Do you have goals for your company? How about one Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG)? Yes, there is such a thing, and I highly recommend your company has one as well. For Brigade, our BHAG is 100% automation.
Why BHAG?
A big hairy audacious goal, or BHAG, is a clear and compelling target for an organization to strive for. A BHAG—pronounced bee-hag—is a long-term goal that everyone in a company can understand and rally behind. The term comes from the book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras.
A BHAG is clear and compelling, needing little explanation. Your team gets it right away. The best BHAGs answer the question: What do we need to do today, with monomaniacal focus, and tomorrow, and the next day, to defy the probabilities and ultimately achieve our BHAG?
Some famous examples include:
- SpaceX: To enable human exploration and settlement of Mars.
- Facebook: To make the world more open and connected and give everyone the power to share anything with anyone.
- Google: To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
The benefit of a BHAG is that it excites and energizes people in a way that quarterly targets and lengthy mission statements don’t.
Is it a true BHAG?
A true BHAG answers questions like:
- Does it stimulate forward progress?
- Does it create momentum?
- Does it get people going?
- Do they find it stimulating, exciting, and adventurous?
- Are they willing to throw their creative talents and human energies into it?
About our BHAG
Brigade’s BHAG is to become 100% automated in what we do. This means we will utilize technology for error-proof work,
fraud evasion, and efficiency. We will do this so we can be more human with our clients and provide them with an overall amazing experience.
As you may have seen in prior blogs, we preach the gospel of
cloud solutions to automate manual processes. One example is automation in expense management. Some 26% of small to midsize businesses (SMBs) still use spreadsheets to manage their expenses, and 49% of SMBs still use handwritten records to track, manage, and analyze spending.
Those numbers make me cringe! Manual processes like these hinder visibility into cash flow, which increases the risk of fraudulent or unqualified spending. Manual-, spreadsheet-, or e-mail-based processes also lead to costly mistakes and delays.
When you automate and integrate expense processes, you can make them run better and bring more visibility and control to all spending. This frees up team members to focus on other critical things and improve agility.
Bottom line: We are on track to meet our BHAG! This initiative is one of the most important we’ve ever set for ourselves: To learn more about cloud-based technology, integrate it into our company, and recommend more programs like it for our clients. BHAGs may take years to accomplish, but I’ve seen first-hand how
the right one excites a team every step of the way.
If you have a business that could benefit from Brigade’s BHAG or are in a firm that needs to evolve with the future of bookkeeping, I’m here to help and consult.
Additional sources:
