Are You Measuring What Matters?
It’s another great day for an episode of the Healthpreneur podcast! Welcome back. Today, I’m going to discuss measuring what matters in business. Go ahead and take a breath of relief because you don’t have to measure everything – just the stuff that actually matters.
There’s a simple concept called measuring OKRs – Objectives and Key Results – that takes the guesswork out of what you need to track and how to read the metrics, and even big companies like Google use it. The fun part is that these metrics can be used to create bonuses and incentives for your team, too.
It’s simple. You need to know the metrics of your leads, clients enrolled, and revenue. If you see the numbers are off in one area boom – that’s the area you know you need to focus on. Tune in to learn more about OKRs, the formula, and how to start using them in your business today.
In This Episode I discuss:
01:00 – 03:30 – Introducing today’s topic: Measuring what matters
03:30 – 06:30 – OKRs: Objectives and Key Results
06:30 – 10:00 – The metrics for team member bonuses
10:00 – 15:00 – Leads, clients enrolled and revenue
15:00 – 18:00 – How to get help and a client example
18:00 – 21:30 – Learning from failure and avoiding pain when you can
Transcription
Hey, hey, and welcome back to the show. Yuri back with you on The Healthpreneur Podcast. Hope your day is going great. Today we are going to be talking about measuring what matters, and is that something you’re doing in your business? If not, well, we’re going to talk a little bit about that in today’s episode.
Introducing today’s topic: Measuring what matters
There are two reasons I want to talk about this today. Number one, I just got a Fitbit, and number two, I’ve been reading a book by John Dewar called Measure What Matters. It’s just kind of top of mind, so I thought we’d discuss this if that’s cool. So, as you can see on the video, I’m wearing this cool band. It’s a Fitbit. I just got it last week, and I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to do this. It’s funny because I have not been one to really quantify my exercise habits forever, so it’s always been very intuitive and so forth.
I never really tracked my workouts. I don’t even know why. But anyway I’m like, “You know what? I want something meaningful to work towards.” As you know, I’ve talked about doing gymnastics and stuff like that, so I’ve been doing that every day. I’m like, “You know, that can be cool to just kind of measure my progress.” So, I’ve been using the Fitbit now for a little bit to measure the number of steps I’m taking during the day, my sleep quality, all that cool stuff. It’s been really, really good.
Here’s the first thing I actually noticed is that taking 10,000 steps a day is actually not that many. For instance, I walk my dog around the block, and I walk around my house, and I’m almost at 10,000 steps. So, maybe the bar is set too low. I don’t know, usually on a daily basis, I’m at about 15,000 steps, which is pretty cool. So, right now, as of this recording, how many? We’re at 4,172 steps, so we’ll see how the rest of the day goes. Should be able to hit that. Had a good workout this morning. I’m in a good routine right now, so I’m getting up nice and early. Heading over to the soccer field, if you’ve seen any of my videos from there through Instagram and stuff. If you’re following me on Instagram, then that’s where I’ll share more of that stuff. @Healthpreneur1 is my handle.
Every morning I’ve been getting up and going to the soccer field, doing some sprints, doing some body weight workouts, and obviously, some stretching. It’s a great way to start the day. It’s getting warmer. It’s just beautiful. I really, really enjoy that time.
OKRs: Objectives and Key Results
I’ve been measuring my fitness progress and then reading this book, Measure What Matters. It’s actually really interesting. So, John Dewar is a guy who came into Google years ago. Google was kind of doing their thing, and John comes into Google and another bunch of other companies, like Intel and so forth, big, big, big companies and introduces this whole concept called OKRs, objectives and key results. I’m reading this book; I’m like, “Okay, this is cool, this is fascinating, but it’s really quite simple.” I’m like, “What’s the secret sauce here?” There is no secret sauce, like with anything. But the whole idea here is that Google adopted what are known as OKRs, and it’s become the framework for which they’ve built their business upon. An OKR is really an objective with key results supporting that objective.
So, if companies like Google are basing their entire business on OKRs, I think it’s probably helpful to talk about this, right? And it’s not just Google. We’re talking about like Intel and huge companies that are doing this. I’m just amazed that this was like rocket science for them when it was introduced to them. I’m like, “This seems pretty straightforward, but apparently for a lot of businesses it’s not.” And if Google didn’t know how to do this stuff, I guarantee there’s a lot of entrepreneurs who don’t. So, what’s interesting is that as I’m reading this book, I started thinking back to our Healthpreneur Planner, which is almost entirely based on the same premise of this OKR system. So, for instance, in our planner, we identify four… We called them the focus four, right?, So what are four big goals for the year, right?
