Monthly Recaps: The Most Impactful Thing I Do to Grow My Companies

When you’re an entrepreneur, it’s easy to get lost in the details of day-to-day business operations – to not be able to see the forest for the trees. That’s why, every so often, it’s important to take a step back and make sure you’re looking at the big picture. I learned this lesson early on, and it’s still a philosophy I apply to every company I work with.

One of my best tools for maintaining perspective is my monthly recaps. I started this practice back in the early days of Mailshake, and it’s one of the most impactful things I do to grow my companies even now.

If you ever get to the end of the month and wonder where the time went or why you still have so many things on your to-do list, I can’t recommend the practice enough. Here’s how to do it and why it’s so important:

The “Say vs. Do” Ratio

Monthly recaps hold you accountable to the “Say vs Do” ratio. I got this idea from Hiten Shah, but it boils down to a simple question – you said you were going to do all these things, but what do you actually do?

Most business owners are smart people – they come up with a bunch of badass ideas, and they recognize that only some of them are going to work. But what I’ve found is that you really need a rigorous process for figuring out where you should be spending your time, based on what’s working.

That’s where this ratio comes into play. If you say you’re going to do 15 things, but you’ve only done 10, you need to understand why you didn’t get to everything and whether or not the 10 things you did do were successful so that you can better target your efforts in the future.

In a sense, you could call this the “Say vs Do Impact Ratio” or even the “Say vs Do ROI” ratio. The point is the same. It’s up to you to get smarter about how you’re spending your time – and to do that, you need visibility.

Using Monthly Recaps to Hold Yourself Accountable

It seems logical that, over time, reviewing the “Say vs Do” ratio will help you get smarter about where you should be spending your time. But the problem is, entrepreneurs are really busy. As a founder, you’re working on so many different things, but – if you’re like most entrepreneurs – you’re rarely taking the time to slow down, measure everything and see what actually works.

I talk about this prioritization a lot in my growth talks at conferences and speaking engagements. In our businesses, we’ve got all of these Excel spreadsheets and reports. We’re looking at analytics and balance sheets daily, but when it comes to what I’m spending my time on – and what my team is spending their time on – somehow, it all gets lost. That’s where monthly recaps can be so helpful.

How I Do Monthly Recaps

At first, monthly recaps at Mailshake were simply all the members of the leadership team listing out the things we’d done during the month. I hate writing in paragraph form, and when I do it, I end up writing blog posts – not updates. So I try to make sure my updates are mostly bullet points with lots of screenshots to help illustrate key points.

From there, we expanded to include what was coming up in the next few months, as well as what worked and what didn’t work for each of us in the past month. And now, after about two and a half years of doing this, we’ve added details for different departments. I manage three departments at Mailshake, as an example, so I include key bullet points, KPIs, interesting notes, observations and interesting data for the customer success, sales and marketing departments.

Once I’m done with my update, I’ll combine it with those from my partners into a central Google doc that’s cumulative for the entire year. Every department has its own metrics. The dev team, for example, might have a goal to release three features in one quarter (and that’ll change from quarter to quarter). But by doing this, now we know – whether by the month, the quarter, or the year – if we set out what we intended to do, and whether it’s working or not.

Then, we’ll follow up with a couple of hour-long meetings for each company every month to go through the updates. We don’t write our observations down on our recaps as much anymore since we just discuss them as a group. But either way, we’re able to tell where we succeeded, where we fell short, and how we need to regroup for the coming month.

Here’s a rough outline of what’s included in each update (download a PDF version below):

BUSINESS

SALES & MARKETING

Overview

• [High level business stats and metrics]

Sales

KPIs:

1. [Goal 1]
2. [Goal 2]
3. [Goal 3]

Notes:

• [What worked]
• [What didn’t work]
• [What’s coming up]

Marketing

KPIs:

1. [Goal 1]
2. [Goal 2]
3. [Goal 3]

Notes:

• [What worked]
• [What didn’t work]
• [What’s coming up]

Customer Success

KPIs:

1. [Goal 1]
2. [Goal 2]
3. [Goal 3]

Notes:

• [What worked]
• [What didn’t work]
• [What’s coming up]

DEVELOPMENT

• [Feature releases]
• [Inputs]
• [Outputs]
• [Impact]

Your monthly recap outline might look completely different than mine. You might have different departments listed or want to capture difference pieces of data that are important to you. That’s fine. Prioritize your monthly recaps based on the items that are most important to you – not on my template alone.

The Impact of Monthly Recaps

First of all, monthly recaps give me the needed visibility I mentioned earlier. If you aren’t actively monitoring what you’re doing and tracking how you spend your time, you aren’t going to be able to come up with the number of tasks you completed to know if your “Say vs Do” ratio is on track.

But the impact of monthly recaps can be a lot bigger than reporting your success on a single ratio. What I find is that doing regular monthly recaps forces me to slow down and really consider whether or not I’m working on the right projects. They keep me accountable by making me think through the overall ROI of my efforts, and how they’re contributing to my overall goals for my companies.

You don’t have to have a company or a team to use this process. Even as a solo person, it’s interesting to me to be able to read back through my updates from the years before. It’s fun to see the cool stuff I did, but it’s also kind of sobering to see all the places I put my time and energy that didn’t work out.

What’s great about all these reports is that, if you share them with others, you can make those relationships more effective as well. If you share them with a mentor or a coach, for example, the time you spend together can be a lot more productive. Now, all of a sudden, within 30 minutes of them reading a few months of your updates, they can see what you’re working on, what you’re thinking about and what your key problems are. You can get to the root causes of your issues a lot faster than if they have to get all the information out of you themselves.

The same goes for working with investors. If you’re able to get the people who are thinking about giving you money clear information about what you’ve tested in the past, what issues you’ve already worked through and how you’re strategizing now, your relationship is going to be much stronger for it.

Follow through with this process long enough and, over time, your monthly recaps turn into a playbook. At Ramp Ventures, we buy and grow SaaS businesses. So when we acquire a new company, we’re able to look back through our recaps to see what’s worked for other companies in our portfolio and to find dozens of tactics and strategies we can redeploy at our new businesses. But we’re only able to do that because we commit to doing regular monthly recaps and to turning those reports into a retroactive annual playbook.

Getting Started with Monthly Recaps

If the thought of putting together lengthy annual reports sounds overwhelming, take a step back. Start small, with the smallest piece of meaningful data you can capture related to your personal “Say vs Do” ratio or your top priorities at your company.

You can always add more details in later, but the most important thing is building the habit for self-reflection. Make holding yourself accountable a priority – whether you do so through monthly recaps or not – and the benefits of better performance and smarter allocation of time and energy will follow.

Do you use a process similar to my monthly recaps? If so, share any other tips or tricks you’ve developed by leaving me a note below:

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