Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Welcome to Leading With Force β a podcast where seasoned entrepreneur Brian Force shares the invaluable lessons he's learned on his journey through this crazy, wonderful life. Having built several multimillion-dollar companies, Brian dives into the nuts and bolts of building successful teams, scaling businesses, and leading with passion and purpose.
Each episode offers practical tools to effectively cast your vision, build your team, boost productivity, and become the leader you were meant to be. Brian's mission is to inspire you to unlock the incredible power within yourself, achieve your goals, and make a meaningful impact on the world. Join us as we explore how to find your inner leader, empower others, and embrace your journey.
βAre you trying to automate more so that you can save a salary? Because that salary is gonna be low return on your investment until that person really grows into capacity. And if I can automate redundant task, I can increase this person's impact and their capacity. So here's the return on my investment.
I'm π saving this much by spending this much on automation. The delta in between is essentially the return on my investment. I wish all the examples were that clean cut, but this gives you an idea of how you can start to set a baseline for the return on the investment you're making in the business. Hey everyone. Welcome back to the show. I really appreciate you joining me for another episode. Before we dive in, if you are getting value from this podcast, please like, share, subscribe on whatever platform that you're listening on, and then send this out to somebody that you think could use this message.
It really helps me with my mission to reach as many people as possible. And then when you're done, head on over to brian force.com and subscribe to our weekly newsletter. I spend a lot of time making sure that we give out actionable advice that you can implement in your business every single week.
So head on over to brian force.com. Make sure you like, share, subscribe the podcast. That is enough for the PSAs. Let's get back to the π show.
Today we're gonna talk about one of the most fundamentally meaningful and impactful parts of running a business.
It's an area where I think a lot of business people and entrepreneurs struggle at some point in their career, and those who really figure it out. Go on to build crazy successful businesses and those who never really attempt to figure it out, they just sort of fly by the seat of their pants or get it wrong a few times, but don't really learn the lessons and make adjustments.
They tend to middle and kind of hover in this gray area where they're. Really always bumping up against the ceiling of profitability. Uh, the business isn't really stable, and then eventually things kind of fall apart. Then they need to rebuild the next iteration and kind of build the business over again.
This is a really, really important aspect of the business, and that is understanding and knowing when to invest in your business in certain aspects and how to invest in your business in certain aspects. What I mean by that is. When to spend money on things, how to know when it's the right time, and then what you're looking to get from the money that you do invest.
The reality is most entrepreneurial journeys look a little bit like this. We start our business from scratch. We pour everything we possibly have into it. We bootstrap it in the beginning, and then we start to make a little money.
And just off our sheer determination and willpower, we start to find some success. And then when we start to find some success, we realized that we probably didn't put a whole lot of infrastructure in place in the beginning to really hold our dollars and cents accountable.
Because we weren't really making that much money at the beginning, but now we are. And now we're realizing, hey, I've got a lot more money in my bank account than I used to. I should go and I should spend some of this money to make my life a little easier. I should build infrastructure. I should create leverage for myself.
I should expand the business
so we do start to spend and our expenses go up. And in the beginning it's relatively straightforward. We spend money on our biggest pain points at first, and usually that pays off and the business grows a little bit more. And then at some point.
We'll really catch fire. Maybe The market is just really, really perfect at this particular moment in time for the business that we're running. And so things really start to take off, and now we're making a lot of money and we're really excited and it feels really good financially. But the business is really chaotic
'cause we really didn't put a whole lot of infrastructure in place in the beginning. We're flying by the seat of our pants, but now we've got the money to really build something that lasts. And so we start spending it. And because money is so plentiful right now, because we just happen to be in this beautiful spring season in our business, we tend not to hold our dollars that accountable if we need it and we think it'll make our lives easier, or we think it'll make the business grow.
Or if it's just a cool idea, we want to try, we'll spend some money on it. And especially in this day and age where so much of what we spend is a recurring expense in the form of like softwares and technology things that charge us every single month. What ends up happening is we get this really bloated p and l, we get a whole bunch of stuff that we're spending money on, but.
It's springtime and the money is flowing in, and so we don't really realize it because we don't feel it all that much. We're still making more money than we ever have been, and so the p and l just becomes an afterthought as long as the money keeps flowing in. We don't really hold ourselves accountable to our operating expenses.
And then spring starts to turn to summer, starts to turn to fall, and the market shifts, or something happens in our business where we're not making as much profit as we used to. Maybe our growth is just stagnated. Maybe we've just hit a ceiling.
A lot of businesses just hit a ceiling of growth 'cause they never really had a specific growth mechanism in the first place, they're word of mouth businesses and they got by on their relationships and referrals and brand image and then they kind of peaked and then all of a sudden we start to look at our p and l and we go, where is all my money going?
