This Might Be Why Your Business Isn’t Growing

Alright, today I’m going to share with you two of the most common mistakes that I see entrepreneurs at all levels making. And this was reinforced for me this weekend or last week when I was in Cancun, speaking at this mastermind. And this is a group of individuals who are doing seven and eight figures of revenue in a lot of cases. So these are not like po dunk entrepreneurs. These guys, they’ve been playing the game, they know what they’re doing. And I see this mistake come up even amongst these circles. And so I want to share it with you because I think at all levels of the game, it’s important to keep this in mind. Reflects back from two ideas.

Number one, that which gets measured gets managed. In the beginning, when you’re just kind of building your business and it’s just you and maybe a couple of people on your team, you don’t have the time and the energy to go and record all the data that you’re getting from all the different sources. You’re so busy in the weeds just doing the thing, trying to grow with a machine that you’re not really recording data and then reflecting on it. And the problem with this is you grow in kind of a haphazard way. You end up spending a lot of time spinning your wheels on things that don’t really move the needle. But because you’re not looking at the numbers, you don’t realize it. And this could be in your finances, right? You’re not looking at how much revenue you’re pulling in, how much is going out on expenses on a daily basis. You’re not looking at this maybe on a monthly basis.

My guess is 99% of you listening to this, you’re not looking at your bank statements nearly enough as an entrepreneur. Just saying, and I know this from firsthand experience because I’ve worked with so many students that are in that boat and I have been in that boat myself. So I’m just saying that which gets measured gets managed. So you need to look at your stuff more frequently. Now, that’s the finance side. There’s so many different sides of this, though, and the other side of this. So number one, that which gets measured gets managed. Number two is that you have to inspect what you expect.
So what starts happening is as we are growing, we bring on team members to take different functions off of our plate. And we’re usually first doing the things that we hate doing, right? Like if you’re a product guy or gal and you have a service that you love doing, maybe the first thing that you start outsourcing is the marketing, the social media, the content creation, and you just say, good luck, godspeed, go do the thing right. And you just let people go off into the field because they’re the professional. They tell you they know what they’re doing. You don’t, and you don’t love it anyway, so might as well just trust them to do the thing. But then you look up a couple months later and you start to realize you’re not really seeing the results that you had hoped for. Now, you don’t know if your expectations are even realistic or not, because, again, you’re not a professional marketer, and you’ve kind of abdicated the responsibility there. So these two concepts start to play out in a very interesting way.
That which gets measured gets managed, and then we have to inspect what we expect. But the problem is, number one, we don’t know what to measure, and therefore we don’t know what to manage. We rely on the person to tell us what is the right thing to measure. And often what they’re, what they’re measuring is the growth. They’re saying, okay, you got this many subscribers, and this is how many we added last month. This is how many likes this post got. This is how many engagements this got. This is how many leads we generated, all of that stuff.
The problem with those metrics is that they are all outcome dependent. They are all lag measures. They are already the thing that has occurred. So you have grown this. You’ve added 100 subscribers this year. This post got 15 likes this month. We generated five leads. The problem with this is that we don’t control this.
I don’t know what the inputs were. Is that based off of one post a day? Is that ten posts a day? Are you doing 15 outreaches a day? Is that 15 outreaches per month? Without knowing our inputs, the outputs are irrelevant. Not only that, but the outputs are largely irrelevant because we don’t control the outputs. The only thing we can control is what we do at the front end, what we put into the machine, and what pops out the other side. That is just what’s going to pop out the other side, and we can triangulate and say, okay, well, I didn’t get out what I hoped based off of what I put in, so maybe I need to tweak what I put in. But you cannot tweak the thing that came out. You can only tweak what you put in and how much you put in. Right.
So the thing that you measure and therefore manage are the inputs. It’s not how many subscribers you got. It’s how many posts you made. It’s not how many engagements you got. It’s how many people you engaged with. It’s not how many leads came in. It’s how many opens and cold outreaches and conversations you initiated. That’s what you measure.
It’s the input, not the output. The second side of this, of the inspect what you expect. You need to be looking at the inputs that the team is doing on your behalf. You need to be looking at the content, at the comments at the DM’s that they’re sending. And if you’re not doing that, then don’t be surprised if what they’re doing isn’t in alignment with what you want. Case in point, I’m working. I’m talking to this gentleman. He’s doing, I think, mid seven figures.
