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Van Halen

2/20/2023

Back in the 1980s, Rock Legends Van Halen had a clause in their contract that you might think was ludicrous.

Back in the 1980s, Rock Legends Van Halen had a clause in their contract that you might think was ludicrous. 

In the backstage area, they wanted a bowl of M&M's but the clause included, and I quote;     “absolutely no brown M&M's!” 

Now, you might think that sounds a bit diva-esque for a bunch of American rockers, especially back in the 1980s. 

At the time there was plenty of speculation about the clause. However, to the band, this was really important. Contracts were long documents with not just the backstage requests but also the lighting, the sound, the set-up, the stage, the build, and many other things.

When the band turned up on the first day and went backstage, if they saw any brown M&M's in that big bowl of M&M's, they knew that the contract had not been read thoroughly in full.      

For the band it became a lead check. Brown M&Ms mean they would have to go through everything else on the contract line by line. If there were no brown M&M's they had a really high degree of confidence that everything had been followed correctly. And that saved them hours, even days.

They introduced huge financial penalties. So, any omissions or brown M&Ms were expensive. The tour promoter’s fees were on the line. 

It was a very simple, powerful way to check a contract. Quite inspiring. In my world, forecasting is not quite rock and roll, they can get a little complicated when a business starts to grow and scale. 

The spreadsheet usually lives in Excel or a Google Doc, with the CEO and another senior team member having access. When I open the file, I need to know if everything is still OK. 

I don't want to have to go through and check everything line by line, cell by cell. So, we have plenty of ways to help with this, from zero checks, completion cross checks, metrics, graphs and also clear instructions to anyone who needs to work on the file. 

These checks make everything so much easier for the FD to jump back in the file and be confident it is still correct and error free. It’s a huge bonus not having to spend time checking the file itself. Bear in mind the FD is normally asked to find and fix errors.

This is not just for forecasting and Finance, it is a worthwhile exercise for other parts of your business. Whether that is Product, Sales, Marketing budgets – all of which become more complex when the business scales. 

This isn’t just about just turning on change tracking in a Word document – cross checking can save time, and also ensure all your team take full ownership or their workflows and key deliverables.

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