“These are wonderful problems, but I’m not equipped to solve them. Can you guys help point me in the right direction?”
I’ve shared Cyndi’s journey throughout this book, and you might remember that she had always seemed unflappable. On this call, though, Cyndi’s voice was noticeably strained. “I can’t keep up with the demand. I can’t provide the level of service I’m known for, for all of those leads.”
Nailing the QBR is the tide that rises all boats. The QBR is the foundation of your business on which everything else stands. Cape Cod Hospital’s QBR is doctors doing examinations. It is the priority and it is protected. So what happens? The hospital builds a reputation for being the one emergency room you go to and get seen instantly. And that, in turn, opens the floodgates. Patients, just like my sister’s husband, drive past other hospitals to make the long trip to go to Cape Cod Hospital.
Cyndi serves e-commerce sellers. Their cash flow is extremely complex. Money flies all over the place, and Cyndi’s QBR is taking all the craziness that is going on and communicating it to them in a way that is simple, understandable, and calming. Her customers fell in love with Cyndi’s company because they finally found someone who could communicate with them and solve their unique problems. Someone who understands them inside and out (the power of a niche) and delivers exactly what they need (the power of the QBR).
Once they found Cyndi, many of her clients started spreading the word about her company. This is what happens when you serve the QBR. The result of that bragging? For the years that Cyndi was a generalist bookkeeper, she got about one lead a month. When she committed to a niche and targeted her marketing to that niche, over time she ramped to generating one lead a day. That alone is remarkable. Then, when she committed to the QBR and all the things that go with it, she turned up the heat to generate one lead every hour. That level of amplification will make even the most unflappable person gasp for air.
On the call, Cyndi explained what had happened. Because of her reputation, the host of a popular webinar series for Amazon sellers asked her to come on the show and share strategies for managing cash.
“Within an hour of the listing that I was going to be on the show, my lead flow jumped,” Cyndi told me. Some Amazon sellers had already heard about Cyndi from other e-commerce sellers. When they saw her name listed on the web series’ site, they reached out to ask her about her services. This lead flow, plus the lead generation of the quickly ramping word of mouth, brought her more than twenty-five leads each day.
By 1:15 a.m., I understood the details behind the problem. With the QBR nailed, the flow of leads was cranking. The Attract in ACDC was flowing fast. But that river of prospects was now hitting a bottleneck at the Convert stage. Cyndi couldn’t convert all the leads into clients fast enough. People were inquiring about bookkeeping, and then were kept waiting. She could manage it with a little bit of dancing around when the lead flow was one per day. But now at one lead every hour, forget it. Disaster pending. Possible reputation damage.
So for the next forty-five minutes, we worked on fixing the bottleneck. There are a few things you can do in a case like this. For example, find a way to get more prospects through faster. You could hire salespeople, or automate the conversion process with a video sales pitch. For Cyndi’s business, we chose neither. We talked about her vision for the company, and then reverse engineered back to the bottleneck.
Cyndi told me about the clients she wanted to serve and the revenue and profit target she intended. We took her revenue/profit target long term, and asked, “What needs to happen this year to make it a reality?” That gave us the twelve-month revenue/profit target.
Then I asked, “How many clients do you want to work with to make it happen?” Cyndi determined one hundred clients was the right size—big enough so that no one client would represent more than 5 percent of total revenue, but small enough that Cyndi would know each and every customer, and, if she desired, could communicate with them all.
Every customer needed to yield $8,000 a year, this year, to achieve the outcome Cyndi intended. In other words, when she converted a lead to a customer, if that new customer only generated, say, $3,000 of revenue that year, she would not be able to achieve the outcome she wanted. Maybe the customer is winning, because they are working with the world’s best e-commerce bookkeeper, after all, but Cyndi wouldn’t be able to reach her goals.
Knowing that Cyndi’s conversion threshold was $8,000 a year, we communicated that immediately through an email response. Starting at two that morning, one hour after I first read Cyndi’s SOS email, when people applied as a lead, leads no longer received the automated email response that read: “Thank you for your interest, we will schedule a call.” Now, all leads received this response:
Hi [Contact First Name],
Thank you very much for your interest in bookskeep and for sharing information about your business and your needs.
Our company is a small organization. Our president, Cyndi, and her husband (and business partner), Dave, oversee every one of our accounts. To sustain the highest level of service that our clients expect (and we demand from ourselves), it is necessary that we limit the number of clients we serve. The typical client of ours invests approximately $8,000 a year in our services. I respectfully wanted to share this with you so you can determine if this investment (noting that once we evaluate your needs, the actual pricing might be higher or lower) meets your expectations.
If the anticipated investment is within your expectations, please advise me so that we can schedule a call. I would love to set up a time for us to visit about how bookskeep might be of service to you. Please use the meeting scheduler link below to set up a meeting at a convenient time for you:
[Schedule a Meeting with Bree]
If you are seeking a lower-cost option, may I suggest you consider our monthly webinar series, where we offer profit advising and in-house bookkeeping education. If you are interested in this lower-cost option, please let me know and I can tell you more.
