4 Critical Tracking Tools To Grow Your Business [Podcast 226]

Are you letting technology get in the way of actually making money and growing your business?

In reality, you don’t need sophisticated dashboards to build and grow your business to make it a success.

 

In this session, you’ll discover:

• How to get on the other side of simplicity
• Why complexity kills momentum
• 4 critical numbers to track in your business
• How to compartmentalize your business for greater efficiency and effectiveness 
• How sophistication and technology are getting in the way of growth and momentum
• Why practice makes perfect is a myth
• The 10 penny exercise to get more sales
• 3 numbers to track that give you greater clarity and confidence
• And more…

These core fundamental numbers are significant, giving you clarity in your business to identify what to focus on.

 

Have you hit a plateau with sales and conversions?  Feel like your sales and marketing system is stuck or broken?

 

If you’re ready to get a steady flow of leads, sales, and profits. Learn more by scheduling a Breakthrough Clarity Session at: http://www.BreakthroughStrategyCall.com

Listen to the podcast here:

4 Critical Tracking Tools To Grow Your Business [Podcast 226]

There’s a tracking device that has everything to do with your growth and your progress to freedom to be able to get that next level big breakthrough. We’re going to talk about it because it’s critically important whether you’re looking to grow personally or professionally. I’m the Founder of Breakthrough3X. We help business owners and entrepreneurs get a steady flow of new clients every day with less stress so they can have more freedom to work on the business and do the things they love to do with family and not give their family leftovers instead of working in the business so much.

Let me give you a little bit of a backstory. About a decade or so ago, I weighed about 246 pounds at my peak. That was in 2007 or 2008. I looked in the mirror one day and I was like, “You are fat.” I realized I needed to make some changes. There’s a lot of information about exercise. By the way, bear with me here because I’m talking about exercise and fitness. I’m going to tie this to your business and I’m going to talk to you most importantly about the four critical tracking tools and numbers that you can be working with that will transform your business to help you get a breakthrough. This will work for you whether you’re a solopreneur, this will work whether you’re a one-man band, whether you run a company with 200 employees like I did at my peak or anywhere in between. This has relevance to you.

There’s a lot of information about how to get more clients and all these different things available. When you narrow it down, I love the quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes, which says, “I wouldn’t give a fig to be on the other side of complexity but I’d give my life to be on this side of simplicity.” This is an advanced type tracking system. The reality is with losing weight barring other factors, hormones and other things being okay, is as simple as how much you put in your body versus how much you put out of your body. For me, why did I wait for 246 pounds at my peak? It was my fault and it’s called overactive fork. When it’s all said and done, the overactive fork will put you in a bind. It will put you in a bad spot. At times, I’ve built eleven companies, bought companies, sold companies, exceeded $100 million in revenue and all these different things but I crashed three companies. That was my fault too. When I was struggling and plateaued with leads and sales and being a victim, it’s like an overactive fork. When you put too much in your body, you’re going to gain weight and I ballooned up. I’m proud to be where I’m at in the 150 pounds.

It doesn't take sophistication to get results. – Dan Kuschell Click To Tweet

I haven’t been this fit since I was in my teens but this tracking device has everything to do with it but maybe not the way that you think. There’s a great quote out there, “That which is measured improves and that which is measured and reported improves exponentially.” I believe Peter Drucker gets credit for the quote but there are some other excerpts from other experts related. When I was a kid about eight or nine years old, I got fascinated by statistics. I was a geek who played sports and I’m still a geek who don’t play sports. I live vicariously through my son who plays football.

Here’s a shocking thing to know about statistics. They lie because they can be manipulated. I see a lot of people manipulate it in their business and their statistics and what they’re tracking and not tracking. We’re going to cover some four critical stats that you can be tracking. Four critical numbers you can be tracking that will transform your business on a daily basis. There are more than four numbers but I’m going to start with some of the basics because until we got the basics the other part doesn’t matter. We have tracking devices like this that we can put on our wrist and here is my phone which shows how many steps I’ve taken, how many calories in, how many calories out. It’s sophisticated and it’s a dashboard.

I see a lot of people letting technology get in the way of them making money, tracking stuff and growing and so on. You don’t need sophisticated dashboards to build and grow a business and have success. Let me show you my archaic dashboard that I use. This goes all the way back to 2015 when I was manually writing all of my workouts. In this particular year, I invested over 282 hours exercising, average 36 workouts a month, average nine to a day, I averaged three days off a month and such. There’s more but that was in 2015 and what’s amazing is I still like to track manually. I manually enter things in my journal with the conversations that I have. It doesn’t take sophistication to get results. Don’t let technology and sophistication get in the way of you making money, making progress, growing, getting your next big breakthrough.

