Leading Indicators

Back in 2007, I started my coaching business, the first piece of real business development I did was to speak to a local Rotary.

Now, if you do any public speaking, you know rotaries are for practice, you don't get any real clients that way. But I got one, I got my first client, and I thought, this is going to be easy. I'm going to love this stuff.

And then silence, deafening silence for six months, with no new clients.

This wasn't going to be so easy.

That six months was absolutely the toughest time in my business. And if I said, I handled it perfectly, I'd be lying.

But here's what I did right. I stay disciplined. And I did the things that I knew were the right things to do. Learning, creating more content, networking, building relationships, making those phone calls I needed to make, doing the training that I needed to do to become a better coach, scheduling more speeches in front of rotaries, chambers, and anyone willing to let me get in front of them and talk.

The challenge was those activities that I needed to execute on every single day, they didn't drive results right away. Sometimes the lag time between an activity and more cash in the bank was six months or a year or more. Those activities which don't drive results right away, are the hardest thing to do. But most often, they're the most beneficial things, to drive a healthy, sustainable business.

When I work with clients, I focus them on what I call both lagging and leading measures of success.

A lagging measure is the measure of a result, getting a new client, achieving revenue or profit goal. Those are lagging measures. Now, if the only thing that kept me going, was those lagging measures getting results, I probably would have quit three months into the deafening silence, because I was working my butt off, but not seeing the results. But you won't get those results, you won't hit those lagging measures without putting a whole bunch of work in.

We need to measure that work and be incredibly motivated by it. The way to measure that work is through what's called leading measures or leading indicators.

Leading indicators are measures of activities that lead to results. So for me at the time, I measured how many times I was out there speaking to a group, how many times I went out to lunch with someone to ask them for referrals, how much training I was doing to build my expertise. If I waited for great lagging measure to keep me motivated, I would have gotten burned out way before I actually achieved the result. But by focusing and actually making a game out of those leading indicators.

I stay disciplined that I remember a game I created way back in those days, I would get one point for every referral I received in a day. Two points. For every meeting I scheduled with a decision maker that day, three points for every meeting I actually had with a decision maker and four points for a new client. My goal was to get at least four points every day. And I wasn't getting a lot of new clients early on. So it was all about getting referrals and scheduling meetings. And that kept me going, and kept me motivated until the results started coming in.

So what are those activities that you know will lead to results? What are you doing to measure them? What are you doing to make a game out of them? What are you doing to stay motivated and disciplined on those leading indicators so that you and your business are around long enough to start really seeing the results?