You know the saying “what gets measured gets improved”? This focus on how to optimise your business for growth was one of my take home messages from the Heart Centred Business Conference this year.
The other core message that I really resonate with is nail one thing, and then scale it. Of course!
Entrepreneurial Mindset Vs CEO Mindset
Starting a business requires an entrepreneurial mindset the focusses on resilience and experimentation. This is an essential phase of business growth – but it involves A LOT of testing, and creating new offers, opt-ins, and experimenting with messaging, connecting – basically everything you do because an experiment to see what’s working.
I’ve certainly been attacked by the ‘I’ll create something new’ bug on several occasions – and it’s exhausting. It also slows down business growth.
There has to come a time when you stop creating new – and start to work out how to optimise your business by focussing on measuring and improving what you already have. This helps develop the CEO mindset – and your business will be exhausting to grow until you start to measure and improve instead of creating new.
My Business Growth Journey
As a part of my systems upleveling journey, I quadrupled my business by implementing systems over time. I learnt to optimise my business growth by setting up systems that
a. saves time and energy because I didn’t have to recreate the wheel each time it’s repeated
b. allowed me to IMPROVE the process each time I used it
This really hit home once I had my Facebook Page content created and scheduled for 3 months. At the end of the 3 months, I didn’t have to create a whole new batch of content. I could optimise my business and save time just by analysing and improving the content I had, because ‘what gets measured gets improved’.
There’s no place for perfection
I also realised that nothing was ever going to be perfect – especially the first time.
Once I create procedures for key parts of my business (and save time) I can improve them as I go with smaller tweaks – because I’m analysing the results (time, ROI, productivity, engagement, income) and perfecting them. This is a very different mindset to creating fro, scratch – and a much shorter one!
How to Optimise your business
It’s a mindset shift that involves trust – and developing that process of replacing “what else could I try” to scale and grow your business with “what gets measured gets improved”
Here’s some strategies on how you can achieve this:
1. Get clear on your vision and identify what’s working and what’s not.
Having clarity on what you want your business to look like in a year or 5 years will really help you identify what you need to hone in on, because it’s getting traction with your tribe, but also what’s not actually working, but costing you lots of time and energy.
Simplifying your business so that you can IMPROVE your marketing is a key to growth. You’ll have stronger launches, and more time to connect and serve your clients and community.
2. Bring your CEO Mindset to the table
Transition from working IN your business doing #allthethings to working ON your business.
This often means making some tough decisions – especially about work that has your blood, sweat and tears in!
However, with a CEO mindset, you will have the time and space to analyse, measure and improve they key areas of your business.
Also, as a CEO, you can set up your business for growth by handing over the admin tasks that are holding you back.
3. Align your business goals with your tracking
You have your business goals, and the basics of tracking right? List growth, social media followers, income.
What are the other ways you are optimising your business, and developing in your plans?
Here’s some examples:
Optimising your time & Outsourcing:
How long does it take you to create a blog, publish and distribute it? Could that process be streamlined, improved for better reach, and – even better, handed over to a VA after you’ve created it?
Record the time taken to complete the task and the steps you took to complete it (and you’ll be closer to outsourcing in no time!)
Productivity:
How much time do you spend on Facebook? Could your productivity be improved by measuring how long you’re on Facebook?
CEO Mindset Vs Entrepreneurial Mindset:
How much of your day is spent on ‘admin’ tasks like answering emails, posting links and scheduling posts instead of CEO tasks, like strategic planning, designing marketing funnels?
Track and measure the types of tasks you spend your time on, so that you know for sure (without under-estimating!) and so that you can IMPROVE this and implement strategies for you to spend more time on CEO tasks.
Conversions:
Are you tracking your free discovery calls and their conversion rate, so that you can improve your Sales Pitch?
How to measure so that you can improve
Here’s a quick list of ways that you can track, or measure your business growth
- Spreadsheet for numbers
- Track your progress against your goals
- Income & expenses tool
- Productivity app like RescueTime, or a pen & paper documenting the tasks you do every 30 mins
- Journalling (you can even measure your self-sabotaging thoughts and improve them)
- Your calendar – checking in to see how much time you have for each task you outsource
A final summary: the keys to optimising your business using the ‘what gets measured gets improved’ is to
- Identify your business goals for the next quarter
- Sync those goals by breaking them down into implementable actions
- Regularly measure and review the actions to measure which actions are creating impact towards your goals
