Numbers can set you free!

When I first started my own business, like so many entrepreneurs do, I wore many different hats, which is so common when you’re first starting out; from sales to operations to finance, and everything in between, I just rolled up your sleeves and got it done.

I mean, let’s face it, I literally had no one else to delegate to anyway, this is what made that time of my career so exciting. I had my hands in every part of the business and knew exactly where it was going on a daily, even hourly basis.

As my team grew, I struggled to let go of these hats and when I did, I just didn’t have the confidence that I had the right processes documented to let them go or the right numbers in place to know things were on track, which led to disappointment, both for my team and myself.

Then virtually overnight, my team grew from 3 to 15 when I merged with the largest MSP (Managed Services Provider) in the Geelong Region. In those early days, I revelled in the ability to let go; to delegate and elevate, we had systems and numbers in place to keep track of the day to day and the team was small enough that we knew them all on a personal level.

As we continued to grow and the team size started nudging 30, we could see that the systems and processes we had in place just weren’t providing us with the confidence that the business was heading in the right direction. We had an amazing team, but we just didn’t have a pulse on the business.

As a leader, it’s this lack of vision across your business that can pull you back down into the weeds. I found myself deep diving into our systems, to see the data and trends myself, to feel confident that the team was heading in the right direction, as you could imagine, this was a massive time sink, and took me away from what I should have been focusing on.

As a Leadership Team, we worked hard to identify and track the right numbers for the business. The numbers really do set you free and we found that once we started to track the right numbers, including leading indicators of our organisation, we got good at seeing trend appearing across our business, identified issues, and got ahead of them sooner rather than later.

To get even more out of the numbers, we made our team responsible for them, not only did that free the Leadership Team to focus on working on the business, but it also gave the rest of the team an incredible level of ownership and understanding about their contribution towards the business, and its growth.

When your team is growing rapidly, like we did, it gives you a fantastic opportunity to onboard new staff with numbers that they are responsible for from day one. Imaging starting a new position and knowing exactly what your numbers are from day one? It’s just awesome! ?

After a couple of years of testing and evaluating the numbers for the business, we were able to settle on the ones that gave us all the confidence in the direction the business was heading.

We were able to successfully achieve this level of clarify across our business by implementing EOS?, which is just a simple set of tools that change the way we ran as an organisation and can be implemented into any organisation, with a leadership team looking to change and grow.

You can check out the EOS? Business Management Tools that we implemented by clicking here. If would like to find out more about EOS and how I can help you implement it in your organisation, then get in touch. In the meantime, I highly recommend reading Traction by Gino Wickman, this book changed my life, and is the reason I became an EOS Implementer?

-RF