Don’t Forget to Celebrate
When we close a deal, we have a champagne toast in the office with everyone on the Permanent Equity team. That’s to recognize that making a new investment is an event that doesn’t happen all the time, an achievement to which everyone in the office contributed, and an opportunity to talk about what went right and how we got there.
But that was a tradition we implemented in 2022. Before then, we’d close a deal and move on to the next one. After all, it was our job to make investments, so making one was what we were doing in the normal and ordinary course. There was no reason to celebrate.
Further, when we had a business doing well, we often took it for granted. When you’re working with well-compensated professionals, shouldn’t moderate success be the base state?
Yet, when we thought about it, that felt wrong.
It felt particularly wrong when we took stock of how much time we spent beating ourselves up for our mistakes compared to how much time we spent celebrating together. Sure we had team outings and trips, but looking back at our Google calendars there were probably 10 meetings set up to talk about problems for every one where we talked about or celebrated something that went right.
An ongoing challenge we have in our portfolio is communicating with our company leaders and making sure that important details don’t slip through the cracks. After all, our investments are located all across the country, in different time zones, and doing different things involving very different types of personalities. It can be exhausting and time consuming for them and for us to maintain open and effective lines of communication, and even when we did, we would often discover that items were falling through the cracks.
Organically at one of our portfolio companies, one of our CEOs developed in tandem with our team a weekly written reporting framework that he could share with his stakeholders. It’s broken into four sections:
Progress last week
Focus next week
What I learned
What I need
When he started sending these in, we quickly discovered that (1) everyone read them; (2) everyone enjoyed them; and most importantly (3) that everyone who could be helpful responded to them.
It was a few years ago when we discovered this simple best practice and what did we do? At first, nothing. Even though it was obvious that this was something to celebrate, we didn’t tell any of our other companies about it and we didn’t shower the CEO with recognition.
In hindsight, we should have done both. Because if we had, we would have quickly spread this best practice across our portfolio and immediately solved for an acute pain point.
Instead, it took a few years for this to happen.
The fact of the matter is success is not a base state. Business is messy, people are messy, and at times it seems that the world conspires against your best ideas.
That’s why when something works, it isn't a given. If something goes according to plan, that’s a success. And if you have a big win, everyone probably contributed. So when something like that happens, don’t forget to celebrate.
Have a great weekend.
– By Tim Hanson