I think he was doing like $7 million in revenue. So he has a great systems, great team. He’s done a lot of training. He’s a very smart, savvy, sophisticated guy. And I said, okay, show me. He’s like, social media is not really working for us at the moment. I said, cool, what’s your system? I got some VA’s doing the stuff they’re posting every day. They’re leaving comments and they’re doing the DM’s.
I’m like, cool. So that sounds like you’re doing all the fundamentals, all the basics. Let’s take a look at what you’re measuring and let’s look at what they’re actually doing. And he goes, okay. So he pulls open the metric spreadsheet, and right away I know that we’re in deep doo doo because all of the metrics being measured are outcomes. There are subscribers, there are impressions, engagements, all that stuff. And I go, okay, how many people is your VA reaching out to every single day? How many did she reach out to yesterday? How many did she reach out to on Monday? And he goes, I don’t know. I’m like, okay, that’s the problem.
Number one, we can’t manage to expectations if we don’t have the expectation clearly set. I can’t say you didn’t reach out to ten people yesterday. If I didn’t clearly articulate that, you need to be reaching out to a minimum of ten people every day. And then I can’t measure or track the progress if you haven’t actually logged the data. So that’s number one, is he had to go back and he has to identify what are those inputs that I want to measure on a daily basis to know that the machine is humming along. The second thing that we then did was we looked at the comments that the VA was leaving, the types of posts they were creating, the DM’s that they were making, and it was immediately evident this guy had a script that VA was supposed to be following. His team was supposed to be following it. But as soon as we looked at the post, the DM’s, it was immediately clear this person was deviating very slightly but meaningfully from the script.
As a result, none of the content, none of the posts, none of the DM’s were converting how they wanted to. And this was a simple process of inspecting what you expect, looking at the work that they were doing, and then asking yourselves, is this, what is this? Is this good? Is this not good? Right? So then I asked them, okay, what’s your cadence for communicating improvements or coaching this person to help them improve? He goes, well, we have a meeting once a week at the end of each week. And I go, have you ever looked at any of their posts or comments to DM’s or anything like that and given them feedback on it? And he goes, no. I go, well, what are you doing on those calls then? Like, that’s not a coaching call. The way that you coach is you look at what they did. You give them feedback on ways to improve, you give them reinforcement for what they did. Well, this isn’t coaching them. The other side of this, I said, listen, your marketing machine is the most important machine in your business because no customers, no product.
It doesn’t matter how great your product is if you have no customers, right? So we need to have a consistent, predictable way of driving revenue into our business. That’s the marketing engine. And so it’s not enough for you just to be reviewing these numbers with this person once a week if you’re not getting the results that you want. Now, if you’re getting the results that you want, they’re blowing it out of the water. Yeah, once a week is perfect, but if they’re not living up to the standards, you need to decrease the time that you inspect what you expect. So instead of weekly sitting down and coaching this person, you need to be doing it every single day. Hey, let’s take a look at the ten DM’s that you sent yesterday. Let’s look at the tendency comments that you made.
Let’s look at the one post you made. Let’s give feedback on it. Okay? Let’s do this differently next time. Let’s use these words. Let’s not format it in this way. Coach them in real time every single day. And guess what? By the end of the week, they’re going to have improved five times as fast as the person who’s only doing it once a week. So I wanted to brain dump all of that on you, because if you can take these concepts of measure, what you, that which gets measured gets managed, inspect what you expect, and then decrease time, time horizons between when you coach and when you hold accountable.

If you do those three things, your business will grow. I promise you. So please take this, go and unlock growth in your business, and then come back and tell me, yep, that was it. That. That changed a lot. Because this is simple stuff, guys. This is not advanced. This is just hitting the basics, the fundamentals of leadership, of training, of coaching, lifting people up, and then, you know, building a machine that runs without you.

Because your job as the entrepreneur is to build the machine that builds the machine. So that means you’re building the people who are building the thing. So hopefully this brings you guys a little bit of value. If it did, do me a favor, share this on LinkedIn, Instagram, wherever it is that you kind of hang out the most, share it with your audience, tag me within it. I’d love to see it. I’ll give it a little boost, give you a little bit more engagement, and it just means the world to me to see that you guys are getting value out of this. So if you got something out of this, let me know and I’ll catch you in the next episode. But until then, stay hyper focus, my friends.