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What Gets Measured Gets Improved!

October 8, 2020

Do you ever have those weeks where you continue to get hints to a message or driving force from all different sources?  The whispers or shouts or subliminal message happens so often it’s like ok I just have to share this.

I was attending a Tony Robbins’ workshop and he said this, “What gets measured gets managed.”   Now there are variations on that quote from Peter Drucker, respected Management Consultant and practical founder of modern business concepts.  It is also stated “What gets measured can be improved”.    Essentially you have to know what you have before you can make a plan to succeed.

There are 2 really important lessons that go along with this philosophy.  First, every business should be gathering meaningful information.  Please note I said meaningful information.  Just because you have used a particular system or data point for the last 10 years doesn’t mean it’s still relevant or efficient for your business today.

If you are only looking at your financial numbers once a year, when you take your shoe box of receipts to the accountant, how do you know what areas to improve?  Tony Robbins pointed out, if you are only looking at your numbers once a year think about how far off track your business could get before you realized you were sinking.  If you take the time to analyze the information, once a quarter, once a month or once a week, could you make corrections before the business was in real trouble?

I have a client, who diligently utilized technology to gather data every month, then put a sticky note on top of the print out with different calculations that were actually meaningful to his business, but not tracking that sticky note information anywhere.  There are probably a million different technology enhancements to streamline financial and productivity information for your business.  Are you utilizing the most effective and efficient solutions to “measure” your business?

The next lesson from that famous quote, measuring alone, doesn’t mean you are managing your business.  Gathering data without taking the time to review the information is kind of like digging a hole, just to fill it in again.

Another perspective from Peter Drucker “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all”.  Let me give you an example from my former career.  The owners of the business requested a specific report be divided out to minute detail, that required hours of manual compiling of information.  The business management software provided a report that was one layer of detail different but ultimately demonstrated the same data.  As soon as we switched to the system generated report, we freed up more than 10 hours a week of staff time.  Just because we had always done the hand compiling, doesn’t mean it really needed to be done.

Along those same lines, I have a client that just implemented an online training program, to allow for the mandatory trainings for new staff members to be automated.  This not only is providing a more thorough training for employees; it is saving hours of staff time allowing the in-house trainer to work within their zone of genius and be more productive.

The number of tools available to simplify bookkeeping, automate email sending, training, HR Information and so much more can make a huge impact on your business.  These tools provide you with easily accessible data to allow you to make decisions on how to help your business grow.  This information can direct you where to apply more resources, be it time or money and how to modify current offerings or operations to continue improvement or stop failure.

There are so many free or low-cost tools that will can be implemented to save time and money for your business. If you are using the shoe box or Excel spreadsheets to do your bookkeeping, check out Wave at totally free software for bookkeeping, or my preference QuickBooks has several low-cost options.

HubSpot offers a FREE version of a CRM software to organize your customer information and services.  There are free and low cost services for email automation like Mail Chimp or my preference Active Campaign.

There are options for industry specific tools that can be used to make measuring and managing your business so much easier.

If you would like strategize ways to up your game with technology and tools to measure and manage your business book your complementary Triple P Strategy call today to help you maximize your Productivity, Profitability and People.