Why? Because it's the foundation of your business strategy!! 

One of the greatest skills you can have is the ability to look at things from an all-around perspective.

This is true in most circumstances as you navigate your day-to-day living and is certainly needed in business when you get yourself caught up in the tunnel vision of one end goal.

You need a view that provides oversight to the big picture while remaining connected to your team and the operation. In other words, you need a Key Function Flow Map. 

The Key Function Flow Map (KFFM) is a simple diagram of how your business makes money.

It singles out three to five key functions in your business that work together to make your company money. It shows the non-fiscal things that flow through your company, through each of the Functions, in order for your company to put cash in the bank.

The KFFM is the foundation of your business strategy because it ties so many things together in one great active view for your business every day. It is a live scoreboard that gets updated every day so the whole team can see if the company is on track to achieve their plan – daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, and beyond. 

The KFFM is simple to build.

The first step is to identify all the high-level functions in your business and the person who owns this function. From this list, identify the three to five key functions that are involved in making the company money. Once identified draw them in the order of how things flow through each function. Resist the temptation to get too detailed. Stay very high level.

Now you are probably looking at the KFFM above and thinking “What is the big deal? Why would I use this every day?”

Here are 10 reasons to create an active KFFM:

1. Provides functional clarity for your business.
2. It identifies clearly who owns each key function in your business.
3. It’s a way to measure in ‘real time’ a daily score for your business.
4. It allows the functional owners to easily share the key challenges or celebrate the wins in their functional area.
5. It provides a strong foundation to non-fiscal forecasting in your business.
6. You can design forward with this foundation.
7. You can design deeper into the organization in a connected way.
8. Each functional scorecard is represented in this map.
9. You can create a 36-month non-fiscal forecast based on the things that flow through the KFFM.
10. It provides a scoreboard visible to the whole company in order to make better, faster decisions every day.

There are many more reasons why the KFFM is the foundation of everything in business. I truly hope one or all the reasons above activates your team to learn more about how you can create your own KFFM for your organization. 

The KFFM is not just a view for small companies, it’s a view for all companies, small to extra-large. The KFFM is one of the best ways to connect the business plan to individual team members each and every day. If you would like to learn more and build your own KFFM, please check out our CEO+LEADERSHIP Team Bootcamp to build your KFFM.