Are you randomly choosing what strategies to try in your business?
Are you doing some piecemeal implementation where you bounce from expert to expert free resource to free resource and try half-hearted tactics to get to the goals you want to reach?
I get it. There is so much information and advice floating around from others who have accomplished what you want to accomplish.
But there is GOLD in one place that you actually have exclusive access to that will unlock the secret to everything.
And chances are you’ve either been neglecting it or ignoring it all together. I’m talking about your own numbers.
The best way to know what works for you and your business right now is to look at the data.
And that’s why in this episode, we’re diving deep into how to use data to make better business decisions.
Show Links:
Show Takeaways:
- Learn what meaningful metrics you should be tracking
- The foolproof system I use to track my data (and that you can use too!)
- And what to do with that information, once you gather it, so you can make better decisions in your business.
Rather skim before you listen? ⬇️
Are you just randomly choosing what strategies to try in your business?
Or are you doing some piecemeal implementation – where you bounce from expert to expert, free resource to free resource and try half-hearted tactics to get to the goals you want to reach?
I get it. There is so much information and advice floating around on the web, quite a bit of it free or under $100, from others who have accomplished what you want to accomplish.
🔑 $10K months
🔑 Sold-out launches
🔑 Doubling and tripling engaged followers
🔑 Six-figure income
🔑 Dedicated team
🔑 Luxury vacations
🔑 Freedom
But there is gold in one place that you actually have exclusive access to that will unlock the secret to everything and chances are you’ve either been neglecting it or ignoring it altogether.
I am talking about YOUR OWN NUMBERS.
The best way to know what works for you and your business right now is to look at the data.
And that is why in this episode we are diving deep into what meaningful metrics you should be tracking, the system I use to keep track, and what to do with that information once you gather it so you can make better decisions.
There are thousands upon thousands, probably millions of people giving you advice, either free or low cost at this point, right? Under a hundred dollars is what I kind of consider low costs.
There’s workbooks, there’s workshops, there’s free resources, checklists, PDFs all over the place. And if you’re constantly just taking those and trying to piecemeal them into a strategy for your business, you’re missing an opportunity because chances are, if you’re doing that, you’re not seeing the significant results that you could be seeing.
And the reason for that is that there’s one place that you’re either neglecting completely, or that you’re not completely optimizing.
That can be the secret that unlocks everything for you.
And that secret is your own numbers.
So why are these so important?
Well, not everything works the same way for everyone.
And there’s thousands of different reasons why that is. There’s mindset reasons.
There’s logistical reasons. There’s market reasons, all the things.
This is also why I don’t do plug and play plans for any of my one-on-one clients.
We create customized plans for them to follow based on the way that they work, their goals, their business model.
It’s customized because no two businesses are going to be alike. No two business owners are going to be alike.
The reason you need to look at your own numbers is to understand what is working for you and your business right now in this time.
And that something that works for you today may not work for you in two years or two months.
That’s why you constantly have to be gathering data and then using that data to make strategic decisions.
Another reason to track your own numbers is that you can see your progress. I am a big proponent of making incremental progress towards your goals on a daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis.
Rather than setting big goals at the beginning of the year, and then waking up in November or December and realizing there’s no way in hell you’re going to get there because it was a year-long goal, and you didn’t make any progress on it for the first 10 or 11 months of the year.
If you can track and use those numbers, the chances of you being able to intentionally make incremental progress towards those goals and get further along in those goals and reach those goals is a heck of a lot higher.
One of the other things is it helps you make smart strategic decisions. What exactly are smart, strategic decisions?
Smart decisions, first of all are educated decisions that are carefully thought through. They are based on information.
You use that information to make decisions. It’s not just based on intuition. Although I do believe that there is a place for intuition in decision-making.
Smart, strategic decisions. Strategic means you are doing more of what actually works.
Okay. So how do you find out what actually works?
Well, you look at, “okay, I tried this, this is the results. Did it work? Or did it not work?”
It’s as simple as that.