Thank you again for reaching out to bookskeep and always take your profit first!
Bree
(Notice who that automated email comes from? Bree! Remember her? Cyndi moved her into the right role, and doing the sales call is part of it.)
Bottleneck solved. Within a day, the flow of leads stayed the same, but the customers self-vetted, and Cyndi’s team only spent time with the properly suited leads. Business flowed stronger and healthier than ever.
Cyndi already knows where the next bottleneck is starting to appear. It is Delivery. Bigger and better customers keep flowing in, and they all want and deserve the highest quality service. So Cyndi is busily designing processes to ensure better and better delivery of service—one dial at a time.
WHEN YOUR QUEEN BEE ROLE IS CLEAR, METRICS WILL SET YOU FREE
Remember Lisé Kuecker’s story? She opened Anytime Fitness franchises when her husband was deployed. Lisé started her first business in the second grade. She made coloring sheets for her classmates and sold them for one dollar a book. Being an entrepreneur comes naturally to Lisé, and yet, when she first started out in the fitness industry, she had an all too familiar story. She had contracted with a Fortune 100 company to develop its Pilates and yoga programs, and despite long hours and successful outcomes, she rarely took home a paycheck. Then Lisé decided to take a leap of faith and buy three territories from a young fitness franchise, Anytime Fitness. This time, she didn’t plan to work eighty hours a week. Nope. Once she had each location up and running, she planned to work as little as possible.
Lisé opened the first location with her six-month-old son trailing behind her in his walker. Then she opened two more. Then two more. As “crazy” as it sounds, she is a master of applying Parkinson’s Law, which we discussed in chapter one. She took on more and more business while her husband was deployed. And without the time to work, she had to make the business work for her. Y
ou know, just like clockwork.
As you may recall, all of her locations were in different states than the one she was living in at the time, and even with that challenge (cough, opportunity, cough), Lisé made it work. She had a meticulous strategy that covered every aspect of running her business, and a system of tracking progress—which I will explain in just a sec.
Within a few years, Lisé’s five locations generated multiple seven figures in annual revenue—and she ran all of the locations from her home, working no more than five hours per week. Yes, I am still amazed by that number! I might say it again. Maybe even right now. Lisé would typically spend about a month in a location getting it ready, but once it was up and running, she only spent five hours a week running all five locations. She and her husband sold their gyms, and now Lisé helps entrepreneurs grow their own businesses using the methods she developed and refined while running her franchises.
To say I was psyched to talk to Lisé would be an understatement. When we spoke on the phone, she immediately shared how she set up her own dashboard so that she could run her business “on automatic.” Lisé used . . . wait for it . . . wait for it . . . two dashboards. The first was a weekly spreadsheet that pulled data inputted by every single employee who had a sales role, in all five locations. Whether it was the general manager of a facility, a personal training manager, or a trainer who managed their own sales, they all inputted data every week that funneled into the same report.
The weekly spreadsheet included several key metrics related to gym memberships: new sales, renewals, cancellations, and any type of freezes put into place for members. The snapshot also tracked daily activity, such as how many appointments were made, how many phone calls were received, how many walk-ins came in. Finally, it tracked each location’s sales closing percentage.
“It was a powerful spreadsheet,” Lisé told me. “But it only took five minutes to go over it, since it had master metrics (seven metrics, to be exact) that gave the pulse. Then I could dig deep on any indicator of a problem. Additionally, my district manager would look at the weekly metrics and then, in our Monday morning meeting, she would report on what she saw in those weekly numbers.” So Lisé wasn’t looking at her dashboard all week long; her district manager was tracking it. Lisé only looked at the summary weekly dashboard for a few minutes each week. From that information, she could tell if she needed to make an improvement somewhere.
“My Monday meeting was with six core team members—I still do that today as a consultant for the businesses we sold. I would listen to their view of what was happening, and then provide them with guidance and encouragement. Depending on the time of year, I might do a second meeting, but never for more than half an hour. It’s a simple numbers review. The numbers don’t lie,” Lisé explained. “During the meeting, the district manager will explain the circumstances behind the numbers. She might say, ‘I know that number is down, but Brittany’s husband was just deployed, so that’s what’s going on right now.’”
Lisé could then tell if a number was falling off due to a temporary situation, such as an employee dealing with the stress of her husband’s deployment, or if the metrics represented a bigger problem that needed to be addressed.
“At the end of the month, I got a mass metric sheet. Beyond my dashboard that had the key indicators, each month I would dig deep into all the numbers,” Lisé explained. “It was a very simple spreadsheet. One line was our projected goals for the entire year. The next line was last year’s numbers for the same goals. And the next line was how we were doing in terms of meeting those goals right now. We could tell where we came from, where we thought we were going, where we expected to go next month, and how we were really doing at that time.
