MBA2444 Q&A Wednesday: What is the most important tool you use in your business?

0:09Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show. Because a better business begins with you. That's why we deliver practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome. And today's episode is Q &A Wednesday, where we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you've got a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over at omar at 100mba.net. Today's question is from Len, and Len asks, What is the most important tool you use in your business? Love this question from Len, because I use a lot of tools in our business. A lot of different software products, a lot of different apps.

0:46Chrome extensions. I use physical calendars, journals, a whole bunch of different tools to make it all happen. But what is the most important tool? Well, I'm going to get into it. And you might be surprised by the answer, but it's the honest truth. It's what really drives everything that is important in our business. I'm going to get into the details of what it is and why it's the most important tool and how you can start utilizing it as well in your business today. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So what is the most important tool I use in our business? A lot of people think it's going to be some sort of complicated software or even a service or even some sort of AI tool.

1:25But the honest truth is the most important tool in our business is a spreadsheet. Yep, plain old spreadsheets. We like to use Google Sheets because it's in the cloud and we use a Google Suite. But spreadsheets rule everything, really. Most importantly, a spreadsheet is used for your profit and loss sheets, used so that you can track how much money you're making, how much you're spending, what your profit is, whether it's a percentage or the actual dollar amount, and where are there areas for improvement. Without a spreadsheet, you really can't know if your business is working. I open our profit and loss sheet and many other spreadsheets, which I'll mention today, on a regular basis, like every day, because it's really the dashboard of our business.

2:09It's very hard for you to know if you're moving in the right direction if you're not looking at your dashboard. Imagine a pilot flying a plane without their dashboard, without being able to see if they're moving in the right direction to the destination. So I can't stress this enough. Your finances, your numbers, it's the core reason why your business stays in business. It's the tool that allows you to have cash flow and oxygen so you can fight another day so you can continue to work on your business and grow and scale and serve your customers. But that's not the only use I use spreadsheets for.

2:43Everything that we're tracking, like for example, today I had a meeting with my team for the$100 MBA and in our team, we have a precision scorecard, we call it. It's basically our dashboard of goals for each month. And every month we plug in our numbers, whether it's podcast download numbers or email subscribers or traffic numbers. And these numbers can be different for your business depending on your goals. But the point here is that we have a spreadsheet that the whole team updates regularly, depending on their duties, and we look at it and say, hey, how are we doing? How are we doing compared to last month?

3:15How are we doing this month? Are we on track to hit our goals? This is very simple, but a lot of people don't do this. Why? Because anything that's easy to do is also easy not to do. And this is why I say spreadsheets are the number one tool in my business. This podcast I'm recording right now that has over 2 ,400 episodes all starts in a spreadsheet. with the episode number, the episode title, the date that it's going to air, calls to action, show notes, all the things that we need to include for each episode before it publishes. The whole team works off this spreadsheet. It's kind of where it all begins is where it all starts and where it all ends.

3:56I just ran a one-day event here in Australia for business owners. That event, you guessed it, all started from a spreadsheet, a spreadsheet of names of people that we want to invite, of people that actually accepted our invite, who confirmed, who paid, what's their email address, what's their phone number, what's their dietary requirements, what's their emergency contact, all that kind of stuff is included in the spreadsheet. And it's the source of truth. Anytime we do anything in the event or any of the steps or duties or tasks we have to do, we refer to the spreadsheet. We need to create nameplates or name tags for the seats.

4:32We want to make sure the name is spelled correctly, go to the spreadsheet. We need to email people so that they have updates. Their email address is in the spreadsheet. Somebody's running late and we need to call them and see if everything's okay. Their number is in the spreadsheet. Pretty much any business that runs efficiently will start in a spreadsheet. It's a way to organize your ideas, your thoughts, and a fantastic way to make sure that you put all your thoughts in one place, all your to-dos, all the things you have to get out of your brain so you don't feel overwhelmed and pop it in a spreadsheet so that you know, okay, I have it covered.

5:06I won't forget. It'll be there and I can track it. And in the example of this event, every time we completed a task, we would mark it as complete. And therefore, a day or two before the event, we can look at that list and say, okay, we pretty much cover everything. Here's what's left. We got to get this done. Who's going to do what? We got to assign these tasks to certain people. This would be so hard. When I say this, I mean an event, a podcast, a business, whatever it might be, would be so hard to run without a spreadsheet. I actually encourage a lot of business owners to learn how to use spreadsheets, learn some simple formulas, how to generate graphs, pivot tables, things like that.

5:47You can learn everything you need in maybe less than an hour on either a YouTube video or a course on Udemy. And these are core skills that can help you run an efficient business and know that your numbers are right. A lot of people who are listening to this show know that I was a teacher. I was a teacher for over a decade. And early on in my teaching career, this is early 2000s, our school didn't have a CRM. It didn't have a grading system. It didn't have an attendance system. We had to run everything on Excel spreadsheets. I talk about report cards and grades and assignments and teacher rosters and schedules and a whole bunch of things.

6:26We had a spreadsheet for everything. But in that experience over 10 years, I learned how to use Excel really well. I learned how to use a spreadsheet. I learned how to do formulas. I learned how to do virtual lookups. I learned how to do a whole bunch of stuff to make my life a whole bunch easier. And now in my business, because I learned those things back in the day, I'm able to apply those skills and make my life so much easier, much more efficient. And you can automate a lot of things. A lot of people don't know that spreadsheets are pretty smart tools. If you want to project how much money you're going to make in the next quarter and the quarter after that, you could do that with a spreadsheet pretty simply.