And we realized that we never held our dollars accountable, never really made strategic decisions around when to invest in the business and where to invest in the business, and then how to hold those dollars accountable for a specific result. And so now we have to start backing out of those expenses.
We've gotta start cutting things and we've gotta start cutting fast a lot of times. And a lot of times what we realize during this exercise is one that our businesses tend to be able to run on a fraction of the operating expenses that we build them up to.
Sometimes if we really just strip things back to the bare essentials, we realize that we can still run a pretty smooth operation, and in good times we tend to bloat our p and o quite a bit. And what we also realize is that this is a process that we never really want to have to go through again.
So that's where we as business people either get it right and learn our lesson and build a really great, stable business thereafter, or we get it wrong and we end up repeating the cycle over and over, bumping up against the ceiling of profitability and growth and never really building the business that we envision.
Because we're not holding our dollars accountable, we're not being strategic with our decision. So today we're gonna talk about how to know when to invest in the business and where to invest in the business, where to spend your hard earned money in order to reinvest back into the business, to make it more stable and
Continue to grow.
So let's just dive in with a couple of really quick tips that I think will help point us in the right direction on this path. So first off, when is the right time to invest in your business? Meaning when can you afford it?
This is an opportunity for so many business owners. I'm very blessed to speak with so many entrepreneurs from around the world every single week, and in my lived experience, I would still say that the majority of them have an opportunity to get a better handle on their day-to-day finances, understanding when they can actually afford to take on larger operating expenses or try new things or reinvest back into their business.
Just from a purely financial standpoint, so what does a healthy business look like? One that is able to reinvest in personnel, operations, growth, whatever it is.
Well, one of the first things to understand that I think a lot of business people and entrepreneurs get wrong is the difference between profits and their actual cash flow. What I mean by that is profit is essentially an accounting term that basically just takes your revenue minus expenses, but it doesn't necessarily mean money that is in your bank account, especially if you work off an accrual type P and L as opposed to cash.
Profit, could come in the form of receivables, it could be tied up in inventory. So if you run a little bit more of a complex business from an accounting standpoint, you really wanna make sure that you know the difference between your free cash flow and your profits, because your profits might not necessarily be.
The bank right now, and if you go and make a big investment because you think you've had solid months of profitability, but you haven't actually realized that cash flow yet, you could put yourself in a big financial pinch by increasing your cash outlay before your cash flow is actually caught up to what your profit says.
So just understand that difference if you don't already. You need to understand the difference between profit and cash flow. Because that's going to affect your decision making.
once you really have clarity on that distinction, I sort of think about this in the same way that I would think about a personal budget. I would recommend that before you make any major investment in your business, that you have a solid three to six months of operating expenses in the bank,
And that three to six months is gonna vary based on the complexity of your business, the type of industry that you're in.
But it's important to make sure that when you make strategic investments in your business, that you're not immediately asking for them to pay off.
Otherwise you're gonna go into debt because then you're gonna start what's called a debt doom loop. You're gonna start this debt cycle where your investments have to pay off at a higher rate. Just to make up for the interest on the debt that you're paying because they didn't pay off quickly enough.
So you want to make sure that you have a minimum of three to six months of operating reserves before you make any large strategic investments in your business.
Another good practical rule of thumb that I like is the 50 50 rule, and basically what that means is that for every dollar that I'm going to invest back into my business, I wanna make sure that I have 50 cents in cash reserves set aside so that I have some time for this investment to pay off and I'm not up against the clock with my burn rate, and I'm gonna run outta money if this investment doesn't pay off really quickly.
So we'll do a simple example here. Let's say that my operating expenses are $25,000 a month to run my business, and I have $100,000 in cash reserves in my operating account or however you set up your bank accounts, which we'll talk about actually in a second.
So I have more than three months worth of reserves. I have four months worth of reserves. Now, how much can I afford to invest in my business? Well, the maximum amount that I could afford to invest in my business is about $50,000 per year. If I have a hundred thousand dollars in operating reserves, and I'm not suggesting that you do this,
but for every dollar that I invest, I wanna have 50 cents in reserves. So over the course of a year, that adds up to about. 4,000, 4,200, something like that. So I could comfortably increase my operating expenses with a new strategic investment by about $4,000 a month, bringing my new operating expense total to about $29,000 a month.
If I had a hundred thousand dollars in the bank. That gives me the runway that I need for this investment to actually pay off before I get into a cash crunch and I have to go into debt just to keep paying my bills.
So those are three really quick tips right out of the gate. The distinction between cash flow and profit three to six months of operating reserves and the 50 50 rule have 50 cents in reserves for every dollar that you're going to reinvest back into the business.
If you follow those three simple guidelines, you're already gonna have a pretty good idea of. When you can invest and how much you can comfortably reinvest back into your business.
