Business Calendar

by Mark McClanahan

When do you start planning for the next year of business?

At Mosby, this process starts in August and continues into November. Every year at this time, we meet as a management team to begin high-level discussions revolving around goals and objectives for the upcoming year. Since this is a regular occurrence, we mark this event and subsequent milestones related to this planning in a calendar used to track repetitive matters that occur throughout a business year.

This very simple tool is created in Excel. We don’t concern ourselves with actual dates because this is a vehicle primarily used to communicate when in the year these events should be occurring. To keep things straightforward, each month is represented by a column heading.  Under each heading, or month, we list the key milestones within individual cells. We avoid going into great detail regarding these events, as this tool is meant to act as a reminder and forward-thinking mechanism.

We include items like periodic performance reviews, company meetings, quarterly business meetings, annual business planning, board meetings and spring cleaning. And to make things easy to discern, we color-code the cells for related items. For instance, we use green for all company meetings. That way, if someone is interested in when company meetings occur, he can quickly see the three months they typically happen without having to read every cell. If someone is interested in when performance reviews occur, she merely has to look for the blue cells.

This business calendar is effective in keeping important matters in front of us without us having to reflect on how things occurred in the past.

Mark McClanahan (mmcclanahan@callmosby.com or 314.909.1800) is the president at Mosby Building Arts.