Finding Your One Thing

0:02Hi, and welcome to this week's episode of the Epic Entrepreneurs podcast where we are all about helping business owners just like you achieve success. So we don't do fancy smancy. We don't do flashing lights. We don't do a lot of things that a lot of podcasts will do. These are just real stories about real people and their entrepreneurial and business experiences. We go into their wins, their challenges, and their learnings. So we hope you enjoy it.

0:37hey there there's a great story about a former ceo of continental airlines and continental was ranking super low in all the customer satisfaction rankings and they were like 20th in the u.s Airlines. And it just wasn't acceptable. So new CEO comes in and decides, hey, what is something that we can concentrate on? What is one thing we can fix that will completely change the game for us? And what he came up with was, we need to start improving on time departures. And so that was the number, on-time departures. And so everybody on the team was working to improve on-time departures. And they were 20 for a while and gradually it began to grow and I think they got it all the way to third or fourth of all the American airlines.

1:37And it was all because they found the one measurement to focus on. Now, I've talked to a lot of clients and I've asked them to do a lot And usually I have to sit down and work through this with them on how to pick a proper metric. And so I'm going to go over it with you now. I want you to know that all of this is in my book, The Coach Approach. And if you want a free copy of it, all you got to do is go to Gift from Bill. If you want to get a hardcover copy of it, then you're going to want to go to Amazon and just look up The Coach Approach. It'll pop up and you can just order it from there. It's a very short book, but this chapter that we're talking about is called The Numbers Don't Lie.

2:20And it's about picking metrics that are going to help you improve your business. So you're going to want to pay attention. This is often kind of a dry subject, but it's out there. So I'm going to go over exactly how to do it. And then we've got a thing called the Scoreboard Optimizer, which we are happy to share with you. We created a tool that you can download or that you can request and we'll email it to you. So let me tell you how you do it. The first thing you do is you choose a problem, something you want to solve, something you want to improve, an opportunity, anything like that, that you want to get better at.

2:59The second thing is, what is your desired outcome? So let me just give you an example. I'm going to use weight as an example. So what do you want to improve? Well, an improvement in weight or fitness, let's say you want to lose 10 pounds. So the outcome you want is whatever weight you want to get to. So if you're at 175 and you want to be 165, then 165 would be the outcome. What are the actions you're going to have to take? Well, the actions, you want to get specific here, but in general, to lose weight, you need to either eat less, get more exercise, or do both. So you want to have specific plans for that, but let's just say that's basically what you have.

3:39So what's the current situation? Well, if I'm trying to get to 165 and I weigh 175, the current situation is 175. Then you want to come up with your measurements. And so there's four kinds of measurements. There's leading measurements, there's lagging measurements, there's people measurements, and then there's productivity measurements. So leading measurements are something like an activity that's going to lead to an outcome. Lagging would be lagging. So, for example, in this case, leading would be maybe how many calories intake or how many hours of walking I did or something along the lines of input.

4:13Lagging is going to be the actual weight. People indicators, that's how you would measure a person. You'd measure a team. You'd measure maybe the whole company on certain people indicators. And then you have productivity indicators, which is generally an outcome over an income. So more in depth, if you'd like some help around understanding those or putting them into your business KPIs from top to bottom, then you're going to want to reach out to us. We'll sit down, we'll have a bit of a chat with you, and we'll talk about how we can help you do that. The next thing you want to do is figure out how you're going to report it.

4:47So is it going to be a chart? Is it going to be a graph? Is it going to be just numbers in an Excel spreadsheet? Whatever it is. And then you got to set up accountability. So what is the accountability? really like who's going to hold you accountable. Well, if I were losing weight, I'd want a buddy or my wife or somebody that I could have to report this to. Then what do I need to learn? Well, I probably need to learn how to eat better or need to do certain workouts. Whatever it is, I am going to need to learn something to improve this thing. So that's how you do it. It's all on the optimizer. If you'd like a free copy of the optimizer, just put optimizer in the return email or in the chat, depending on where you're watching this, and we'll be glad to get you a free copy of the Optimizer, and you can begin to put numbers into your business.

5:39Now, this came home to us because we get our clients together every Tuesday or every second Tuesday of the month. So by the way, if you're anywhere in the sort of Western North Carolina area and within a couple hours of here and you'd like to join us for a day, then let me know. We'll be happy to invite you to come in and check out our community. We get great work done. We worked right through this and helped all of them get at least one metric for them to work on. So one thing for them to improve and one metric to measure. Generally, we had four or five metrics, but that was how it all worked out.

6:15So if you'd like some more help with that, just reach out to us. Hey, and I hope you have a fantastic week. And until next week, all the best.

6:27Hey, thanks for listening to the Epic Entrepreneurs podcast. Here's three things that you can do. Number one, remember to subscribe to the podcast. It takes very little effort on your part. It's going to help you and your fellow entrepreneurs. Plus, you guys know how it works. The more subscribers we get, the more cool things we can offer to you. Second, to learn more about growing your business, just download my book, The Coach Approach. It's free for you at giftfrombill.com. That's giftfrombill.com. Hey, and if you'd like more info about growing your business and what we can do to help you grow your business, send me an email directly.

7:14Just send it to williamgilliland at actioncoach.com. That's my personal email that I read. No one else reads it first. it's not screened it's my real email just send it to me i can't wait to talk to you hey and until then all the best