What You See and What You Watch
by Jonathan McGaha | 29 August 2016 12:00 am
For most of my adult life, I have been an avid cyclist. In my twenties, I even spent a brief season on a cycling team. (It was brief because I wasn’t very good.) Cyclists travel in tight packs called pelotons, often bumping shoulders and rubbing wheels. It can be nerve racking, and if you lose your concentration, you can bring down the whole peloton in a heap. They teach you during those times to “look at nothing and see everything.”
It’s an admonition not to get too focused on any one thing. If you’re staring at the wheel in front of you, you’re missing the slowdown three bikes ahead. You have to concentrate on not focusing your eyes too acutely, pay attention to your peripheral vision and see.
What do you see? Patterns. You’re watching for patterns. In the field of your vision, you want to catch the disturbance in the path of a cyclist in front of you. In fact, you’re even trying to catch a hand moving on a brake lever which would give you enough time to react.
Simultaneous to that, you are making sure that your own pattern is consistent and predictable. You hold your line on turns and never ever brake in the middle of the peloton unless you’re trying to avoid a hazard.
“Look at nothing and see everything” is the same kind of recommendation that works on running your business. If you’re only looking at costs, you’re not paying attention to revenue (or leads or overhead or assets).
Every good business manager gets a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual report that he or she uses as a dashboard to assess the health of the company. Those different reports deliver different news, of course, but there are specific benchmarks within each that appear more important than others.
I often encounter managers who are so focused on one benchmark that they lose track of the overall health of the report and miss changing patterns. A great example is a roofing contractor serving the residential market. Such businesses are highly dependent on leads. If you know that your sales staff will close 20 to 30 percent of all qualified leads and what your average job size is, you can do a pretty quick calculation on the number of leads you need to generate to be able to determine if you’re meeting your revenue goals. A sudden drop-off in a weekly or monthly lead report would indicate that you’re going to have a revenue shortfall in the near future. That kind of information is invaluable.
But if you’re paying so much attention to the lead count and miss other patterns, you may miss other changes. For example, you may notice your leads held steady but miss that the close rate has soared to 40 to 50 percent. That kind of pattern change is equally important because it may be an indication that your sales staff is discounting too much and you still may hit a revenue shortfall in the near future. It also could mean your pricing is too low and your margins may suffer down the line.
No matter what the problem is-and there is a problem there that needs to be investigated-the important thing is that if you’re focusing on just a portion of the business, you’re missing the changing patterns in the periphery of your vision. It’s from that area that the hazard may arise that brings down the whole operation.
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