How to Track Mission-Critical Metrics to Avoid Business Leaks – in Just 7 Minutes with Layne Booth

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For those mission critical metrics, I want to help you get started on those today. We have our '12 Metrics Checklist' for online businesses to go ahead and take a look at some of my top 12 metrics that I helped create for our clients and you can go ahead and start with that as well. You can go to www.12metrics.com and grab that free checklist for you guys.

Summary:

Layne Booth is the CEO and Dashboard Expert of The Project Booth, a consulting agency that uses proven metrics and data to grow online businesses by 2x. With strategic planning and visual dashboards, growth-focused entrepreneurs can reclaim their time, make data-driven decisions, and increase their income.

With over a decade of “in the trenches” experience, Layne ensures business owners simplify their strategies and increase their profits … so they can get back to running a business they love.

Here are the highlights of this episode:

1:30 Layne’s ideal Client: We work with 6 and 7-figure women entrepreneurs that are running online businesses; that's from influencers, membership sites, from service providers to digital agencies.

1:53 Problem Layne helps solve: The biggest piece that we help them solve is, they get to stop guessing with their gut and start making data-driven decisions. We'll help you grow and scale your business without being the bottleneck. We really want you to bring forward that CEO, that version of yourself to making intelligent business decisions with the data and the confidence to back them up. And we found out that the simplest way to do this is to harness the data that's been swirling around your business. And then harness and create visual dashboards that will make it more of a 'red light, green light' decision instead of looking at a spreadsheet that makes your eyes go crossed.

3:04 Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Layne: One of the common problems that's typically our clients are saying, is that you're feeling that you're doing all the things and you're still frustrated with the results that are coming out, like "I tried this thing one more time" or "I heard someone else doing it and it worked amazing for them yet when I do it, it seems to flop again" or "I don't know how I did! Did I do better or worse than what I was already doing?". It's just this constant question of "Am I doing it right? Because it feels like I'm really not sure." All of the same time, one of the more common and probably the worst symptoms of all is you found yourself in a constant or recurring cash flow crunch, which tends to be one of the things no one wants to talk about over the dinner table. People asking you how's your business is going and you're like "ooh, it's great" and really what's happening is "man, I feel like I pinned myself into a corner again, I thought this ad agency was really going to help me with growing my scaling or hiring that team member..." but it just feels like the decision you're making aren't working to actually move your business forward. 

4:51 What are some of the common mistakes that folks make before finding Layne and her solution: One of the things that we see people making is, is that they just rely on one set of metrics and if you can probably imagine Bill, that set of metrics is typically 'finances'. Finances at the end of the day are very important to monitor, to watch these metrics but unfortunately, the finances are the last thing that happens in your business. So, you've already done the marketing, you already spent money on your team members to deliver and execute and now you're sitting with cash in the bank; you're sitting with the revenues and expenses, but there's nothing you can do about it at that point in time. The key shift is to really move towards what we're going to call KPI's (these are Key Performance Indicators), these are the things happening on the front-end, and I kind of like to call it your bread crumbs of business. So, they're going to lead you to what's happening, they're going to lead you to that cash in the bank, they're going to lead you to the revenue growth, they're going to lead you to how your expenses are going to land, and it's going to tell you how to land before it's too late. Before you're too late and you can't fix it, you can't change it, you can't pivot it. That's one of the biggest things to call out is that it's not just about the financial metrics, there's tons that you can implement and look at from operational perspectives. You're not overspending on team members, you're not screwing up your systems, and then there's a lot on the marketing and front-end side of business as well to make sure that is it worth having a YouTube channel, an Instagram platform, is it worth doing a live webinar versus a recorded-on demand training. These are the questions that get easily answered when you look at the right data.

6:53 Layne’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): If I can leave you with just one action to take today is, I want you to know 'the one number' that can take you from struggling to scaling as an entrepreneur. And that one number is your annual forecast. And when I say forecast, I want to make a clear distinction, most people are thinking about what number they can hit this month in their business or "what number sounds dreamy by the time I arrive to December 31st" and that's not what I'm talking about. A forecast requires you to look backwards at what actually happens starting from one source of truth, looking back on what happened last year, last month, and putting together a solid expectation of what's possible with your baseline plus the new moving levels in your business and come up with the solid forecast. What's that annual forecast number that you can anchor today, doesn't take that long to review what happened last year and to put together that number. If there is one number I can leave you with to go from struggling to scaling, it's nailing your annual forecast number for your business.

8:21 Layne’s Valuable Free Resource (VFR): For those mission critical metrics, I want to help you start on those today. We have our '12 Metrics Checklist' for online businesses to go ahead and take a look at some of my top 12 metrics that I helped create for our clients and you can go ahead and start with that as well. You can go to 12metrics.com and grab that free checklist for you guys.

8:59 What's possible when you start data-driven decisions in your business? What we've seen from some of our favorite client’s success stories are hitting their first million dollars a year in their small business. Being able to work half as much, going from 60-hour a week to 30-hour a week, we have our clients double their business in 12 months or less, and even had clients have their best month ever during the pandemic when they were supposed to be speaking on stages. So, what's possible is when you look at the data, it really unlocks the opportunities, helps you avoid the leaks in your business, and really look into and lean into the opportunities that were hidden in plain sight.