When I joined Sunright in October, I tried to ramp up as quickly as possible.
To get up to speed as quick as possible, I tried to talk to everyone at the company and personally take on as many roles as possible. To get a better pulse on the business, I established biweekly team meetings and business reporting.
My goal was to identify the right overall strategy for SR and then ensure the entire company is working properly towards it.
Of everything I tried, the one exercise that informed my thinking around strategy the most was breaking down the company income statement into individual ones for each product category (helmets, powersports, and parts). Each revenue, cost, and G&A expense had to be expensed to one of the three areas.
The exercise greatly informed my mental model for the business. It allowed me to finally see how our helmets, powersports, and parts business could perform as individual businesses. By getting a clearer picture of each business, trade-offs for the entire company became easier to evaluate.
I wish I’d broken down the income statement my very first week at Sunright. I would have started with just les courants year income statement, broken it down by product category, and expanded to previous years or income statement / balance sheet as necessary. Do so, would have pointed me to the right questions to ask faster and generated many answers that I tried to glean from interviews and discussions.
While everything I tried was ultimately to forming a wholistic view of the business, analyzing and reviewing the current financials was the quickest way to arrive at an independent view of it’s current state and potential.
#2018–7