“I could look at last year’s attrition numbers for July, for example, and then compare them to July this year and determine what we need to tweak to get that metric closer to where we wanted it to be,” Lisé continued. “When you are making goals and projections for your business, many of the shifts are circumstantial—especially as your team grows. You may lose an employee, or something may drop off. The numbers can shift rapidly, and this dashboard allowed me to see the whole picture.”
Remember, Lisé was only at the actual gym location in the beginning, but it was during those formative weeks that she would make sure that everyone knew the QBR and how to deliver it. “I had a big vision for what I wanted the gyms to look like, and I understood that I had to inspire that vision in my team,” Lisé said. She also made sure she communicated the gym’s QBR to existing members, and to people in the community. And, no surprise, she hired based on the QBR. A gym manager who can run a tight ship, but is a jerk, is not helpful. A gym manager who will do whatever they can to deliver extraordinary customer service, but struggles at times with keeping things running smoothly, is okay. The QBR always comes first.
Would Lisé have been able to run her businesses—from another state—working only five hours a week (after the initial location setup) if she wasn’t clear about her QBR? If she hadn’t trained her staff to deliver on that QBR? And if her customers didn’t feel as if they could rely on that QBR? And if she didn’t have a strong dashboard to keep her apprised throughout? No way. Further, it was Lisé’s passion for changing the obesity rate that kept her motivated, and the success stories she received from members kept her fulfilled, despite her distance from the locations.
* * *
Recently, my father had a health scare that scared the living bejeezus out of our family. As he was rushed to the hospital, he was immediately put on certain machines to measure critical vital signs. His pulse, blood pressure, and temperature were monitored. While none of those were his immediate problem, they are critical to life and therefore were monitored. His “bottleneck” was diagnosed by its symptoms: extreme weakness, dehydration, hallucinations. The belief was that it could be a stroke or a urinary tract infection (which manifests in the elderly with symptoms like those he was experiencing). The test showed a urinary tract infection, and he was put on antibiotics. Metrics were put in place, and his health recovered slowly but surely. And the metrics showed that his health improved as the urinary tract infection went away. Two weeks later we all celebrated my pop’s ninetieth birthday, with the big guy blowing out the candles with one sturdy exhale. If the metric measurements were not in place, I can only imagine the horrible consequences.
With a clearly defined QBR and a team focused on ensuring that the QBR is delivered consistently, without fail, you too can monitor the health of your business using a dashboard made up of simple metrics. You must have numbers that tell you the normal expectations for the four core parts of your business: Attracting (leads), Converting (sales), Delivering (your promise), and Collecting (their promise). The numbers don’t lie. But they don’t tell you the whole story, either. They simply flag an opportunity to fix or amplify something. With the metric flag raised, take action and investigate. You can finally fully step away from your business and manage by the numbers. And you can still experience joy and fulfillment as you grow your business. Even if you only work a few hours a week.
CLOCKWORK IN ACTION
Take twenty minutes right now and determine the core metrics you want to use to create your own dashboard. Remember to keep it simple; it’s too hard to track too many things. Set your smartphone alarm or timer for twenty minutes, and just get started with identifying those core metrics—those few things that best pinpoint the health of your business.
The ideal metrics to create always include a way to measure QBR performance, as well as the bottleneck(s) you have identified with the ACDC. What are the key things you think you can do to increase the flow through your ACDC? Classify those metrics and measure the progress over time. Where do you think your business is at the most risk when there is a problem in the ACDC? What dimensions of the business are you trying to improve? Determine metrics to help you monitor those things.
Still struggling, or
want to bring in an expert to help you fully design a business that runs itself, one that runs like clockwork? I am happy to report that my meetup with Adrienne Dorison flourished into a business partnership. Together, we formed Run Like Clockwork, a comprehensive framework designed to assist you and your team in streamlining any and every part of your business. If you want to learn how we can help you, go to RunLikeClockwork.com.
CHAPTER NINE
PUSHBACK
(AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT)
My most recent speaking tour in Australia was an unexpected equivalent of taking a four-week vacation. I was working on this book at the time and I was in the midst of testing the Clockwork process on my own business. I think this is what makes my work somewhat atypical compared to that of some other authors and consultants. When I research a concept, I first test it on my business, often for years, before I start to write about it. And then, during the writing process, I continue to test the system on other businesses and test tweaks on mine. It is a very iterative process.
After enjoying the smorgasbord breakfast, including world-class pastries, at the iconic, albeit old-fashioned, Miss Maud Hotel in Perth, I sipped on coffee and opened my laptop, right there at the table. I thought of a final tweak to the system after having a conversation with Australian entrepreneur Leticia Mooney earlier in the week. Once I had made that one last improvement, I was done with the core of the book and had nothing left to do. I considered a second round at the smorgasbord, but that would only result in extra tires around the waistline. Twiddling my thumbs, I wondered what I could do. I checked email. Nothing. Refreshed. Still nothing. If you’ve ever experienced the stress of an overflowing inbox, it doesn’t come anywhere near the terror I felt at looking at an empty one. In that moment, I had a realization: I thought I had finally moved past the biggest barrier to ensuring my businesses ran on its own—my ego. But, alas, I had not.
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