Another great way to measure your investment readiness if you've been running your business for a significant amount of time, is to set up three different bank accounts. There are a lot of different ways to set up your financial structure.
I really love the Profit First Model, and this is sort of a variation on that,
so we set up three separate bank accounts. Very simple. We have one for our operating expenses. That's just your day-to-day operating expenses. That's your three to six months of operating expenses that you should have in there at all times.
Then you have a tax account, a tax account where you set aside the money for all your forecasted taxes, so you're not surprised and you don't have to take money outta your operating expenses to go pay your taxes at the end of the year, and then you're gonna set a third account up. That's just gonna be for strategic investments.
Okay? And then what you'll do is you'll take 10% of your cash flow every single month. The actual net profits that you're really making, the actual cold hard cash that your business is making, and you'll put 10% of it into that strategic investments account. So essentially, 10% of your true profit will go into a strategic investments account every single month.
And then a big milestone that you're aiming for with this account is you want that account to equal and maintain 10% of your annual revenue. So for example, if your annual revenue for your business is $500,000, then by the time your Strategic Investments account hits $50,000, you'll know.
That your business is in a really good position to make strategic investments. Now, if you have three to six months of operating reserves and you have 10% of your total annual revenue in your strategic investments account, that means that you have a business that has good padding in the operating department.
You have had enough cash flow over time that you can comfortably reinvest back into the business. That's a really, really great model to follow. Three to six months of operating expenses. Invest $1 for every 50 cents of operating reserves that you have, and then make sure that you're building up that base over time by allocating 10% to that strategic investments account.
If you just follow those three key pieces of advice, you're already like 99% ahead of most entrepreneurs who are kind of doing this stuff by the seat of their pants. If you're disciplined around this model, you're like way more than halfway there. Now it's about what do you actually invest in? How do you know when your strategic investments account is ready to actually be deployed, where that money is best served?
To establish a baseline, we want to have some guiding principles around how we invest into our business. One of the guiding principles that I've always tried to abide by when it comes to investing in our businesses is that every single dollar that we invest in our business should get a measurable return on investment. And then we can measure whether or not that return on investment is attractive for us to actually go and pull the trigger.
Now, this sounds really simple, like, yes. If you're gonna invest in the business, you want to get a return on that money. That's very straightforward. But measuring it isn't necessarily as straightforward. Because we're not always investing directly in growth.
There are a lot of things that we need to invest in that make our operations run more smoothly or our client experience better. And so measuring the return on those dollars can be a little bit more nuanced.. So what we need to do to make sure that we know whether or not our investments are paying off, is establish a baseline for us to measure our return against.
Here's a great example. We invest a lot in our businesses in automation these days. Technology, automation, operational efficiency. There are so many incredible tools out there and so many incredible ways to automate redundant, repetitive tasks in your business that even five years ago, we had no way of automating or even outright eliminating, , now we have so much awesome technology at our fingertips. Not only should we be using it, but we should be measuring it to see what sort of ROI we're getting on it. For example, if I have an operational role in my business that has a specific capacity,
let's say that this is a client service manager that can handle 250 clients at a time. Their job is to onboard clients, take them through our service experience.
They are the face of the business to their clients. If I know that I can get 250 clients per client success manager, then I know that for every new 250 clients that we onboard, I'm going to have to bring on another salary, and that salary's not gonna be at capacity day one that I'm bringing them on. So I'm actually getting a very low return on that salary in the beginning, because let's say that that client success manager is only gonna start with say, 75 to a hundred clients, there's gonna be.
Uh, a transition period where the first client success manager is way past capacity and things are breaking and there's gonna be overflow. And so now we need to bring on our new client success manager. We're gonna transition 50 to 75 clients out of the first pod and into the second pod, and that's where that client success manager is gonna start.
And then we're gonna grow that pod. Well, I'm getting a very low return on that salary in the beginning because that pod isn't anywhere near capacity. So let's say that that's a $75,000 a year salary for that client Success Manager. Just kind of throwing out an arbitrary number there, let's just say that for $2,000 a month, I could automate so many of the redundant tasks in my first client success manager's role, that I can increase her capacity from 250 clients to 350 clients.
Well, before I go. And I bring on a whole nother salary. I would much rather invest $2,000 to get us to 350 clients per pod with the same amount of time, energy, and effort on that first client success manager's behalf, than to bring on. 75,000 more dollars a year to manage 50 to 75 clients. In the beginning, I would look at that $2,000, which let's just say 24,000 a year, let's call it 25,000 a year.
I would essentially consider that a two x return on my money because for that $25,000, I've saved myself $75,000 a year in an added salary to serve those same 50, 75, a hundred clients that I've increased this person's capacity by. So for the $25,000 that I'm spending, I'm saving 50,000 by not having a $75,000 salary.