Success is a habit, but so is losing. – Dan Kuschell Click To Tweet

I’m going to come to the four critical numbers to start tracking. It doesn’t take you having to figure out dashboards or go create computer software or buy a bunch of stuff. You can manually start tracking some of this stuff. I know it’s not as sexy as some people make it out to be but do you want sexy or do you want what works? Overactive fork got me 246 pounds. Overactive fork making stupid business decisions ran three companies of mine into the ground. When I shifted that and focused on the right things when I lean the ladder on the right wall, my business transformed and I have been able to help a lot of people over the years help them transform their businesses too.

Habits

This is my January calendar where I’m still tracking it manually because I like being able to see it visually. On top of that, I still have this sophisticated device, which I’ve now had for four-and-a-half years to be able to track other things. It makes it a little easier but it starts with the fundamental. Let me start with the first premise, habits. Success is a habit and so is losing. Losing is a habit. A friend of mine and somebody I’ve known for a long time, Joe Polish says, “Winners find ways, so do losers.” Sometimes we can get so good. That old idea that practice makes perfect, that’s a lie too. How we practice makes a difference and how we track what we track makes a difference. Would it be helpful if I gave you a couple of critical numbers to be working with to start with? Depending on the feedback that you give me, I may go deeper because even though I’m not a person who loves numbers and it’s my natural tendency, there are numbers I have found. I can see truth very fast in numbers very easily. I have people I’ve shared it with. Our private clients who go, “You have simplified financial statements for me. I’m intimidated by these things but now it’s simple. It’s easy to understand. It gives me the ability to make better choices and better decisions.”

If that’s what you want, like the page, share some comments and I’ll go deeper depending on your engagement, your interaction with this and we can introduce you to some of the other numbers to be able to track. Let me start with a couple of the basic numbers. First of all, thinking of your company, not thinking of your goals but thinking from your goal. Every company can be laid out like this. I’ve looked at companies very similar to this for many years. There are other experts who teach versions of this that are brilliant at what they do. Verne Harnish talked about companies being built like this structure, Gino Wickman, etc. I found this out intuitively over the years and what that is are compartmentalizing the business. Not all numbers are equal. Not all divisions are equal. As a visionary leader, that’s what the V stands for. As the entrepreneur, the creator, the builder, the owner of your business, you’re the visionary and the creator.

 

At some point, you’ve got to be willing to take that hat off of the other roles and compartmentalize the other areas of your business. What we found is there’s essentially four other compartments or divisions to be looking at. The PC stands for project coordinator or implementer. Others have called this the integrator or a person who handles execution. This could also be called a director of operations or COO type. Down on the bottom is F that stands for finance. There are certain numbers to track in finance that are different from the O, which are operations, which are different than marketing, which is the M and S which is the sales. As you’re running your business, you get your team to identify what are your three to five key projects you’re focused on this quarter, not tasks, so to speak. Tasks support the projects. What are the five big projects you’re focused on? Have a list of those and then regularly like weekly communicate what the percentage of completion is in each of those projects?

It makes it much simpler to track and you can get all kinds of sophisticated tracking. There are all kinds of great platforms out there but keep it that simple. Put a list of five key projects and then weekly communicate what percentage of completion are we at on these projects? As the owner of the company, imagine if you have a team of three virtual assistants or three full-time people or 100 full-time people. At our peak, I had close to 200 people. Theoretically, if you had 200 employees or team members or virtual staff and they were reporting to their five key projects, which they did project at the beginning of a quarter and they communicated where they’re at percentage-wise. I got 10%, 20%, 50%, 70%, 80%, 100% or it’s completed and the day it was completed. Would that give you a structure to be able to operate? That’s a simple one to be thinking of that I have found that one simple idea is demystified and helped a lot of business owners become far more productive and not feel like they’re in limbo or lost or in the dark over some of their key things going on in their company.

I want to talk about sales. We’re going to talk about that sales compartment. I’m going to talk about four key numbers and here’s why. One of our clients runs a great business and has a great team around her. She has people that she has called into her company regularly, like every day. Until we got a chance to talk and go through some of this stuff, she was not tracking those calls coming in and what was going on with those calls and that’s lost the opportunity. Everything measured improves, everything measured and reported improves exponentially. I want to introduce you to four critical numbers in the sales division of this that you can be tracking. How many contacts are made? This could be contacts out or contacts in coming to your business. This can be by phone or it could be face-to-face or it could be by email, depending on your team. You could have people doing all of those or a combination of those.

