I have to say it’s been a pretty cool (and busy) week so far!
On Wednesday morning I was speaking at Nottingham Innovation Park with Nottingham City Council Growth Hub where I did my talk on getting radical financial results
And on Wednesday evening I was delighted to be the guest speaker at the superb quarterly Catena networking event at Trent Bridge.
It was the first outing of my new talk “The mindset and habits of the financially successful” and despite it being the summer holidays we had a packed house.
The week I got a Fitbit
Last week my friend Lyn sold me on the idea of getting a Fitbit. Getting enough exercise into my life is always a challenge and yet it’s something I have to do to stop my back playing up, and to have the energy and fitness I need to pull off my plans for my business and my life. She showed me how much stuff the Fitbit measures. The deeply buried accountant in me loved this! Imagine – KPI’s on tap to measure everything from steps, calories, heart rate and even my sleep!
What’s astonished me is just how quickly having this information has changed my behaviour. Because I see how I’m performing I’m able to change things quickly; not got enough steps in yet – then go out for a quick walk, not drunk enough water yet – drink more. One of the ultimate measures of your health is your resting heart rate, ie how healthy your heart is. To see my resting heart rate fall by 3 points over the last week is my bottom line proof that my actions are having an impact. Not to mention I’m full of energy, and feeling rather pleased with myself!
What do you want to change in your business?
So what on earth has this got to do with finance? Well, if you closely measure the most important things in your business, you’re automatically more focussed on them. And we know that if we focus on something we’re far more likely to get a great result.
Part of the stuff we train our clients on is making sure they’re measuring the things that will have the greatest impact on their bottom line profit and cash. So it’s really important to focus on the right things. And the flip side of that is not measuring too much, and not measuring things that really don’t matter (like who cares how many twitter followers you’ve got!)
It can take a bit of thought and effort to come up with those measures. We rarely take that sort of time to think deeply enough to work out what would be important; it’s much easier to react to the latest email or problem as it hits you. But then you risk days, weeks, months and years of fruitless activity, when you could have been spending that time on the important few things that would make the biggest difference.
Challenge
If you had the right measures in place, measures that you knew would give you better profits and cash, how more likely is it that you’d make the time for those important activities?
So here’s your challenge. Take an hour out sometime in the next few days – book it out right now in your diary, and lock yourself away somewhere you can think without distraction. Come up with just a few key things you’re going to measure – things that you know if you actually did, you’d make a big difference. Oh and then, make sure you do start measuring and focussing and see what results you can get on your bottom line.
If you’d like to email me to tell me what you’re going to start measuring, I’d love to hear from you!