7:01So it's a worthy skill to have. Yes, I use a lot of sophisticated tools. I use a lot of email marketing and social media tools and editing software for videos and images and HR tools and a whole bunch of stuff that helps run our business. But actually, the most important tool is the simple spreadsheet. Now, why do I like to use Google Sheets? Well, we're in the G Suite anyway. We use Google for email, so therefore we get these tools for free. Email and Gmail is very, very inexpensive. I'm talking about email that's hooked up to your company domain. and with that account you get Google Docs, Google Drive, and Google Sheets along with a whole bunch of other stuff but these are the three things that they're really good at.

7:45I'm not in love with their slides. I don't use it at all. I actually really love Canvas slides. That's what we use but we use Google Drive, Docs, and Sheets pretty much every day. What's fantastic with Google Sheets is that you have it saved in the cloud. You can access it anywhere on your computer, on your phone, on a desktop, on a tablet, on whatever. You can easily share access with other team members and you can have a setting where you can just have it automatically share with anybody with the same domain as your company, meaning their email is with your company. This allows people to collaborate and add to the sheet, make comments, all kinds of stuff.

8:19It's simple to use. It's very fast and it just does its job, right? It just works all the time, which we absolutely love. So what are some other ways we use spreadsheets in our business that are maybe a little bit outside of the box creative, maybe some ideas that you haven't heard of before. Well, we use spreadsheets to plan any kind of business trip. The itinerary, the schedule, the notes, the confirmation number is all in the spreadsheet. So all the information I need for my trip is in the spreadsheet. I can easily just pull it up when I'm at the airport, when I'm looking to pick up my rent-a-car, when I'm trying to get my confirmation for the hotel.

8:55I don't have to open up a million apps or a million emails. I just go to one spreadsheet and it's all there. I have a spreadsheet that is just called a brain dump. I have a spreadsheet where I just dump ideas. These ideas could be for podcast episodes, for videos, for social media. It could be for tweets. It could be for blog posts. It could be whatever. It's just a bunch of ideas I want to dump. I might have a category, say this might be a good blog post or this might be a good topic to discuss on an interview or in a podcast. And this is very handy because I have Google sheets on my phone and sometimes something pops in my head.

9:27I get an idea. I could just open up in one click and I can just jot down the information very quickly. I really prefer this over a note-taking app or a doc because with columns and rows, I can easily categorize things, color code, mark them as done. It's just a lot more organized. Anytime you're running any kind of event that has a schedule, this is fantastic to kind of brainstorm schedules. Anytime you're running any event, one day, multi-day that has a schedule, spreadsheets are great for that, but they're also great for run sheets. A run sheet is basically a schedule for the organizers. So it has the time, the activity, and what to do during those times.

10:04So for example, the session before the break, you want to talk to the caterer to make sure the coffee and tea is ready. That needs to be put down somewhere that's not in a doc or a beautiful looking front facing schedule that you'd print out and put on people's tables. Spreadsheets do all the dirty work and allow you to make sure you don't miss a beat. Anytime you're analyzing any kind of information, whether it's a marketing campaign, traffic, conversions, one of the best ways to show that or display that to you and your team is with a chart, whether it's a pie chart, a bar chart, a Gantt chart to see progress.

10:38And charts are very easy to create in Sheets, in Excel, when you just plug in the right numbers that represent the chart. You just highlight those numbers and create a table, a chart, a bar graph, whatever it might be. and it's an easy way in a meeting to just show, hey, this is what the data is showing. And by showing a chart or graph or whatever it might be, it makes a lot of sense to people, especially when you're trying to show like progress over time with a line graph or percentage of a hole like a pie graph. Graphs are fantastic. Listen, a lot of people just gloss over what you're saying.

11:13They're just looking at the screen and they're like, okay, that makes sense from a visual point of view. So go crazy, go nuts, have fun. And some people use sheets to do Sudoku puzzles or create them, artwork, all kinds of stuff. So, Lem, thank you so much for asking today's Q &A Wednesdays question. If you've got a question you want to ask me right here on the show, go ahead and email me, omar at 100mba.net. Again, my email is omar at 100mba.net. I reply to every single email. It's one of my favorite things to do to connect with our audience. I might be a little slow to reply because I like to reply personally, but I will reply.

11:47And if you have a question you want to ask and want it featured on the show, I'll make sure of it and put it on Q &A Wednesday. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of my favorite features of Google Sheets is that they have offline mode, meaning you can use your sheet. You can refer to it. You can look at it even if you don't have internet connection. This is especially important if you're going somewhere overseas, you're traveling, and you may not have access to internet when you land. So by making the sheet available offline, you can still see it on your phone and refer to all the information you need to get yourself sorted.

12:20I know this was like a huge plug for Google Sheets. I swear they are not sponsoring today's episode. I just absolutely love the tool. It's really the backbone of everything we do in our business. Thanks so much for listening to the$100 MBA show. We love what you hear. Make sure you hit subscribe on your favorite podcast app. I'll check you in the next episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Thank you.