Cruise Control Over Your Business

It’s a virtual road-trip toward business success, the final destination–whatever your next venture will be, because you’re done with that last one. It’s running on its own, without you.

Until then, cruise control helps. Without cruise control, long road trips would be more tiring for the driver and for those of us with lead-foot, a lot more speeding tickets.

All you need is a dashboard that has the exact read-outs you need to control your business. You pick your top 5 – 10 critical success factors and come up with a system on how you’re going to measure them. If you can’t think of five, pick that top factor.

If you’re measuring lead generation, for example, how many leads are coming in? You gauge leads per week and per month, at least. Now dig deeper. How many leads from each lead source? How much does each lead cost per source? Is one source cheaper and bringing more return than another? When you have benchmarks–like how much you’re willing to pay for each lead–you’ve got numbers right in front of you that tell you how many leads come in and what you pay for them. What do you have?

You have control over your business.

Consistency, predictability, tracking–systems that can be operated and understood by practically anyone. When you can duplicate that, you’re on cruise control.

Now take 15 of the most important things you want to track. It might be lead generation. It might be customer satisfaction. It might be cash flow management. If you have a business with labor, labor productivity is a good thing to measure. And then the question you want to ask is what’s going to enable you to measure whether or not you are being successful at that?

All you do is establish a handful of gauges, tools, or metrics–whatever you want to call them– for whether or not you’re executing that critical factor properly.

We test to make sure it works. We test it backward and forward. You want to make sure you can get to the benchmarks you set from the steps in your system. The good news about systems is they don’t require that much training. A good system is where you put that system in someone’s hands and they know how to use it.

It can be a simple narrative to describe–for people who like words–how this system works. You do flow charts for people who are the linear and visual thinkers in your business. It’s as simple as a check-sheet. Someone else could operate it because all they need to do is go down the list: I did this, check; I did this; check. If you do every step on this check sheet, at the end, you’ve got a system. That simple!

Note, though, that it’s not that easy. There’s work required to put systems into practice. Not torturous work; it can be a lot of fun as you refine them. Intuition and creativity can play into this thing, from the artist to the architect. You are the person qualified because you know it inside out. You know all the parts of it. You know what’s involved. Your business is you, and you are in control!

What do you think Millionaire Mind community? We want to hear from you!