Without data, there’s no way for you to make accurate assessments on what you’re seeing. Without numbers, you are much more likely to plan with your gut and not base it on reality.

So what kind of numbers are we supposed to be looking for?

In today’s episode, we cover 3 main areas that must be tracked to make the best decisions:

- Revenue

- Expenses

- Team

The data will set you free and improve decision-making at every level!

Learn more at https://www.adamliette.com

Discover how to work with me: https://www.adamliette.com/work-with-me

Transcript

What's going on smooth operators, welcome to this new week, hope you had a good weekend, you're ready for a fresh start, you know, dust off all the cobwebs on the weekend, hope you had some good time down. I'm not always the best example of that. So I'm just going to be straight up with you I, I try to take Sundays off, I'm successful about 60% of the time. So you know, for whatever it's worth, you know, if you fall into that mindset trap of you must take Sundays off, or you must take your day off. And you don't do it. I mean, if a lot of this work life balance stuff is about what works best for you. And so that's just what I'll say about that, you know, if you're the type of person that that two hours on Sunday really gets you set for Monday, helps you synthesize stuff in the week, or if you're especially if you're working like multiple gigs, and you got your side gig get your main gig. Like I don't know how you do that without seven days a week. Anyway, with that, let's get to the topic for today. And it's about knowing your numbers. You can't, you must must have a way of having numbers to look at what you're doing what your team is doing. How the business is doing. It's it's amateurish, just to rely on intuition. And to think you're going to be able to just feel your way through the market, your numbers are going to be what really tells you what's happening on inside of your business, inside the team, with your revenue with all those things.

Otherwise, you're going to be making every assumption based on your gut. And not basing it in reality actually makes decision making harder makes decision making less accurate, it means you're more prone to making the wrong decision, you're more prone to questioning your decision because we don't have the numbers to back our play. So I want to get into some of the numbers that we need to be really tracking. And then different ways that we can track that and make it a whole lot easier on ourselves. Because it's one of those things like when you start talking about tracking your numbers and spreadsheets and all these dashboards and stuff, man, you can get out of control with it. Okay, I've seen some truly wazuh trackers, and I've coached people in their marketing where they were looking at different things and trying to make sense of it and like, like, Dude, you're making this really hard. Like you're actually making it, you're making it so hard on yourself that it's actually going to throw up blockers to actually executing. Like, the key that we're trying to look for is the minimum effective numbers that you need to make the right decision. Just as an example, I was coaching a client the other day, and they noticed that they got their ad spend. So there they have front end ads to one of their tripwire offers. And the main goal of that campaign, that line of effort is to keep that front end offer at breakeven or better. And they're doing that they're at about 1.5x row as so good. For every dollar they put into advertising. They're pulling out $1.50 in revenue. So okay, we're on track. And then they ran a big promotion, they realized that about half of the people that bought in the promotion, were also people that came in through their front end through their lead magnet into a tripwire. And they were trying to redo all their calculations. I'm like, man, you're gonna drive yourself crazy. If you start trying to track the long tail back to its source. That's just one small example of where, like, we could do that. But really like, is that really the best use of our time? Is it really something you're going to be able to accurately plan on?

You know, I don't think so. You know, there is such a thing as the numbers that we're getting on a full list promotion, versus a front end funnel. And that those those two, they seem like two different things right. And so let's treat them as two different things rather than trying to equate the success of our ads campaign on a sale that came four months after the fact Because I see that as two different parameters, right? The row as what we're looking for on the front end is all about the effectiveness of our funnel of that front end funnel. Where as a purchase on the back end four to six months later, is an effective is a measure of effectiveness on your nurture campaigns, and your episodic calendar promotions. So why try to mix those to understand, and I think if we look at our business in a bigger perspective, we can, I could probably like 20, or 30, different examples like that. But the important thing is like knowing the numbers that matter for you right in the here and now. So a couple of different areas that as operators, we really need to be keeping a close look at and making sure that we're tracking on a regular basis. So the first thing is just your overall p&l. What is your profit, and what is your loss over a duration. So p&l gets kind of funky, right? Because we'll have good weeks, bad weeks, good months, bad months, good quarters. So p&l, you have to be looking at it in different timeframes as well. So a lot of times, I would be tracking on a week to week basis. But with my particular business, my my lead gen. And lead the sale is, you know, really, it's on average 17 to 28 days, between acquiring a lead and getting a sale. So you have to know your business and know what those numbers actually mean. I can track it on a week to week, but then it's helpful to roll it up and do a full month, because the full month actually gives me the best indicator of the success of my business.

