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Cruise Control Over Your Business

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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!

Staying On Track

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Your business is you. It’s you creating something that wasn’t there before; with material results from your intentions, your energy, your essence, whatever it may happen to be at that time. The science of growing it simply means having prepared leadership, development, producers, and administration. As the process evolves, so do your systems for solving frustrations and focusing on those critical factors that matter most.

This is your rich-making vehicle. Like any car, you’ve got a gas gauge, a speedometer, oil gauge–all the key things you need to know quickly and conveniently if this thing is running properly. You need the same things in your business.

You need the ability to track what’s important. There’s what is quantifiable and easy to count–like sales–but there are also subjective things where opinions are measured, when the ‘qualifiable’ becomes quantifiable.

One issue that’s gained tons of traction over the last couple of years is going green–especially in businesses–from "cloud" computing to energy consumption’s impact on the bottom line.

Some people couldn’t care less about the plight of the pelicans in an endangered eco-system (a shame, for sure), but when you can quantify how switching over to energy-efficient equipment can save thousands of dollars, politics goes out the window. Saving the planet is on the same track as the bottom-line.

Also consider, though, the marketing appeal of being able to sincerely tell your market you support green initiatives. Again, the subjective can become countable in response rates.

Put a scale in and it. Customer satisfaction; employee satisfaction–you measure benchmarks, time frames, the ranges you’d like to be in, or what high/low thresholds would signify danger-zones. They sound complicated, but they’re really not.

How many sales calls and closes per hour would you like to see? You look at what your sales are per month and compare. Too low? Too high (maybe there’s something else not being considered if it’s too good to be true)?

You want the salesperson that follows a script, makes the calls and closes the ratio that they should be closing. That can be copied, duplicated, and most importantly, tracked. If the oil pressure in your vehicle is too high, you’ve got a problem. If it’s too low, you’ve also got a problem. You want to be in between, yes? What are your operating ranges for your critical success factors?

It might be that you’re willing to spend a certain amount of money per employee depending on their role in your business’ structure. If you’re paying your marketing guy $30,000 more than you really intended, there isn’t going to be much speculation on why your profits aren’t where you want them to be. Like getting a speeding ticket, you had this gauge that you weren’t paying attention to and you exceeded the operating range.

There are things you can count on and physically look at; things you can measure; and real accurate data that you can track–not guess. They’re documented. It could be in a manual you pass out to all employees, or one that you’ve got linked up online.

It takes consistency, predictability, and tracking–systems that can be operated by someone with a base-line level of skill. When you can duplicate that, you’re on track to financial freedom.

Mission: Critical

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Of all the things that occur in your business, which ones make the most difference?

If your top value is revenue, for example, which parts of your business make the most difference toward revenue? Is it lead generation? Is it having a good sales process? Is it knowing how to close and eventually sell the business?

Those critical factors that lead to success in your business—or really in anything—are those practices where you put more time, attention and effort, and where afterward you get even more in the return for that time, attention, and energy you put in.

For example, adding legal services might not transform your business, but adding lead generation systems (i.e. systematic marketing!) could really transform it. Adding a referral generation system could totally transform your business at an incredibly low cost.

There are some fairly broad success factors that really make a business hum to the tune you want to hear. Those factors include:

  • – Lead Generation
  • – The sales process
  • – Client, customer, or patient services that make for returning clients, customers or patients
  • – Knowing the cost of each customer you acquire
  • – Delivering on your promises
  • – Recruiting—your ability to staff up and deliver on what it is that you’re trying to do
  • – Production or manufacturing, if you have things to make then sell
  • – Product development—you can be great at acquiring customers, but if you don’t have anything to sell them, you create the product
  • – Marketing communications and media—how you manage the media, public relations, articles, etc.

Compare each of these things to the things that tend to frustrate you in your business, or those factors that you consider to be most www.healthandrecoveryinstitute.com/topamax-topiramate/ important to you. If revenue is your top value, lead generation is going to take on greater importance, but if it’s client services, then recruiting will be more important to you than lead generation. There is no fixed, one-stop shopping solution.

Your selection of criteria could be vastly different from everybody else’s, so you select your criteria first, and then you go through the list and you consider, “What are the pieces that are most important to how I get what I want out of this thing I call my business?” Naturally, the list above isn’t all inclusive; there are many others.

Once you figure out your criteria and then start looking at how to systemize whatever process you’re focusing on, that’s permanent. The hardest part of that is already done. You might look at your critical success factors every half-year or so—you don’t want to just do this once and get complacent in thinking that adjustments won’t be necessary along the way. But doing it in the first place is a key step in creating those systems that not only grease the wheels of your business for smoother function, but also those reasons why we started doing all this to begin with; more profit, more time, and eventually freedom from the business so you can do whatever you really want to do.

What do you think? What are the success factors that have been critical to your business, or where do you find yourself focusing your time? How does that pan out? What adjustments did you or do you have to make? The Millionaire Mind community wants to hear from you!!!

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