Bored with your revenue assurance career? Stuck in a rut because you lack the imagination and skill to add any more value to your business? Want to distract people so they do not notice there are lots of leakages that have been going on for years but that you missed? Here are the best ways to make yourself even more important in your own mind, if not in real life….
1. Start doing revenue “management”. This used to be the job of Marketing and Commercial Finance, but obviously Marketing and Commercial Finance lack your special skills, so you are there to help by pointing out how much more money could be made. Expect a backlash when people point out that RA must have too much time on their hands and demand the elimination of a cost leakage = wasted salaries on people in RA.
2. Do SOX. Not all of SOX, just a few bits you do not understand well but nobody else fancies doing. Try not to draw attention to the fact that you claim to assure the integrity of revenues but are not familiar with the company’s policy on revenue recognition. Also keep quiet on how you are able to claim to add lots more value in future when the controls were so tight last year that nothing could possibly go wrong.
3. Assure costs. Not the big interesting ones like building networks, just the ones where you reconcile revenues to directly variable costs. Do not mention that a check like that would have been a good idea just to assure your revenues in the first place.
4. Stop doing revenue management immediately after your business announces a big slump in earnings. Obviously that had nothing to do with the bit of revenue management you took responsibility for. Think of a new name for revenue management, something even vaguer than revenue management like “business assurance” or something like that.
5. Assure margins. This is a bit like revenue management but perhaps Marketing may not notice you are doing their job. Ideal way of increasing responsibility without being to blame for that slump in earnings.
6. Take on responsibility for detecting Fraud. Then think again because they would sack you if you messed this up.
7. Fly around doing conferences. Having done everything imaginable to add value to your own business, you have a lot of time on your hands to tell everyone else how successful you have been.
8. Cover revenue share with partners. Hope you spot your own screw-ups before someone in revenue assurance for your partners does. Remember, they may talk at the same conferences as you and if they boast of lots of leakages then everyone will know it was you that mucked up.
9. Do quality assurance. By definition, there are no consistent, measurable and objective targets to meet with quality assurance so it fits perfectly with your approach to revenue assurance.
10. Do business assurance. Every morning when you arrive at work, ask yourself if the business is still there and if it is, say “check” and pat yourself on the back for a job well done. Spend the rest of the day planning your sight seeing at the next exotic conference location.
10a. But seriously, assure everybody else’s business decisions. They cannot be trusted. Form an underground “shadow” exec board to make the tough decisions the real execs are afraid to make. Don’t tell the real execs because it might upset them. Or anyone else, just in case. Unless it is at a revenue assurance conference because the probability of that making its way back to the execs is nil.
10b. But really seriously, do business assurance and revenue management and anything else that takes your fancy. Write your own job spec and change it at will. Take a few extra days holiday because you deserve it. Give yourself free reign to second-guess any decision anyone else makes and point out all their mistakes. Unless earnings slump. That was someone else’s fault. Because obviously those decisions were not your responsibility. You know your place, even if nobody else does.
