{"id":213,"date":"2019-01-11T09:06:01","date_gmt":"2019-01-11T14:06:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/?p=213"},"modified":"2019-01-11T09:06:01","modified_gmt":"2019-01-11T14:06:01","slug":"2019-and-goals-putting-the-cart-before-the-horse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/2019-and-goals-putting-the-cart-before-the-horse\/","title":{"rendered":"2019 and Goals. Putting the Cart before the Horse."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cA man has to have goals – for a day, for a lifetime – and that was mine, to have people say, ‘There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived.’\u201d Ted Williams<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the calendar flipped from 2018 to 2019 many people have\nasked \u201cWhat are your goals for 2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1979, out of a college dorm room in New York City,\nQueensboro, and the custom embroidered logo apparel businesses were born.\u00a0 Our mission today is to help people share who\nthey are with the world.\u00a0 In 2018 we did\nthat for over 50,000 customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By many measures, 2018 was a great success.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t our most profitable year, but by\nalmost every other measure, we took significant steps forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Queensboro has been around for a long time, but it is only\nsince 2014 that our primary goal has been to become a great company.\u00a0 It took me over 30 years to realize that in\nthe end, that was all that really mattered to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We have improved a lot since 2014.\u00a0 Yet for all our improvement, we are still not\nhappy with a few basic things.\u00a0 We feel it\nstill takes us too long to turn around orders, the process of ordering custom\nlogo apparel continues to be too complex and frustrating for our customers, and\nas leaders there remains much to be learned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We have therefore decided to focus on these three areas for\nimprovement in 2019: speed, ease of ordering, and leadership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How are we going to do that?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Great question!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, just coming up with these three areas of focus took\nus a lot longer and was a lot harder than any of us expected.\u00a0 It was a great exercise though.\u00a0 It forced us, as a team, to take an in depth\nlook at our entire business and organization and think hard about what was most\nimportant.\u00a0 The questions we kept asking\nourselves were \u201cWhat is keeping us from greatness? What are the main things we\nneed to work on to get better?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It became clear through this process that making intelligent\nand cooperative decisions about the most important things to work on is at\nleast as important as any work on those decisions that would follow.\u00a0 If we make the right decisions, we move forward.\u00a0 If not, we don\u2019t.\u00a0 Time, energy and opportunity are wasted.\u00a0 We get no closer to our greatness goal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reflecting upon our path to greatness, I believe that this\nwas the first year our leadership team was strong enough to take on this goal\nsetting process together.\u00a0 Decisions had\nbeen made in the past, but they weren\u2019t truly owned by all.\u00a0 Our relationships, trust, communication and\nexperience working together were just not deep enough to take this on.\u00a0 Goal setting clearly helps focus a team, but\nif that team is not solid and in synch, execution is going to be very\ndifficult.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We spent a lot of 2018 working and talking as a team about\nsmaller issues. We were very disciplined about setting aside at least an hour\nand a half every Wednesday to learn and talk about leadership and greatness. \u00a0As the year progressed, our ability to\ncommunicate and work together got better.\u00a0\nWe had some really nice \u201cwins\u201d last year and made impressive progress. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As 2018 wound down we naturally started looking ahead and\ntalking about 2019.\u00a0 At first, these\nconversations were slow and frustrating.\u00a0\nDespite all our accomplishments in 2018 we were still seeing things too\nmuch from our own personal perspectives and had different ideas about what our\nprimary challenges were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We stuck with it, though, and I believe we are all pleased\nwith our work. And most importantly, we now all own it.\u00a0 That was a huge accomplishment for 2019\nbefore the year even started!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So now back to the question of how we are going to improve\nour speed, ordering process and leadership skills \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have mixed feelings about the annual cycles of\norganization in our lives and business.\u00a0\nIn many ways they feel arbitrary.\u00a0\nFor example, it is a New Year, so now we need new resolutions and\ngoals.\u00a0 We worked hard for the past 12\nmonths to achieve certain results and objectives.\u00a0 We achieved some, missed others, and probably\nmade some bad decisions towards the end to achieve short term results so we\ncould feel we were successful.\u00a0 And now\nit is January and it is time to start all over again!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the drive to improve never stops!\u00a0 And the New Year, with the break for the\nHolidays, does give us some time to reflect and recharge. So here we are. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is how we will get to work on our goals \u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the next two or three weeks we will get a benchmark on\nwhere we are with current lead times and discuss the specifics of what is\nslowing us down in our production cycle.\u00a0\nWe will also identify the biggest causes of frustration for our potential\nand existing customers.\u00a0 Finally, we will\ntake a fresh look at our leadership principles, our 4 R\u2019s (relationships,\nrelentless, reflective and reconnect) to see where we are most often falling\nshort as a team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We will then pick one or two things to work on in each of\nthese three areas and figure out how to best attack them, including the very\nimportant piece of determining how to measure our progress.\u00a0 As we do this, we\u2019ll tell the rest of the\ncompany what we\u2019re working on, why we\u2019re working on it, and we\u2019ll enlist help\nas necessary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then we\u2019ll get to work.\u00a0\nWe\u2019ll refine and communicate regularly as we progress.\u00a0 And we\u2019ll work hard to keep focused on these\ngoals as the daily demands of life and work inevitably pull us away.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As we get more specific on what we are working on and how we\nare doing, we\u2019ll also communicate with you, our customers, and keep you updated\non our progress.\u00a0 Stay tuned and let us\nknow if you have any questions or comments!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On a personal note, my individual goals for 2019 are to get\nas comfortable with my golf swing as I used to be shooting free throws.\u00a0 To do this, I am going to spend at least an\nhour a week hitting golf balls.\u00a0 I am\nalso going to try to connect better with my wife, children, other family\nmembers, friends, co-workers and neighbors.\u00a0\nTo do this, I\u2019m going to spend another hour a week hitting golf balls \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looks like piano lessons may need to wait another year, but\nI\u2019ll get to them eventually!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cA man has to have goals – for a day, for a lifetime – and that was mine, to have people say, ‘There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived.’\u201d Ted Williams As the calendar flipped from 2018 to 2019 many people have asked \u201cWhat are your goals for 2019\u201d In 1979, out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":214,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":215,"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213\/revisions\/215"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.queensboro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}