And I say simple, not necessarily easy, but it’s simple.
And then the last reason why metrics really fit in with what I think you should be doing as a small business owner is entrepreneurship is an experiment.
And if you can look at it like that, then you never fail. Absolutely zero failure.
Now you could have a failed launch, but you as a business owner, you never fail.
And the reason for that is, you are always gathering data, always gathering really good information as to what your next step should be.
So think about it this way. I actually a majored in biology in college. I have a bachelor’s of science degree in biology from the University of Tulsa. So I did a lot of experiments in college. And even in high school, I’ve always been a giant science nerd. I love that. It just makes sense to my brain.
But if it’s not your default mode, I would challenge you to start looking at your launches or, even some of your social media plans or strategies as experiments.
Rather than “Oh, this has got to work,” look at it as, “okay. These are the things that I’m going to try. I’m going to gather the data and then I’m going to analyze the data to create a better experiment later.”
With an experiment, no matter what the result is, you’re going to benefit from either confirming that what you thought was true is actually true. Meaning you didn’t have a failed launch or whatever it was.
Or that what you thought was going to happen actually didn’t happen. And that’s really great information for you to have so that your next experiment, the next strategy is even closer to where you need to be.
You may saying, “okay, Erin, I’m on board. Let’s do this whole numbers thing. What do I need to track?”
I would say that there are some things that you should track, no matter what.
The first thing to track is your revenue. Because if you don’t have revenue, you don’t have a business. This is usually just the amount of money you are bringing in.
Another metric to track is clients or customers, depending on if you’re a service-based or product-based business. How many new clients or customers do you have coming in? How many repeat clients or customers?
Because so much is reliant on your relationship with the people that you are serving, I also recommend tracking how effective you are at moving those people from potential ideal client to warm lead to client— your lead generation, how effective your funnel is.
This can include the number of leads you’re nurturing, number of sales calls, and your conversion rate from sales call to client or customer.
The final thing I would recommend you track is efforts on social media. I know most businesses have some sort of social media presence and social media strategy, especially right now.
I would say there’s not any one social media channel that I would recommend for this, (there are so many to choose from and there are a lot of factors that go into choosing what platforms to spend your time on and leverage) but what I’d recommend you looking at if you’re doing these strategies is what your social media progress is. What are the results of the efforts you are putting in? What metrics on that channel does it make sense to track?
So those are a few of the ones that I would say, absolutely, track those.
And then there are other things that you might need to track that would indicate that you were getting closer to your goals.
If you are not familiar with the term KPIs or key performance indicators, those are just that they indicate how close you are getting to your goals. And you get to decide what those are.
These additional KPIs or additional things to measure might change from quarter to quarter or month to month, depending on what your goals are and how you’re breaking those down.
And by the way, if you have questions about how to break your goals down and make that incremental progress, I actually have a Goal-Getter Workshop that you can access to see my signature framework for setting and breaking down goals to make incremental progress every. Day on your big goals. Head on over to erinhaworth.com/goal-getter-live
You can totally take this system and make it your own. You can start with what I have shared or you can create a totally different system, but this is how I do it. And it’s really simple to do.
I can use the data in real time. I’m never surprised by what pops up whenever I do my quarterly or annual review and planning.
My current system is that every single week on Monday mornings, one of the first things I do is fill out my scorecard. My scorecard is just a spreadsheet that has the things that I’m tracking on it divided out by week.
You can actually get a copy of the Scorecard template I use by heading to http://erinhaworth.com/scorecard.
It includes the metrics I recommend — like clients, leads, number of strategy calls, social media metrics that matter to my growth.
And I just fill in the numbers I go through and gather the data. It takes me just 10 minutes to do this on Monday mornings.
I do that on a weekly basis. And then whenever I sit down to plan out my months and quarters, then I know the things that I need to focus on in order to continue to move towards my goals. I do reviewing and planning on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis.
What’s really powerful about my scorecard is I can not only see the incremental progress on making towards my goals, I also can take note of important things either internally or externally that happened during that week that may have resulted in the numbers that I’m seeing either positively or negatively.