So, those are the only four things, the quantitative objectives. So, I want to make a million dollars, I want to help a hundred clients, or whatever the objective, black or white, is. We identify four of those. Those are the objectives, okay, in the OKR system. Underneath those, then we obviously break those down into projects and things that we can do to make those goals a reality. Within those projects, we look at what are some metrics that will allow us to know if we’re moving in the right direction? So, these are essentially the key results. So, key results are things you can measure, you can quantify. In the OKR system, the objective is not as black or white, it’s more of like, you know, we want to be the industry leader. Now, how do you know when you’re there? I’m not too sure, but I like to keep goals quantifiable because you know you are…
For instance, instead of saying we are the industry leader, it would probably be better to say we are the number one fastest growing company according to the Inc. Top 500 Companies. That way, you’re either… I feel like you’re number one on the list or you’re not. Like, you know it’s happened or not. So, I’m a big believer in quantifying the results because you know when you’re there or when you’re not there. The key results are simply metrics or key performance indicators that as they move up or down, depending on what the metric is, they should move you closer to that objective. Does that make sense? So, that’s the whole premise of OKRs. It’s not like nothing we’ve never heard of before, but it became such a huge and profound component to what Google and a lot of these companies are doing, and I’m only about halfway through some. You know, I’m not fully done, and maybe there are some nuances that obviously are going to come to the latter half of the book.
The metrics for team member bonuses
But one of the things I found interesting was they talked about how OKRs are not tied to compensation and bonuses, which I thought was really interesting. For instance, if certain metrics are hit, those are independent of bonuses for team members, and I thought that was pretty cool. The OKR system is completely transparent across the company so they know exactly what the CEO is doing, the CEO knows exactly what everyone else is doing. It’s completely transparent… It’s almost like an aquarium with all the fish swimming around. You can see exactly what they’re doing, and the fish being all the team members. So, I thought that was a really cool nuance. That’s something we’re going to do a lot better job of in Healthpreneur is just making sure that everyone’s metrics are number one, identified, number two, transparent for the whole team to look at.
So, that’s just, you know, how you grow as a leader. Just kind of learn new things, implementing, and so forth. But I want to take it back to the Healthpreneur planner. So, the Healthpreneur planner, if you don’t have a copy, you can actually get one at Healthpreneurgroup.com/planner. This is a planner I’ve built for 10 years, and it’s finally in print. It’s something I use every single day. It’s a 90-day planner for people who actually want to get shit done, who actually want to reach their goals. And the reason I think this planner’s so effective is because of the way it’s built and the way it’s structured.
So, it’s not just like, “Hey, what am I going to do tomorrow?” It’s not one of those. It’s about casting your vision, like, where do I want to be in at least in the next year, like, in the next 12 months? What do I want that to look like? What are the four focus projects with the four goals, the focus four that I want to achieve? And then step by step, we break those focus four down into milestones and projects that now you have control over, right? You can’t control earning $10 million, but you can control what you do every single day to move you closer to that.
So, part of the thinking that the planner helps you work through is figuring out, well, number one, what are my focus four? Number two, how do I break those down into controllable projects? And then what are the tasks that I have control over, my team has control over that are going to help us accomplish those projects, and as those are completed, they move us closer to those ultimate focus four objectives. That’s part of the brilliance of this system is the way that it’s structured. And then from that, that becomes the guiding light for all the decisions you make. So, what you plan to do every single week, what you plan to do on a daily basis, all of those decisions filter down from the previous thinking that you did about the focus four, the projects to get you there, and those daily and weekly tasks.
So, what you’re doing on a weekly basis is you’re simply looking at… It’s almost like you’re looking back to the map, and you’re “Okay, where are we going? Okay, cool. We need to do this and that. We’ll get that done this week. I’m going to do this first thing tomorrow morning, etc.” So, it’s a really nice strategic way of planning that is not just haphazard, and you know that everything you’re doing daily and weekly is tying back to your ultimate goals because one of the challenges that I’ve seen a lot of entrepreneurs fall into is they do stuff, but it’s not tied into the ultimate objective they want. And what’s even worse is they don’t even really know what the objective is that they want.
Leads, clients enrolled and revenue
So, they do a lot of stuff, right? They’re busy, but they’re not productive. They’re busy, but they’re not effective. And so part of being a leader is knowing what to do, right? Is really knowing what matters most to work on. So, I’m going to give you four metrics right here that I think for a coaching business are really important to look at. We look at them every single week. Number one is how many new leads have come in, and leads, in our case, are phone calls. How many phone conversations have you had with prospective clients, okay? Lead flow is very important to your business. You know, if you don’t have leads coming in, you better be amazing on the back-end to get referrals and whatever else.
