We entrepreneurs are emotional creatures.It’s very easy to get caught up in our feelings and take action (or not act at all) based on feelings.
The problem is – if you make decisions based on feelings you can easily make things worse and put yourself into one of those downward mental spirals.
I’ve had those before and let me tell you they can really set you back.
I don’t want that to happen to you.
So, in today’s video, I want to share a story about how a client of ours had some things going on her personal life and without even realizing it – projected those feelings onto the success of her business.
Yet, when she looked at the numbers – things were actually improving but she was too blind to see it.
If you don’t track and know your numbers you’re exposing yourself to acting based on emotions.
Watch and let know if you want help with this or need someone in your corner to help you grow your business.
You can grab a time to chat here: http://altagency.com/book
Transcript / MP3
What’s good, everybody. In this episode I want to talk about feelings versus metrics and I was just talking to a client yesterday who we’ve been working with for about four months and let’s just say she had a bad day about two weeks ago on the personal side of things. I won’t go into those details out of respect for our situation, but have you ever had a bad day? Maybe something, you know, uh, maybe, maybe in business you had, you know, a client cancel on you or maybe you got in a fight with your spouse and it kind of just ruined your day. And that feeling, that event, the story you told yourself about that event then became a lens for how you were looking maybe at your business or possibly another area of your life. In this situation, our client was, had a personal event happen and it didn’t go so well and she then use that as a story for how the business was going.And she’s like, I feel like the business is going backwards and we’re, you know, we’re not doing well and you know, should I go get a job? And, um, all of these things like are totally understandable and you know, when you hear that you’re like, okay, like, let’s figure it out, what’s going on? And um, she shared that message with me about a week ago, a week or week and a half ago, and we spoke yesterday. So about a week later, less than a week later we get on the phone and she’s like, yeah, like I just was overreacting. Um, because I went and I looked at the numbers and she’s like, Greg, like 2018 to 2019 was completely like a change for me. And she’s like, in 2018 she’s like, in our agency, we had a $30,000 loss in 2019. She’s like, I more than doubled my, my own pay as an owner. We increased my partner’s pay by 7,000. Uh, then we also had a over an $8,000 profit.So not only does she more than double her salary, pay her main employee more, she went from a $30,000 loss to now a profit of, of over 8,000. Uh, with a lot of the changes that she made in working together and she’s like, really, you know, that event happened. And you know, when I went and looked at the numbers, she’s like, actually, things have dramatically improved from where I was, you know, last year. And she’s like, you know, the work that we’ve been doing has obviously been dramatically helpful. And she’s like, things aren’t just like, they’re not bad. And she’s like, I just let that one event kind of tell this whole story about how everything is bad. And just this morning as I was running, um, I literally did not feel good while I was running. I don’t know if you’re a runner or if you work out, but sometimes you go and you, you’re, you’re running.And you know, last year I ran my first half marathon and I was training a lot. I haven’t been running as much and so when I have been running a lot of times I just haven’t felt that good. And so I’m halfway through my run. I was running about a five K this morning and I literally just said, man, like why do I feel like I’m moving so slow? And I looked down at my watch because I track my runs through a Garmin watch and I saw that my pace per mile was actually better than it’s been the last like six weeks. And so despite me feeling slow and sluggish for whatever things are going on in my life, in my mind as I’m running, I looked down at the numbers and I’m actually doing better than I’ve been doing from a pace perspective. And I finished my run at the same average pace better than I had been over the last six or eight weeks, actually at the same pace that I was really running.Um, for my half marathons and or half marathon. I didn’t run multiple marathons. And so the moral of the story is we need to be really careful with how we, like we take life events or business events or any event rather that is neutral and cast this negative, um, story to it and then apply that same story to everything else. And when we make decisions based on feelings and emotions, which I find a lot of entrepreneurs and and really agency owners do because we get caught up in our client’s business very often we tend to, I’d say like over emphasize the negative side of the story. And oftentimes that can lead into sometimes a little bit of a downward spiral in your mindset, uh, eventually in your numbers. But if you are measuring what’s important in your business, all you need to do when you feel a certain way is go back to the facts.And when, when our client looked at the facts, you know, things were way better than how she was feeling. When you really look, when you like brass tacks, when you look at the hard numbers, the hard facts, like she’s dramatically improved and it was just, she had a bad day. And for me I was running and I felt slow. But I look at the numbers because I’m measuring something that I can look at to give myself true data to say, am I, am I improving? Was this a good run? Was this a bad run or not? I have that data. And so if you’re not tracking the key metrics in your business and you have a bad day and it’s very going to be very easy for you to cast the whole net and say, well, everything’s not going well. My business is falling apart. I don’t like it anymore.Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And negative, negative, negative, negative. When really if you had been measuring key metrics and KPIs, key performance indicators in your business, you could very quickly understand like, is that feeling warranted and, and, or is it just a feeling? So my question to you is, what are you not measuring in your business and, or your life? I want you to comment below in this video and, and share, maybe it’s a business thing, maybe you’re, you’re not tracking your sleep. I’ve been wearing this order ring and it really shows me tons of great data on my sleep patterns and I can now correlate that to when I’m having a good, like if I have a bad sleep, you know, how does that play itself into my run? Um, what about my energy and how I show up? Or if I push myself hard in a run, you know, how do I recover?How do I sleep that night? Like I can see all of those numbers. So it’s not just me in my own head saying, Oh, this isn’t working. Or, um, I feel bad. Obviously we do need to address our feelings, but if the feelings can be reversed, or at least we can not be overwhelmed or not stressed or at least less stressed by actually looking at numbers that we can see the real true story, we get back to reality and we can start operating as an owner, an owner of our business and owner of our life. And so I was just really starting to think as like an agency owner, um, you know, a couple key metrics. This isn’t an episode on KPIs by any means. We’ve talked about some of that stuff in other episodes. Um, so check those out. But the one thing as a service provider, you know, your scale factor is based on your ability to serve more clients, right?Um, and so one thing you could look at is, you know, if you put X leads into your sales process, your sales mechanism, how many of them become clients? Right? So what is Y? So ifX is the number of leads you put into your funnel, why is the number of of them that become clients? And then of why, how many of them lead to a referral or get to the results? Like those are three things you could be looking at right now to understand what is the health of your business, which is how many clients am I closing? If I speak to 10 clients, how many of them are becoming or 10 prospects, how many of them are becoming clients? If we have 10 clients come in, how many of them are actually getting the result in the desired timeframe? And you know, how many hours am I spending with each client?If you’re, you know, in a situation where you’re measuring how much time you spend on each client. And so you really need to start looking at some specific metrics, uh, to help you understand one where things are actually broken. And two, are you on track? And is there something to really be worried about? So if you and your business or in your life, sometimes you have a bad day, look back to the metrics, look back to the data to help you tell the real story. And if you don’t have the data and you can’t go look at the numbers to help really justify and or put a layer of truth to how you’re feeling you’re going to be in, has been in a situation where you’re operating from scarcity, uh, out of fear. And probably even when you are doing well or things are going in the right direction, you will have no idea if that’s actually the case.So whatever personal event happens, if it’s a negative event, you’re probably going to tie that feeling to your business as well. And that’s not going to help you grow. You don’t want to operate from that place. You don’t want to live your life from that place. It’s really not going to serve you and really gonna make it difficult for you to grow. So ask yourself, are you making decisions based off of how you feel or real metrics that are telling a true story? Hope you find this helpful. If you are not currently in our free Facebook community for agency owners that are looking to grow and scale without working nights and weekends, then visit [inaudible] agency.com/group you can use the link below and we’d love a like and or subscribe to this video. We really appreciate it and we’ll chat with you in the next episode. Hey, if you’re an agency owner and you’re done growing your traditional agency model and you want to add on a high high ticket coaching and or consulting program, then join our free community over at all agency.com/group or we’re going to share the latest strategies and tactics to add that as a revenue stream to your business today.
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