Let’s do story time!
A marketing firm owner sat across from me a while back, and on paper her business looked healthy. Revenue was on target. But she couldn’t tell me why some months were strong and others weren’t. That bothered her more than the numbers themselves did (which it should have). Everything underneath the top line was a guess.
We didn’t touch her sales process. We went looking in operations first, at how long it actually took to get a campaign out the door once a client signed off. It turned out the answer was inconsistent. Sometimes it was fast. Sometimes it was strangely slow. Nobody had ever measured it and analyzed it closely enough to notice the pattern.
Once we started tracking it weekly, the pattern showed up fast. Campaigns were sitting untouched in a shared drive for two or three days between the strategist finishing the draft and the designer picking it up. No one was slow. It was the lack of a strong handoff and trigger of what step the campaign was in. It lacked an owner for several days.
We gave it an owner. Set a 24 hour standard for it. It was a very small change.
The results were pretty great.
Output per person went up 30% within a month.
Most owners would stop right there. Who wouldn’t be happy with a tighter operation and a less frustrated team? But three months later something else showed up that had nothing to do with operations on the surface. Her sales team started closing more deals, up 10% for the quarter. This was a direct correlation with the increased operations. They noticed repeat clients were asking for more. It didn’t have to do with selling, it had to do with the fact that for the first time, what they promised in a pitch actually showed up on time, every time, and prospects appreciated that.
Retention was the number that told us this increase would stick. Retention crept up steadily over the following two quarters. Clearly, 6 months after the excitement of the first two numbers had faded. Clients who get consistent, fast delivery stay longer and send referrals. That shows up in retention months before it ever shows up as new revenue. This is the number that tells you whether a fix was real or just a lucky quarter.
One number in one part of her business ended up moving two more that looked completely unrelated at the start. That’s the whole case for watching the number that moves first instead of the one everyone’s already staring at.
Measuring the business is one piece of what I call the 20 Hour Workweek™, the handful of pillars that let a founder stop being the bottleneck. On its own, this one piece got her a 30% productivity jump and an increase of a 10% close rate. I’ll leave you to imagine what the rest of the framework does when it’s all running at once.
Talk soon,
Stephanie
PS- I’ve reworked Structure 2 Scale based on some initial client feedback and I am looking for 5 people to go through it. The new case study co-hort starts on September 1st. 90 Days to get you from overwhelm, feeling trapped, and exhausted to gaining clarity, feeling supported and in control, and feeling a bit more freedom in your own business. I will only be taking 5 people.
Reply to learn what the first 3 people who sign up get as a bonus.