So, number one is how many calls have you had booked? Number two is how many clients have you enrolled? So, okay, in the space of one month, I had 50 calls booked, I enrolled 25 people, which is great, right? Now you know what your percentage enrollment rate is for that month and how many clients you’ve onboarded in that mindfulness. Now, we’ve looked at leads and clients enrolled. The third metric is going to be revenue, right? So, what’s the revenue? If you have 25 clients coming in in a month, each client pays you $3,000, that’s $75,000 in revenue. Pretty cool, right? And then the fourth metric is profit. Because if you are smart and you’re doing things like acquiring clients through paid traffic, like Facebook ads, there’s obviously going to be some ad spend.
So, if your revenue is $75,000 but your ad spend as $100,000, something’s wrong, right? So, we’re not going to jump up and down at a $75,000 revenue because we have to account for profitability. You need to look at what are your expenses, what’s your ad costs and so forth, and you need to take all that into consideration because in a premium-price coaching model, and again, there’s a lot of… We can go down the rabbit hole in this, but for the most part, you should be profitable at least two to one, at least at the minimum, two to one on your front end acquisition. So, those are four metrics, right? Leads, clients enrolled, revenue and profit. If you only looked at those four things, honestly, your business would be pretty good. Like, you would have four important dials that as they go up, you’ll know that your business is in the right direction.
So, there’s two… Of those four dials, two of them are what are known as the leading indicators, and two of them are known as trailing indicators. Trailing indicators are, they’re kind of after the fact, right? So, revenue and profit are after the fact. They don’t really predict the future unless that revenue is largely based on recurring revenue. But for the most part, revenue and profit is a trailing indicator. Now, leads and clients enrolled becomes a lot more of a predictive indicator, especially phone calls. Clients enrolled, obviously, as well. Again, if clients enrolled, if they’re on payment plans, like, if you enrolled 25 clients and they’re all paying you three payments of $100,000, then you know roughly what the next three months are going to be look like. Phone calls, if you see that number go up, your revenues should go up, right? If one month you had 25 phone calls and next month you had 50 the next month you had 500, that should correlate with your revenue and your profit.
So, your most important thing to look at and what we help our clients with, and again this is why it’s helpful to even know what you’re looking at. You know, one of the things that we do with our clients is we have a critical numbers document, and this critical numbers document is something they fill out every single week. They look at everything from click, all the way down to enrollments, right? So, all those metrics there and in between, and we give them very specific parameters of how much you should be paying for a webinar registrant. I’m not going to tell you the number because it’s a magical number, it’s good to know. But we tell our clients, “If you’re in this range, you’re golden.” How much should you be paying for a phone call? Here’s the range. How much should you be paying for enrollment? Here’s the range. If your numbers are outside of that, then you know where the leak might be in your pipeline and how to fix it.
So, for instance, if you’re getting a lot of calls booked but no one’s enrolling, where do you think the problem lies? On the phone, right? So, you have to get better at having conversations that lead to enrollments because I promise you if your pipeline is set up the right way, you’re not having 20 conversations with unqualified people. If you’re having 20 conversations with completely unqualified people, it’s no longer a phone call issue. It’s a higher up in the upstream issue in terms of your messaging, in terms of your webinar, in terms of your criteria, etc. But the key thing is that you have to measure what matters most in your business. And if you don’t know what those metrics are, I’ve just given you four metrics that will really help.
How to get help and a client example
Again, if you’re running some type of pipeline, like we are, a Facebook ad, webinar application, or phone call, and you need help with that, then just let us know. Case in point. We actually just had a new client enroll with us, and she had a phone call with one of our coaches back in September and that’s whatever, six, seven months ago now? She sent me an Instagram message about a week ago as of recording, and she asked me if I have a look at her funnel. I told her, I’m like, “Well, not really because you’re not one of our clients. It’s not fair to my clients who pay me good money to do that for them to do that for you.” And so I said, “Listen.” And she had been through someone else’s webinar training. I’m not going mention the person’s name, but they’re a very well-known person who has a webinar course, a DIY course, by the way. This is just a perfect example of why courses are never going to lead to lasting outcomes.
Not all the time, but compared to a coaching program with hands-on coaching, it’s very, very different. So, she took this person’s course, got her webinar done, got it live, and it just wasn’t working. And so she was like, “Hey, can you have a look at my webinar funnel? It’s just not working the way I want it to.” I said, “Listen. Like, I’d be happy to, but you got to be one of our clients.” And she’s like, “Well, do I get like, you know, hands on support and all this kind of stuff?” I’m like, “You will get more coaching and support that you can handle, and we will get deep into your webinar. We’ll give you full-on reviews. We’re going to review everything, slide by slide, with you. We’re going to figure out what the problem is. Maybe it’s not even the webinar, but I can’t tell you that stuff if you’re not one of our clients.”
