Your Flight Plan For Business Success
August 13th, 2020 // 11:07 am @ Scott Manning
As I ended last week about paying attention to the right numbers, we’ll start this week by taking a big birds eye view from up in the sky of your business. For the most part everyone is always looking at trends from the past as indication of the future instead of actions for the future creating the trends you want to see.
This is what leads them to being focused on the wrong numbers.
The great Dan Kennedy talked about “future banking” and “present banking” (while financials and accounting statements represent “past banking”). Which one of those would you like to be focusing the direction of your business on?
This is why I talk all the time about creation. You want to be a creator of what you want to have happen not just a business who deals with the aftermath of what has happened.
This is about being at the mercy of your business and all the variables around you or being in control of your business and the opportunities that exist.
Future success is not dependent upon past anything and past anything is not a predictor of future success.
So, you must determine the most important metrics in your business that you should be tracking and then what are the highest value actions, systems, people, responsibilities, opportunities, and everything else that will allow you to manipulate, control, create leverage with those numbers to drive the results.
This is my reverse engineering brought to life in both quantitative and qualitative form, in numbers and actions, in stats and strategies.
You see, this is what real business is all about – the backend behind the scenes stuff.
I could pick many analogies for this but let’s go with an airplane.
First of all you don’t take off until you know where you are going to land. And you don’t navigate forward based on the weather that was behind you. You are looking ahead – always – and basing decisions on what is to come not what has passed.
You also chart out your entire route in advance and you plan for everything as it is in the moment but you adjust and course correct along the way as things change. You are always aware of where you might land should anything happen and you take advantage of a clearer path that might be seen as an opportunity for a better flight.
Best of all, there is no concept of failure. You might get there earlier, you might get there later, you might be right on time but the main objective is to get there – alive. In the air, there is only one outcome that is possible, back on the ground.
If only businesses were as committed to their outcomes as pilots must be to the successes of their flights. This isn’t achieved by someone’s guess or opinion or gazing out into the clouds hoping for enlightenment nor is it done through a rear view mirror.
It’s done with real-time monitoring, with instant calculations, and by looking forward in order to get where you want to go.
In your business – like a pilot in the cockpit – you need the same.
Good news: what you contend with is far simpler and less complicated (and by the way not life and death – though maybe it should be).
So, what do you pay attention to?
There are basics such as new leads entering your funnel, prospective customers nurturing, and the conversion of new customers. You always know what you need to do to keep a customer in motion on your experience and through your sales system.
Then, more advanced, you pay attention to retention metrics, the overall value of your customers on the immediate first transaction, and ultimately the lifetime value of your customer.
If you don’t know these things you can’t possibly be able to make decisions on the future and on your growth.
You should also track performance of each team member you have also. That’s a topic for a different day.
Most of all, we have to know that new opportunity is coming into your business pipeline and based on that you know you have a healthy future. As long as you have systems that work and create predictable outcomes then you have peace of mind that your future bank is growing and that means that your present bank will be growing too.
Think about the philosophy of giving up short term gratification for long term gain and then eventually you can have both – but – most businesses are so desperate for immediate money they get a few dollars and lose out on the bigger portion because they don’t have a way of cultivating and nurturing it. They never think beyond the initial transaction.
Summarized, we want to transcend your business from transactional to relational and deliberately increase the long term value of every customer that comes into your business.
For my doctors, it doesn’t matter how many new patients they get, there is a value to that number but knowing that number of the past doesn’t mean it will happen again next month. More importantly, what matters is the dentistry. They track diagnosis (that is opportunity that exists in a patient’s mouth that they can, bluntly, turn into money now or sometime in the future), which is their core future banking number.
Then you take it to the next level of what we call treatment acceptance that may not be done right away but it has been said yes to, hopefully pre-paid, and moved into the schedule.
If diagnosis is the future bank, (pre-paid) case acceptance is the present bank, and finally when the dentistry is done it has been earned as past bank.
In your business, money has a long way to travel to end up as profit in your hands. The further back you go to the origin of the money – your takeoff point – and the clearer you are on the flight path of it to it’s final destination, the more likely you will get it there safely, reliably, predictably, and consistently every single time.
Now it’s your turn…
What numbers should you be tracking?
Are you focused on creation and opportunity by building the future bank every single day with every single customer?
As the pilot of your business, do you have a flight plan and know where you are going? Have you charted how money moves through your business BEFORE it’s even created?
More good news for you… you’ve got blue sky opportunities and open air every day with your vision as the guide to take you wherever you want to go.
Category : Blog
