In this blogpost, I’m going to talk about why a lot of people in the bootstrapping phase of their business are overthinking and over-tracking all the metrics in their business. And when people are scaling, vice-versa, they’re not tracking enough.
Overanalyzing and getting stuck in an analysis paralysis
When people start out, often, they overanalyze everything that’s going on. They want to grow an expert business, and get it off the ground. And what they often do is overthink every single step. When setting up their Facebook profile, for example, when choosing their offer, when choosing what to post and where to post… They overanalyze everything and they stay stuck in this analysis paralysis.
Over-tracking the KPIs when starting out
Most of the time people are overly obsessed with tracking things. Let’s say, someone is trying to get some lead generation using Facebook, they might be tracking exactly how many conversations they’re starting and how many people they invite to a sales call and that is nuts. If you’re doing that, you’re massively over-tracking the KPIs in your business. When you’re just starting out, you don’t need to obsessively track everything that’s happening. It doesn’t matter how many replies you’re getting for all the connection requests you’re sending out on LinkedIn or on Facebook. You don’t need to track your call to friend acceptance ration… You don’t need to track all the stuff. The only thing you need to track is the most important tasks that you’re doing and focusing on in your business.
Identify your key tasks and implement them consistently
In every business, when you’re starting out, there are certain key tasks that are known to produce high income. You need to identify what those key tasks are and then implement them consistently every single day. For example, that could be mindset work, that could be some type of posting on social media, creating content, starting conversations with potential clients on social media and booking calls with them. That’s just an example. So, that’s what you need to focus on.
Business should be fun, don’t get lost in details and numbers in the early stages
If you start micromanaging the numbers and you start to over-track everything you’re doing too early in the business it’s going to hold you back. And your business is going to start to feel like it’s not fun. Business should be fun, especially when you’re starting out. You need to keep yourself motivated, you need to make sure that you find some enjoyment in the process. Especially, when you’re not making a whole lot of money yet. And the more you start getting lost in those details and numbers, the more frustrated you will become. You need to focus on the big picture and do the big picture things that are proven to generate results. Keep things simple, bootstrap your business, validate your offer and then once you’re making 10K-20k a month you can start tracking in more detail and become more mathematical about everything you’re doing.
Advanced people, on the other side, are not mathematical enough about their businesses
On the flip side, I also see a lot of advanced people not tracking enough. A lot of people who are making high six-figures or even multiple seven-figures, are of not tracking enough. They are often not mathematical enough about their business. They have no idea about the different KPIs in their business. So, once you enter the scaling phase of your business, once you’re making 10K-30K a month in your business and you’re really looking to scale, that’s when you should start tracking everything that you’re doing. Especially once you’re getting into paid ads. You need to start tracking every single day the key performance indicators that are involved in scaling your business. That could be key metrics of your Facebook ads, that could also be sales metrics, how many people you are having a conversation with on the phone, how many of those you are enrolling, how many people are qualified versus disqualified and of course all the metrics related to your ads and your organic marketing. That way you can calculate better what’s your cost per acquisition, what’s your cost per booking or your cost per lead. You need to measure all of that.
When scaling, you need to pay attention to the details
If you want to scale, you need to become obsessed with tracking these things. When you’re scaling, although you want to keep things simple, you need to pay attention to the details. You need to make sure that you’re tracking a variety of different KPIs. Because otherwise you will have no idea of what’s going on in your business and you will start spending money on advertising without having any control. So, when you’re in the scaling phase, start using tracking software, like Google Analytics. Start using spread sheets efficiently, such as Google Sheets. You can set things up in a way that makes sense for your business and you can have an assistant fill these out for you every day.
Beginners that over-track VS advanced people that under-track
It’s very interesting that beginners tend to over-track and more advanced people to under-track. So, when you’re a beginner, you should just keep it super simple and focus on the big picture. And when you scale, you need to track mathematically what’s going on. Because otherwise you will get lost and start to loose money in your business.
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