And so she got to the point where she realized that what she was doing wasn’t working, and she enrolled with us last week. Super pumped to have her on board, and we’re going to create some magic together because she’s a really great person, really awesome business. And we can make some small tweaks in her business and just get her to that next level very quickly.
So, number one, you have to know what you’re measuring. You have to know what metrics you’re measuring. Number two is you have to like… Trying to figure this stuff out on your own sometimes can be challenging. This is why Google, you know, like, for instance, they brought in John Dewar to do this stuff with them because they didn’t even know what they didn’t even know, right? So, now they’re introduced to the system, this OKR system. Now, they’ve kind of identified some OKRs that are important for their company, and they know, like, they had a consultant that came in and guided them through this whole process. This is just another reason why, another example of why having somebody to look on your stuff like third party, that coach, that mentor, to look at your stuff is so important.
Learning from failure and avoiding pain when you can
I just shot a video for my clients this morning, and I was reminding them, I’m like, “Hey, listen. Once your pipeline’s up, there’s not much you can do. You can’t force the issue, right? You can’t force a grass to grow faster.” So, I gave him some insights and some pointers to remember about, like, here’s what you want to do at this point, right? There’s only certain things you can control, and there’s certain things you just kind of have to let them be. But if you’re trying to do this on your own, it can be really challenging to navigate this world of business, especially if you’re not as seasoned as someone like myself, for instance, right? Because I’ve been doing this for 13 years. I’ve launched hundreds of products and offers, and most of them, quite honestly, have failed, right? I’ve learned a lot from those failures. And I’ve had a couple of wins, which had been really big wins, and the only reason they’ve been big wins is because I’ve failed so often.
So, there’s a lot of that comes from pain and suffering, and I would rather you not go through that same journey. That’s why we help so many people inside of our Healthpreneur Community, right? Our Health Business Accelerator Workshop and our Luminaries Mastermind.
Here’s the thing is. If you want to be able to grow your business, right, number one is you have to identify what those metrics are. I gave you four, which I think are really powerful. If you have a coaching business. Second is you have to know what type of ranges to look at, right? If you’re getting people on the phone for $5,000, you probably need some help, right? If you’re getting people on the phone who are just not qualified, well, you probably also need some help. And if you don’t know what to look at, if you don’t know how to make those tweaks, what are you supposed to do, right? Where are you supposed to find the answers? On YouTube? On Google? It’s not going to happen.
So, anyways, if you want some help with this, then listen, come join us in Toronto. We’ve got like literally a handful of spots left. June 26th and 27th in Toronto. You’ll get my hands-on help. We’re going to build a true million dollar model, and you’re gonna get the nuances that you’re probably not even aware of to help your business grow. We actually have a doctor who I was speaking to on Messenger last week, and he was actually in another very well-known person’s course. I’m not going to mention his name, but I actually think he’s doing some cool stuff. You’ve probably seen him all over the place; YouTube, Facebook, et cetera. He took his course, got some really good momentum, spending a good amount of money on Facebook ads, but he’s getting a lot of people on the phone who are not qualified or actually not even showing up.
And I just really quickly asked him, I’m like, “Hey, man. Can you just show me one of your Facebook ads and your landing page?” I didn’t have to take an hour on this. I looked at it in 10 seconds. I saw three big opportunities, and I said, “Hey, man.” I’m like, “You got some great momentum. I can see three big issues right now that we can fix in half a day.” And that’s the power of having someone like me be able to look over your shoulder and give you those nuances and those insights. So, he’s going to be joining us in Toronto. Really, really cool stuff. And we’ve got about 20 other people that are going to be with us for the two days.
So, if you’re interested, June 26th and 27th, my hands-on help. You’ll be in a room with some really great players in the health and fitness space who are all building their coaching businesses. And if you want to move things to the next level, you got to be with us, okay? So, healthpreneurgroup.com/twoday. Two, as in the number, and then D-A-Y. Go to the page. If you meet the criteria, fill out the application, and I’ll get back to you within 24 hours, and we’ll take it from there. Sound good?
So, that is why it’s important to measure what matters. Hope you found this well. Hopefully, it resonates with you. Hope you have an amazing day. I’ll see you in the next episode. For now, continue to get out there, be great, do great, and I’ll see you soon.
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What You Missed
In our last episode, I talked about three lessons I learned when I recently traveled to Puerto Rico to speak at my good friend Mark Wade’s mastermind and it was a blast!
I was able to share things about my own business and how we got to where we are today, but more importantly I was able to connect and learn from other masters in the field like Jeff Walker, creator of the Product Launch Formula.
One point he mentioned that stuck with me is that the higher up you go in life, the more personal development you need. I was also reminded of the fact that we need to surround ourselves with big thinkers. That way, we are constantly challenged to do the same.
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