What’s on your daily dashboard?
What's on your Dashboard at work?
Growth Equity / VC and Private Equity partners have so many competing priorities
A. Many work 100 hour weeks, trying to do it all, losing time with family over the weekend
B. Others stick to 80 hour work weeks, being fairly consumed M-F
C. And another group takes half days on Mondays and Fridays
I help clients migrate towards fewer, higher quality hours works. How?
We start by establishing a Dashboard in excel or airtable. Every day, you wake up and look at this. By knowing what you really care about and need to do, you can dump/delegate or deprioritize/do later things that don't pertain to your personal goals.
In order to establish the Dashboard, we backsolve for their goals by asking this question:
Which daily activities help you drive Enterprise Value for your firm? If you create Enterprise Value, you will get paid more, get promoted more, and feel more relaxed at work.
For a GE/PE/VC Partner, the dashboard might look like
1. Determine subsectors likely to have targets which our firm would like to partner with / own
2. Generate top down thought piece to share the investment thesis with the IC group, and ASK FOR HELP with introductions in the sector
3. Call and meet each company in sector; confirm/refine thesis, determine best targets -- this is a state of iterative refinement 4. Present best targets to IC and put termsheets in front of targets 5. Fund deals hashtag#repeat Other Dashboard Items include: B. Port Co management - board meetings, projects, financing and liquidity C. Internal Activities: committees, recruiting, training Once you're clear on how you generate Enterprise Value for your firm, you can focus your hours on those activities. Whatever doesn't align with the dashboard gets pushed down, not done, or pushed out. A common trap I see is that "busy today" feels great. Thinking top down, writing macro papers and intro calls feels intangible and pointless relative. The latter requires a cumulative long term mindset -- like bellows on a fire, eventually it will become roaring hot. The former is the sugar high mindset which wants immediate results. Having confidence in the latter and your Dashboard driven days allows you to win over time. Additionally, since the hours are cumulative (as opposed to one off busy work which amounts to very little), you can work fewer hours each week. What's on your dashboard? Or are you too busy to think about it?
