Let’s go ahead and take each of these growth operating system components one by one.
So I said you have to have a process for measuring what’s important and there are two things to that that I think is absolutely critical if you’re an entrepreneur running a newer business or a smaller business.
Automated Sales and Marketing Process
The first thing is you got to have an automated sales and marketing process.
Why do I say that?
Look at your sales and marketing process, your ability to generate new customers or clients, revenue at your business is by far the most important process at your business.
Taking care of customers is critically important and managing the books at your business is critically important, but none of that matters unless a sale is made. As the saying goes, you got to have a good consistent process for bringing in new revenue.
Now, the problem is if you’re a small business or a new business, is that what happens is you get caught in doing that process because it is the most important thing. You’re probably strapped for cash when you are starting your business then you’re hustling and trying to generate revenue however you can and you get stuck in that process.
If you’ve ever read the book, The E Myth by Michael Gerber, you know that what happens is that you get stuck working in the business instead of working on the business.
And that’s why I believe that probably the most important thing that you can do if you’re an early stage entrepreneur, is to automate your sales and marketing process.
Automate your sales and marketing process so that you can stand outside of it, observe it, measure it and watch how it’s working every day and get good data from it.
Because when you’re actually in that process and you’re hustling every day and you’re manually doing things right, you’re running around and meeting with customers or you’re sending out proposals or you’re sending out emails.
Instead of having those things happen as automated as possible, you’re so stuck working in it that it’s really hard to be able to step back and objectively look at it, measure it and determine what’s working and what’s not.
So we’ve got to put an automated sales and marketing process in place.
Daily Score Card
The second part of this is what I call a daily scorecard.
We got to have a very simple scorecard and I literally mean like a Google sheet wherein I just plug in a handful of key metrics every single day so that I can see how am I doing on my key measures.
Again, it’s like getting up in the morning and going to the scale and seeing how much you weigh based on what you did yesterday, how much you ate yesterday, did you exercise, etc.
You want to be able to track the most critical numbers each and every day so that you can see and ask yourself, “Am I improving on them?”
A huge mistake that I see people make is either they can’t track the metrics at all or they’re tracking them so infrequently that a lot of time goes by in between activities to actually impact those metrics. You have a month go by that you haven’t looked at that number. Well, in a month a lot of things happen and your number can go completely off track.
But if you’re measuring it every single day, every week or month you will know if it is working or you need to make adjustments.
You can make them now instead of making them a month from now or a quarter from now when your numbers for a period of time have already been messed up. 
So automate that sales and marketing process and put in a daily scorecard of just a handful of key metrics. I’m talking three to 12 or 15 key metrics that you have to look at every single day to know are you improving in your most important areas or are you getting worse and you need to take some fast action.
So if you have those two things in place, then you can measure what’s important.
Evaluation process
Next is that we need a process for evaluating where we’re going to put our energy and resources to try and get growth at our business.
Again, if you’re an entrepreneur, you know at any given day that we have a list of hundred things that we need to improve in our business.
The reality is that they are not all created equal. There are some things that I could work on for the next month and it would not really have any significant impact on the growth of my business.
And there are other things that if I just go get them unstuck, my business can explode to the next level of growth.
So, how do we determine what those things are?
Well, I have a process or a tool that I use called the Predictable Growth Formula A. It is essentially a series of questions that I ask to help me find the areas that my business is most stuck. I’m going to have a separate video where I’ll walk you through that tool but I think what’s most important about this tool is it’s based on questions and it’s based on data.
It’s easy for us to get our own biases as an entrepreneur, as a human being, into thinking, “I know what the problem is and I know how to fix it.”
But then again, we can be very emotional creatures as entrepreneurs and we can start making decisions that are based too much on gut instead of some data and too much based on our assumptions. Instead of asking good, powerful questions that will help us uncover the truth, uncover the most important opportunities for us to create growth of the business.
So I’m a big believer in that statement from Tony Robbins that says that the quality of your life is based on the quality of your questions.
And I think that that’s absolutely true in business as well. I think that if you’re asking the right questions, you will find the right answers.