Don’t think of your goals. Think from your goals. – Dan Kuschell Click To Tweet

I had a mentor years ago, Tom Hopkins. He was one of my original mentors all the way back in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. He had this idea. It was called belly to belly. I had another coach around this same time. He said, “Put ten pennies in one pocket and every time you have a contact with somebody, a meaningful contact, move one penny over to your other pocket. By the end of the day, you’re done. You can go home when you’ve got all ten pennies over in the other pocket and only then.” Imagine the discipline that would create. The ten pennies were a way to track how many contacts made in an old school style. Another thing is to put a spreadsheet together and identify between you and all your team members, how many contacts are you making in the business proactively or that are coming in phone calls?

Presentation

Number two, how many presentations did you make for what it is you offer and sell? In other words, how many offers did you make? How many presentations for an offer did you make? That’s different than contacts. You have to identify and isolate how many presentations did you make overall? Let’s say whatever business you’re in, if you were making ten presentations a day versus once a week, do you think you’d make more money? By the mere fact of being aware of the presentation, putting a little extra accountability on yourself to make more presentation, you’ll make more money, so will your team members. Having built a large sales organization, hired and had thousands of salespeople, independent contractor and full-time employees worked for us over the years, most of them don’t like to track but they liked the paychecks they get. They may not like the behavior they have to have but they like the outcome. They liked the breakthrough that they get, making more sales, making money and all those sorts of things.

Enrollment

Number three is how many enrollments did somebody make? In other words, the sale. If you made a presentation on that particular day or given time period, how many sales were made? If you do one presentation a week, the maximum number of sales you can make at any given week is one. On the other hand, if you’re doing ten a day, one of my companies that I was blessed and fortunate to sell where we had lots of people working in it, we were doing 300 presentations a day. It was tracked by the same four numbers I’m giving you. The company made over $28 million a year in its peak and we were doing over 300 presentations a day. If you’re doing 300 presentations, would you have a chance to make more money? I imagine you would.

What you put attention to will grow and expand. – Dan Kuschell Click To Tweet

The last one is how much in the revenue? In other words, the sales amount. If we made ten sales in a given time period, call it a month or a week or a day. We made ten sales in a time period, how much revenue did it create? Now we’ve got a dollar amount. Why are these four numbers important? They give you the ability to start to develop trends in your business that you can start looking at over quarters and over time periods of six months to a year. I want to share as a bonus a couple of things. The insights that you can get from this is a bonus.

Bonus

What it allows you to do is to identify how many contacts per day, how many presentations, how many sales you’re making and how much revenue in given time periods? What would that data be worth to you as you build a company? Not day-to-day starting from scratch but in a quarter from now, in six months from now, a year from now, two years from now and three years from now, you will start to see some correlations. It also gives you the ability to isolate some other cool things. A couple of other bonus numbers to look at is your enrollment percentage. The enrollment percentage is the number of presentations divided by the number of sales that you do.

Revenue

Let’s say you do twenty presentations in a given time period and you make two sales. That’s a 10% enrollment rate. Another example of that is 50 presentations and you make ten sales. That’s 20% of an enrollment or conversion percentage. That is a critical number to know both offline and in an online-type environment. Are you tracking these? Are you looking at the trends that are happening over time? It’s critical to track some of these very simple things. Next is your value per enrollment. You don’t stop at a conversion number of value per enrollment. Not all clients are created equal nor is every rep. At my peak, we had a rep in the business which was generating over $1.5 million in revenue that he directly sold himself. We had other people who are doing $50,000 and $100,000 a year. There’s a difference in value per enrollment per rep and per person even as you, as the owner of that particular company. Value per enrollment is the dollar amount divided by the number of actual enrollments and that’ll give you a number.

Another critical number percentage to look at is value per presentation. You see this a lot in the seminar business. You hear this about these numbers on webinars. I want to demystify some of these. We might be getting a little bit in the weeds at this moment but I’m not only giving you basic one-on-one level. Maybe for some of you that have a mature business, you will appreciate more of the advanced thinking behind these number of value per presentation, dollar amount divided by a number of presentations. On webinars, track the number of attendees or different timeframes. You’ll have a different number of attendees at the start of a webinar. I’m working with a strategic partner. We’re doing a webinar and we’ll track how many people registered, how many people attended and how many people were on it 30 minutes, 45 minutes and an hour and we’ll have that tracked. We’ll track the number of attendees that see a replay of the webinar. We’ll also track the number of sales that come from that and the dollar amount of those different sales. What if you were tracking those? What it allows you to do is come up with a conversion percentage. Now, you can identify the number of attendees divided by the number of sales gives you a conversion percentage.

