes one goal for the week and I can map out what I need to do each day to make sure that happens. This way then when meeting with Kevin I can have a clear set of goals I achieved for the week verses something that just says “Principles.”

2) Better recapping - A favorite movie of mine is Big Fish. A theme of the movie is every story can be told different ways. As the storyteller, you get to choose which one you want to tell. I think how I tell what I did to Kevin is just as important as what I did. Even if I had the best week ever, if I poorly and inaccurately retell it, then I can’t expect my audience to achieve the outcome I wanted. 

Moving forward I’ll be testing my ideas out and report back soon. 

I want to be proactive in my work and life. 

A few weeks ago, I dedicated myself to being proactive by strategically mapping out my week, month, and quarter ahead of time. In doing so, my weeks are more effective, I'm focusing on what is most important, and I'm clearer on what needs to get done. All in all, I'm on the right track.

I've run into one problem however…

While I may have a great plan for my week, I'm forgetting to disseminate my plan to the rest of team ahead of time. So even though I'm more proactive in my work, I'm forcing those around me to be reactive because they won't know I assigned them work until the day it is due.

We have systems in place to coordinate the team (Basecamp, Highrise), but remembering to use the systems is the real key. 

Today I acknowledged to our logistics manager, Megan, that I was not supporting her in being proactive and promised to prompt her ahead of time of related work so she could prepare as well.

All in fun learning! I'll check back in in a few weeks to see how I'm doing.

Being more proactive verses reactive in my work, and life, is a skill I’m learning to love again. A big part of proactive planning involves setting effective yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily goals.

Two years ago, I used to religiously follow a plan I mapped out for the
quarter and broke all the way down into days. While I was proactively planning, the projects weren’t necessarily the most strategic. The work was thus more about efficiency than effectiveness. Since then, I’ve drifted away from yearly, quarterly, monthly, and weekly planning and am more reactive in my daily work flow. Reactive has gotten us to a $1 million company, proactive will get us to a $10 million company.

My goal this time around is to not only proactively plan, but also strategically plan.

(mapping out my work week)

In June, we took on our first "in-house" intern, Andrew Schwartz. Andrew's only a Senior in High School, but thinks, and gets work done, at a Graduate School level. He's smart, quick, thinks critically, and wants to learn. For the short time he was here, he kicked tail.

He also taught me a valuable management lesson. An intern, or employee for that matter, is only as effective as the plan. If a medium or long term plan isn't established ahead of time, real work quickly turns into busy work. As our team grows, I want to make sure everyone stays effective not just efficient. Staying effective is a combination of smart people and a good plan. We're good at attracting smart people, my growth is in keeping everyone aligned on the goals.