Consistent with my commitment on the All Company Call yesterday, I am blogging to you from somewhere between Chicago Midway and Salt Lake City. I think I am grateful to have WiFi so I can try to keep up with the inundation of issues and emails!
As I mentioned yesterday, I am trying to prioritize and keep our company prioritized through a simple goal and objective setting exercise. As the Board of Directors reviews my objectives, I thought I would share again my goals but also with some additional information on what I am planning to do to achieve them:
1. Nurture a mission-driven, performance based culture
As I said yesterday, the first step in leading a perfomance based culture is to remember my husband's simple but profound advice to make sure everyone knows what is expected of them. Writing down goals -- and forcing myself to only have three professional goals -- will be useful if I constantly revisit them and evaluate if I am aligning my time and efforts with those goals. The mission driven piece starts with everyone knowing what our mission is (to provide the highest quality learning programs and products in world languages to the education market) and how each person and teams responsiblities help fulfill our mission. Simple to state, harder to do.
2. Exceed FY 12 financial goals and establish conditions to achieve explosive growth in FY 13
This will be the hardest goal to meet. You are all aware of the painful right-sizing process we went through earlier this year when I was presented with a budget which had a cash burn which exceeded the Board's appetite. The challenge now is two fold: to manage to that conservative operating budget AND to insure that our software revenues meet projections. The second part -- looking at our sales numbers and getting comfortable with what the back half of the year will bring -- has been a big focus this week. Even while I am in Provo taking a deep dive on our product road map -- critical to insuring the conditions are set for success in FY 13 -- I will likely spend a good bit of time on the pipeline and software revenue forecasting with Ismail.
3. Identify and plan for new lines of business
This will be one area of significant focus for Stacey Rainey when she starts next week. With her time at Microsoft and the Parthenon Group, combined with her passion for world languages and global citizenship, I am confident we will find appropriate ways (whether through organic growth or acquistion) to extend our impact. ESL is high on my list and I know it is an area of focus for K12 as well.
4. Maintain commitment to family & good health
When Heidi heard that I had a 4 am wake up call today she reminded me of this. As every working mother will attest, maintaining my health and being a good mom is not always a mutually compatible goal. I took the early flight this morning to compress my travel schedule. With a 13 year old in 7th grade and the twins in 5th grade (still 10 years old) the busiest hours for our family occur in the evening -- trying to prepare a healthy family dinner, get homework done, gather supplies and other needs for the next day of school, participate in extra-curricular activities. In addition, getting out of the house in the morning is our second busiest time of the day -- especially if we weren't completely organized or ran out of time or energy the night before! Obviously, no one else was awake at 4:20 am when I left for the airport. But, I will also take the last flight home on Thursday from SLC and creep into our house at 1 am ish (hopefully!) in order to be part of the busy morning routine on Friday before final preparations for our monthly board call. I will definitely have a sleep deficit going in to the weekend! Given the Saturday night slotting of the Patriots v. Denver football play off game, I probably won't catch up totally!
Less than an hour from Salt Lake and a busy schedule. Hope you find these posts useful.
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