So there's your overall p&l. I also like to track to make sure I'm tracking every single major promotion I'm running, you know, what is the profit, the revenue and the profit for that promotion? And how are we tracking those numbers? Like what are we looking for? Are we looking for revenue per lead, revenue per per watt, per click, average revenue per follower, I mean, we can go a number of different ways with this. But the important consideration is nailed down what you want and be consistent on how you're documenting the success of promotions, I tend to try to do it per lead. So the number of people on my list revenue equals this amount. So we can do a quick calculation on our revenue per lead. We talked about PPC and like those front end promotions, absolutely, you need to be tracking them on a regular basis. If you have a media buyer, that's really something we want to be passing on to them. And for a lot of my lot of my students, a lot of my clients, most of them have memberships. With memberships especially, there's two important areas that need to be looking at, they need to be looking at churn. So the number of new members you get and the number of members that you lose. And what is the actual lifetime value of a member when they join. These are all really important to to assessing the health of your business and really helping you make strategic decisions. So this is all revenue stuff. This all the stuff that we hear about from every single guy that talks about ads or funnels or media buying, like we know these things, let's get a little bit deeper and peel apart this onion where I want to know the team members. I want to know what my team is doing. Because that's where I make the bulk of my decisions. As the Director of Operations, it's all on what the team is doing. So a couple areas we really need to be assessing.

The first is what are what is our utilization? How many hours per week is each team member working? How many hours are they billing? If they are on salary, how many hours are they actually working? Do we have a way of tracking that? That's their total hours. What about their hours per task? How long are they spending on each area of emphasis within their role? I think gosh, Adam, we're getting pretty granular You darn right we are when you find ways to track this over time. You can do predictable team management pretty Double growth scheduling, you can even start look at the promotions that you have up and coming and be able to realistically estimate what team assets are going to be needed. To execute that strategy.

You have to start with the baseline, though you have to understand what this number of sales equals to Team outputs into what's actually required to fulfill. We get into those those hours that hour per test, what is then your total team requirements. Of those total team requirements, how many of those requirements are what I call recurring?

So we all know, I've talked about this in a previous episode, we have this this sub sub, this part of our task list the things that have to happen in the company, a certain subset of it I call recurring task, meaning they're tasks that must happen every day, every week, every month, just to keep the company moving as is. So these are not necessarily growth oriented. They're not new projects. They're just stuff that happens within the company to keep the lights on. Things like customer service, things like comment, moderation, managing communities, sales, even all these things happen on a regular basis, over and over again, repeatedly. recurring tasks, when managed correctly, don't really require much like management per se, where it's you having to tell people what to do and do this and do that and do this. There are things that just happen. What are your recurring task requirements? Do you know? That's a good thing to know. Because now we know the minimum required just to keep the company running. And as we start to think bigger, does each team member have their KPIs that they're working to achieve? What are those KPIs? What does success look like for each and every one of your team members, everyone should have a KPI they are trying to meet. And you know, their performance based upon what their KPIs telling you. You're not going to fix any of this overnight. So if you walk out of this episode of the podcast I got I gotta fix this isn't this just fix one for now?

