Want to Achieve Business Growth and Confidence? Coaching Isn’t the Only Option!
Are you at a crossroads in your business? If you’re stuck and looking to gain confidence on the path to achieving the business growth you desire, you may be considering getting a business coach. I say: Forget coaching. Use data instead.
There’s no doubt about it: Growing a business is nerve racking, anxiety inducing, and stressful. In my experience, we entrepreneurs have a knack for making it even more anxiety inducing and stressful than it needs to be. And about the time that we are “in it,” we are reaching for anything that looks like a life preserver to help us feel like we can keep swimming.
Listen to Season 1: Episode 23
What’s Your Best Business Growth Life Preserver?
Have you ever noticed that, when you’re in the middle of a situation, it’s really hard to gain clarity on any of it? Instead, we’re all caught up in our feelings. And sometimes we even forget that facts exist. It’s at this point that it’s important to remember that businesses do have options to call on to make sure that they can keep swimming and not give up.
Community, coaches, mentors, and even business besties are really useful life preservers in these situations. But I think a largely overlooked area to help us get out of our feelings and into the facts is analytics and data.
Why Metrics Are So Helpful
The point of having metrics is to make sure you have the information you need—when you need it—to make critical decisions for your business growth. And to gain context for those decisions. Even when we do have this data, if it is not easily accessible or presented well, our feeble human brains will forget that it exists in our state of panic.
The key to making sure you always remember you have this lifeboat is to make it a regular part of your business management.
Who (or What) Is Steering Your Ship?
Personally, I’ve never cared for corporate-y business terms such as oversight, management, leadership, or strategic planning meetings. Ugh. In my business, we call these activities steering the ship. I’ve found it is critical to make sure the activities that go into steering the ship are regular and planned. That way, when we’re in the middle of a storm, we have the navigational tools needed to find our way through.
This typically takes the form of a once-a-month meeting with myself—or with the team—to review analytics and metrics in our business, in addition to other documents such as our Vision Traction Organizer, which is our yearly and quarterly planning document. And our accountability chart, which is how we break out roles and responsibilities in our company. These documents come from a book called Traction and its system called the Entrepreneurial Operating System. We use them in conjunction with our analytics reports in my business to help chart our course and steer the ship toward business growth.
Achieving Business Growth and Confidence
When you invest the time, effort, and resources to make sure you have a lifeboat, know where it is, and have the structure to remember to use it when you need it, business growth gets less stressful.
Then when the storm hits or the tide rises, the tools you need to stay on track toward your goal and the information needed to make adjustments is right there for you.
And this makes it not only easier to steer the ship, but then the whole crew has access to these tools also. And the role of captain doesn’t have to be the sole decision maker. Delegating actions, tasks, and decisions becomes possible for you too.
Get Help!
Ready to bust the uncertainty of business growth and make more profitable decisions based on facts, not feelings? We can help. Our analytics and reporting service, Insight Pro, properly sets up metrics in your business and serves them up so you can make decisions based on the information that matters to your success. Check it out!
