A questionnaire: The Vitals + Health Check consists of a set of 15 questions.   

A process: How deep you go next is up to you. Reviewing responses can be a single conversation, the opener to a week-long sprint on your most pressing need, or the basis for ongoing alignment with your team and investors. 

A philosophy: The Vitals + Health Check is designed to fundamentally alter the odds for founders and teams building solutions. Teams fail when they run out of cash, capital, or desire. All three are avoidable if we are willing to listen. The Vitals + Health Check is a structured way to ask the most important questions, and hear the answers. It is based on the belief that the wisdom you need exists within you, your team, data, and results so far.

The Vitals + Health Check is the product of the hardest won lessons:  the shortcuts, the questions and the sequence I have come to rely through over 20+ years of building, investing in, and dismantling businesses with founders, executives and investors.

I’ve used these questions as a diagnostic tool, scaffolding from which teams can create and reinforce structural alignment across departments, and as a sort of pre-, during- and post-flight checklist, with dozens of high capacity teams to keep them safe as they grow.

Founders and executive teams scaling high growth operational businesses 

Teams with existing strategies to address climate change or working to build one

Team managers

Individual contributors

Board members, if invited by the executive team  

Investors and capital partners, if invited by the executive team

Scaling in this context means growth from one scale of operations to another. 

Example: Growth from 10 ‘reps’ a year to 100. From 100 to 1,000. From 1,000 to 10,000.

We may have great systems for selling, fulfilling, getting paid, managing cash, and refining products when doing 10 of whatever we do per year. Want to go from 10 to 100? Every system will break, and need redesign.

The pressure is especially acute for operating businesses working in the physical world, bound by the laws of physics, changing regulations, and diverse technical talent.

Scaling successfully in this context means achieving that growth without breaking revenue streams, customer satisfaction, capital relationships, or burning out your team and partners. 

1. Reflect: Take time alone to ask and answer ‘simple’ questions about the business. Simple is not the same as easy.

2. Align: Determine your own confidence about the degree to which your team is on the same page - where our strongest and weakest alignment exists, as of a defined point in time. 

3. Prioritize: Identify and decide on the strongest needs for alignment, clarity, or visibility. 

As often you’d like support rising from deep in the weeds up to the horizon, and back down again.  This could be quarterly, monthly, or annually.

The frequency most effective for your team will depend on 

a) how frequently workflow and roles are changing

b) how many layers of ‘translation’ you need between functional disciplines 

c) how effective it feels for you and your team.

Whatever you’re doing now: Consider the Vitals+ tool as an accelerant for your existing communication and decision processes. Your team will know best what is working, and what could use improvement. But opportunities may be tucked into a blind spot or hard to hear when things are moving fast and the stakes or emotions are high. Vitals+ is a lifeline, a rapid way to slice through the noise. It’s designed to help you and your executives align and speak the same language - to see clearly where your team may be stuck, and how to unlock the power already within your team with focused decisions, communication, clarity or visibility.

Business Model Canvas: The Business Model Canvas is a good tool for use by a tight group of founders in early stage, rapid ideation. It is less effective for operating businesses with existing revenue and performance data. Jargon and format limit its effectiveness for communication.

Annual strategic planning process: Consider Vitals+ an alternative or replacement to a traditional strategy document when you need rapid alignment on the health of the company, and a system to harvest the wisdom of the entire team. Annual documents tend to require a grueling process and provide more comfort to executives than value to team members. I’ve never seen strategy documents create decisions, alignment, or commitments that stick in a rapidly growing company.

Concept memos: Memos like Amazon’s famous 6-pager are phenomenal for working through complex concepts and getting meaningful feedback from diverse stakeholders. And, memos are not operating tools. The Vitals+ tool can help an executive team scan operations to determine where the best thinking of a concept memo has, or has not, translated to support the individuals responsible for delivering daily operations and long term capital structure.

Annual budget process: I love a budget as a communication tool about the conditions under which we could achieve x, y, or z. Budget processes don’t vet whether the team has the clarity and visibility they need to deliver on core budget assumptions. That’s where Vitals+ comes in.