You'll get there. But take it take your time, build this stuff out as needed. Couple little tricks that we can use to really help with this. Just to make it so much easier on ourselves. First off. I love the idea of having standardized and templated reports. Especially when I'm working off evergreen promotions, PPC promotions, calendered promotions launches. The report that we use to gather all the pertinent data that we need to capture in that moment, can and should be a template. It's something that is calculating the same information every time can even be I use spreadsheets and Google Docs. The spreadsheet has the calculations built into it. It has the categories where I want the raw data put in. That way we take all guessing out of this. We're working from a plan, we're working from a framework of structure. This not only makes sure that everything is done the exact same way every single time. But we know when things are done the exact same way every time it becomes off loadable it becomes something that you can delegate, because that's the next step. Once we have things in a framework, we can teach someone else to do it on our behalf. Someone else can gather that raw information. So we part of the decision making team isn't stuck in the weeds. gathering the information, we're able to then grab it, someone else does it for us. We take a look at it. And because we're fresh, we're able to make different assertions from it. That really just gives us just a lot of power in that moment. Because we're not bogged down with everything else. Just use automation wherever possible.

Most CRMs Most that I've used at least have your ways of putting in all the parameters for a report. Save those. Save those reports. I know all of them don't, but the ones that do, make sure you save them. If you can't save the report have a walkthrough that you use to gather the same report each and every time. Again, so we're always working from a place of a framework. And we're taking all the variables out of out of things. For my team, there's a couple of great little tricks that we can use, especially for time tracking, which is where a lot of this stuff with what the team is doing plays into. So as you know, I use project management systems. And like most of you, I use time tracking for my team members. Here's the great thing. There's now all these integrations between the software's so asana and Time Doctor have a direct integration. So you can be in Asana, click Start on the task. And it'll actually display the tasks that you're working on in your Time Doctor, which means, at the end of a period, like let's say, the end of a month, or the end of a week, I can pull that report from Time Doctor. And now I can break down where my team is putting their time. So if I have those numbers, now I can create my own spreadsheet, my own tracker, create a baseline based on what the team is doing now. Measure that over the next 23456 weeks. Now, we have really solid expectations, and we can start to monitor all of our inputs over time, we can see what increases in sales. Due to our increases in requirements, we can see how a team member might spend longer on this in this week, then this other week in a certain area of the company.

But we're now looking and gathering data to better allow us to make future moves to make future changes future allocation of resources. And finally, with your KPIs with what your team members are tasked to do, that is something that ultimately, you need that to either have it automated, or you need to have the team member responsible for self reporting, their achievement of their KPIs are they achieving? Now I know that brings up I mean, that can be super uncomfortable for many of us when we have to realize that wait, people are reporting their own success measures? Yes, I actually do advocate for that. Now, that's not to say you're not going to want to spot check them from time to time, make sure that the numbers that they're giving you are accurate. But by them having to report their own numbers, you're giving them radical responsibility for their own success. For what they're able to do. All of this leads to a company that is driven from knowledge driven from facts driven from data, which is going to better enable you to make decisions in the future. So if you don't know your numbers, if there were any, if there are any blank spots where you're just not sure how the company is performing. Maybe think about how you're gathering this information. What importance are you putting to it. And when you put importance to gathering your numbers, you will be better served, you're going to be in a better position to grow.

And ultimately feel a whole lot more confident about your decision making your way of looking at the company. And you can see you can move forward faster. Thank you so much for listening. Before you jumped, please just go over to Apple and do give us a review and a rating. It helps more than you can imagine. And I genuinely appreciate it. It lets me continue doing these podcast episodes at no charge. But until then operators man you know what to do. You got to do the work. But a lot of these systems, setting them up as the hard part. Once they're set up once team is trained in them once we have processes. We've seen this in other areas of the business things just get easier. And if you'd like any help setting these things up setting up the various parts of your operating system. That's really what the smooth operating system is about. That's what I do. That's what I help my clients do inside their companies.