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The End of the Year as a COO

Maybe I never do anything on New Year's Eve because I'm worn out from all the end of year activity. The end of the year as the Ops lead for the company (that might be a COO, CEO, President… the title isn’t relevant as I’m speaking to the responsibility) is daunting. There are so many year-end activities that coincide with an already busy time that includes holidays, team members on leave, and holiday events. I wanted to share a couple of key thoughts that have improved the end of the year for me.

The Value of an Annual Calendar – Spreading out the Action

Looking back to 2017 and 2018… the end of the year was really exhausting. There were so many activities lumped into the end of the year that it felt like a second full time job. Adopting an annual calendar has been a major benefit to the end of year time crunch.

The annual calendar serves as both planning and tracking mechanism. We keep an eye on actions we need to take to make sure that we don’t forget about them (only to remember in December) or leave them for the last minute. The annual calendar also serves to drive the conversation about when an action COULD be taken. The simple activity of discussing some annual requirements leads to common sense improvements. Those improvements range from reviewing available goals and metrics earlier in the year to starting the planning process for next year sooner.

Since we’ve adopted an annual calendar (and improved it over time for added maturity), we now start the annual goals and objectives review and planning process in September. We discuss annual increase strategy beginning on October. Several of our bonus plans are calculating on a running basis so we are only reviewing but not analyzing at the end of the year.

Another lesson learned from the annual calendar conversation was that we could spread out activities by both time and person. We’ve evolved from having me calculate lots of things to developing processes and training others on those processes. I became a bottleneck in some years. We began asking the question of, “How could we make this process easier and who else could help?”

Just for the sake of perspective, I’ll summarize end of year activities in a generic government services contractor (in case anyone might be curious as to what happens behind the scenes):

Annual Increases & Annual Reviews – Everyone in the company needs to get a salary and performance review. Now I don’t do all of those personally, but I’m in the approval process for all of them. There are also a lot of individual conversations to talk strategy based on the specific situations of an employee, group of employees, or contract.

Bonus Plans – There are multiple bonus plans for leadership, for BD, and for recruiting. Many of these are tied to goals and objectives that need to be reviewed, while others are driven by numbers or formulas.

Forecasting Revenue – This process involves the baseline of revenue planned for next year based on booked (won) contracts. Then there’s a calculation and judgement call on the probability of keeping work that will be recompeted and winning new business.

Forecasting GA & OH – Based on the anticipated revenue for the next year, the team needs to establish and an overall support organization (back office) budget and then decide how to break that up by group across the company (HR, contracts, finance, etc.)

Budgeting Purchases – Government contractors in the services field don’t generally buy a bunch of materials, but we do buy things that end up being expensive. Everyone that will be doing a timecard needs a license for that software. Each employee needs an email license. We have to forecast IT hardware, corporate membership fees, and similar expenses.

Goals & Objectives for the team – Each part support organization needs to have goals and objectives that tie to the overall corporate goals. While the corporate goals are often similar from year to year, there is still a lot of tailoring to be done.

End of Tax Year purchase decisions – Every year there are decisions based on what might be advantageous to buy now as opposed to buying next year. Microsoft licenses don’t get stale so sometimes it makes sense to buy more now.

Q4 & Year Recap & Reporting – It’s always important to let everyone know how things have gone. There’s reporting to employees, managers, and the board.