 

You hear guys like Russell Brunson who is brilliant at what he does. He will say, “I did a presentation at XYZX Growth Conference. I enrolled 20% of the people in the room and we had over $1 million revenue day.” He knows his numbers. I can assure you that if you want to grow your business, grow your impact, grow your reach and grow your ability to make a bigger difference and contribute, start looking at working backward. Begin with the end in mind and think of what I can track. You can identify the value per attendee. This is the total sales amount divided by the total attendees into different seminars. This is an old school strategy. Back when I was on stage speaking to sell, we would get revenue per head. Dollar per head, they call it. I don’t necessarily like it. I feel like that’s a little more transactional than I like. The principle and psychology are sound to be tracking. Tracking something like this is better than nothing, like value per attendee.

Lastly, this is one that in your business will become probably the most important number that you could ever think about and it’s LTV. You’ll hear this a lot but it’s almost like the Loch Ness monster. A lot of businesses talk about it but you never see it. If there’s anything I was going to share with you is get committed to focus on identifying what your Lifetime Value of a client is. When you’re new or you’re starting, your Lifetime Value is going to be smaller and it’s going to feel a little bit overwhelming and stressful to try to figure out. It doesn’t have to be. Make it simple but come up with a model to identify your long-term value. Look at the trends over a month, a quarter, six months, a year, two years, five years, you may shift businesses and you may add new businesses in. These core fundamental numbers are critical for you and your business to be tracking to help give you clarity. When you have clarity and certainly it makes it a whole lot easier to identify what are you expanding and what are you bringing in and it makes it almost I don’t want to say easy because this hasn’t been easy. This has been a multi-year decade journey to go from 246 pounds down to 150 pounds something at the time we’re doing this and that takes effort, commitment and discipline. Tracking and having key numbers to pay attention to have helped make it real.

I challenge you, put these numbers in place, come back to this, jot those down and put your spreadsheet together. If you’d like our help, this is part of what we do when we work with clients is help you go behind the curtain and go deeper in your business. If you start working with the end in mind and if you put focus into this, have you ever heard what you put attention to? It grows and expands. It’s the power of intention. What you put attention to will grow and expand. If you start putting your attention to doing more presentations, to doing more enrollments, to getting your conversion percentages up, it will grow up and when it goes up, your revenue can grow. Your profits can grow, you can have a bigger impact, a bigger reach and contribution.

That’s what I want for you. I didn’t draw something out of this but if you’d like our help, you can go to BreakthroughStrategyCall.com. If you’re looking for a way to grow your business, possibly double, triple it, do it with less stress so you can work more on the business and do more of what you love to do. Maybe spend more time in a freedom zone with family and doing the things you enjoy and you deserve to do instead of in the business wearing twelve hats, being reliant on you, being reliant on networking or old-style approaches. If you want to go deeper and have a conversation, see how we can help you. We’ll show you how we can give you greater clarity for your business. We’ll give you the ability to connect the dots and to see the blind spots. Most importantly, get unstuck so you can develop a system where you can have a predictable flow of leads and sales coming in every single day. Imagine what that would be like. Picture that, picture what it would be like if you had a daily flow of new leads and sales coming in every single day in your life and it could be measured. If it’s measured and improves and measured and reported.

If you have someone like us as an accountability partner, if it’s not us, find somebody that can help you do. If you’d like to go deeper with us, we’d welcome the opportunity. You can set up a time for a conversation, see how we can do that. It’s no cost to be able to set up the initial conversation and analyze your business. We’re going to help you identify where you’re at, where you want to go, some of the things that might be missed and this might be one of them. We’ll show you some ways to be able to bridge those gaps. It may be offering you some of the things we do. If we’re a fit, we’ll talk about that but if we’re not a fit, no harm, no foul, we can refer you to other resources and other tools.

We have over 200 hours of free education available to people like you who are excited to want to grow their business, to have a bigger impact, reach and contribution. If you want to go deeper, go to BreakthroughStrategyCall.com. It will say request your invitation or something like that. You’ll fill out some questions so we can get an understanding of where you’re at contextually and we can make it a productive conversation. If you want to come back to this episode, do so. Our highest compliment is if you share this with somebody who could use it. If you know of a business owner, an entrepreneur and a visionary creator, someone who’s looking to grow and scale their business, share this with them. We look forward to working with you.

Resources mentioned in this episode: 

• Breakthrough3X
• Tom Hopkins
• https://www.Facebook.com/dankuschellpage/videos/2260992604143110/
• http://www.BreakthroughStrategyCall.com