Having a place to put notes as to some reasons why the numbers may have been what they were. “My daughter was on spring break. It was International Women’s Day and I was running a sale. I did a guest training in someone else’s community. That’s really good information to have.
Not only I can make really good decisions and know how to move forward within this week, this month or this quarter, but whenever I’m looking back at these numbers next year, to try to see if there’s any patterns in seasonality to anything, then that gives me really good information.
You could look at it and say, “Oh, well, March was March. It’s just a slow time for my business.” Or you can look back at that and say, “no, the entire world turned upside down. That’s not true.”
You get to use the information in a way that makes sense for your business.
That’s where we’re getting into analysis.
I know that analyzing data does not come naturally to every single person.
But there are a few things that I want you to do in order to make it as useful for you and your business as possible. And what that means is you get closer to your goals.
You’re using this information to get closer to your goals. It’s a tool, to help get you from where you are to where you want to go faster & easier.
There are three things to remember as you’re analyzing, because I don’t want you to get stuck in analysis paralysis.
Analysis paralysis is a real thing. You could just sit here and pour over the numbers and go back and forth and NOT move forward.
Let’s not do that because it’s not going to help you.
The first thing that I want you to do is ask the right questions. And what those questions are, what questions you need to ask yourself?
So, some general questions you might start looking at are, “did I do everything that I set out to do for this week, for this month, for this quarter?”
“Did I put everything that I had into it? Did I promote as much as I possibly could? Or could I have done anymore?”
Now, the second thing that I want you to be careful about is taking the ego out of it.
Asking yourself. if there is something more you could’ve done could lead you into a shame spiral where you start to doubt yourself.
That’s not what this is about. You need to start looking at this objectively. So, try to take the ego out of it.
This isn’t about you. This is about how you can use this information to serve your people better, to achieve your goals faster, and to make the impact that you want to make, whether that be financial, in terms of reach, number of people helped.
Remember that your business really isn’t about you. It’s about the people that you serve.
So if you can keep that in mind and take the ego out of analyzing your data, then it’s going to be so much more helpful for you.
The last thing is to consider both internal and external factors. What do I mean by that?
Internal factors are basically going to be things that are within your business or within your control.
So could I promote it more? Could I have changed the messaging or change the entire offer, maybe all of those things you have control over because they’re under the umbrella of your business.
On the other side, external things might be what’s going on in the world, what’s going on in your client’s lives, the decisions your lead’s make.
If you had a sales call and you expected it to convert, but it didn’t was that because you didn’t give all that you have on the sales call and really explain the value of your service. Or was it because that particular client wasn’t a good fit and they had other stuff going on that they weren’t going to sign with anyone anyway.
And then things like spring break or vacations or whatever it might be, also may be external circumstances. You may have had control or you might not have.
This is not to shame anyone. This is not to take blame off. It’s so you have really good data. So you know what you need to do differently next time.
At the end of the day with you as the CEO of your business, you have to be the one to make these smart, strategic decisions. And all that means is that you know what works and what doesn’t work for you and your business right now, and that you lean into more of what does get you closer to the goals that you have for yourself.
If you can create this habit to where you’re regularly looking at your numbers, you are going to be leveraging your time and energy.
You’ve probably heard “what you pay attention to changes for the better.”
If you can start to pay attention to the results that you are bringing into your business and looking at those somewhat objectively and using that to make decisions, then you are going to grow, and you’re going to be able to make the incremental progress that you need to make in order to get heck of a lot further.
Even if you don’t reach your goals, you’re going to get a heck a lot further towards them than if you had just turned a blind-eye to everything and just kept throwing spaghetti at the wall and didn’t even bother to look up to see what stuck.
I always like to end each episode with an action step that you can take right now to help you move forward and begin to implement immediately. Here is your action step for this episode:
Create a list of the metrics or numbers you need to track. Download my scorecard or create your own. And commit to tracking your numbers each week or month.