That's a. Double my investment on the $25,000. That's a really, really simple example. I wish they were all that easy to measure, but that's how you can measure the return on your operational expenses is to understand what is the result that you're trying to accomplish?
Are you trying to automate more so that you can save a salary? Because that salary is gonna be low return on your investment until that person really grows into capacity. And if I can automate redundant task, I can increase this person's impact and their capacity. So here's the return on my investment.
I'm saving this much by spending this much on automation. The delta in between is essentially the return on my investment. I wish all the examples were that clean cut, but this gives you an idea of how you can start to set a baseline for the return on the investment you're making in the business.
Obviously, on the growth side, you wanna measure how much new business you're generating through whatever strategic investment is, and you need to be realistic about the timeline. Especially if you're doing something like a new digital marketing strategy or SEO optimization or doing something that's kind of a longer term payoff.
But on a very fundamental level, before you invest a single dollar back into your business, it is very important to understand what it is that you're measuring and how it is that you're measuring. So if I'm measuring. The success of the automation that I'm spending $25,000 on,
I need to come up with the baseline metrics that I'm looking at to make sure that I'm really actually getting a return on that investment rather than just $75,000 salary is no longer being paid. $25,000 for technology to automate $50,000 return in between. What am I measuring when that person is now working 350 clients instead of 250 clients?
I can look at client feedback surveys, I can look at testimonials and reviews. I can set a metric for here's what success looks like at 250 clients. Here's what our client feedback surveys say. Here's what the amount of referrals we generate from happy clients. Here's how many five star Google reviews we get.
Per 250 clients, right? Let's establish those metrics and let's keep those metrics the same. At 350 clients per success manager. Now I know that I really did get a return on that investment 'cause I saved the salary. I automated redundancy, and we're seeing the same results across the KPIs. Make sure that you establish a baseline for what it is you're measuring and how you're going to measure it to see if you're gonna get a return on your investment.
As a very general rule of thumb, every dollar you invest in your business should make it run more efficiently or it should grow. And as a business leader, it can be very difficult at times to really synthesize what's more important in the moment.
Is operations more important in the moment, or can I set an acceptable standard that we're already hitting even though it's not perfect? And I should invest in growth because growth is gonna drive more revenue and more revenue is gonna turn into more profit and more cash flow for me to eventually invest in better operations.
Those are answers that I can't really give you. This is why it's so important to think deeply and strategically about the direction of your business, where your pain points are, and be realistic with yourself. One of the hardest things about leading a business is that at times you have to accept that the standard that you have for your team might be slightly lower than the standard that you would have. If you had one of you in every single role on your team, leading people is difficult because oftentimes they don't perform at the level that we think we would perform in their role.
And so a lot of times our reinvestment ideas automatically go to how do I give them more leverage, more resources? How do I find new people? How do I top grade my talent? Like how do I make this business just run? As it would run if I was doing everything, I can't do everything, but if I had one of me in every single role, what would that business look like?
And then let's go spend the money to make that happen, because then I'll be free of feeling like the business is a wreck all the time. And I'll be less frustrated. I'll operate a lot more smoothly, I'll sleep better at night. But that really isn't reality. I mean, over time, absolutely.
With the right standards, the right accountability, the right systems and processes, the right technology, you should absolutely have people in their roles that are better than you would be in that role. That's what great leaders do, is find great talent and lead them to do great work. But it won't always be like that, especially not in the beginning.
You have to really grow. Into that culture. You have to build that culture one day at a time. And one of the ways to do that is to grow the business and to go through this messy, chunky, chaotic period where you're growing the business in a way that's really straining your operations. And then your people are gonna be put to the test and you are gonna be put to the test as a leader.
But at the end of the day, you'll have enough revenue coming in that if you do need to top grade talent. You can afford to go do that if you spend too much money on a plus level talent at every role before you invest in growing the business, it's gonna be really hard to retain that top A level talent because top A level talent wants to be with a business where their opportunities are gonna continue to expand.
They will outgrow you if your business doesn't grow alongside them. And so this can be a bit of a catch 22. Do you need to invest in operations and a-level talent right away, or do you need to invest in growth? My simple advice would be if your business is only growing organically, meaning you don't really have a formal growth engine, a marketing strategy, a lead generation platform, a process by which you are acquiring new business.
That is a very sensible place to invest your money because your growth should be a systematic process, just like every other aspect of your business. If your operational side is very systematic, when a customer comes into your business, this happens. This happens.
This happens the same way every single time. That's fantastic. That's what you're aiming for, but you also need to be doing that with your growth. Here's how much it costs us to acquire a client. Here's how much we spend on marketing and advertising, so on and so forth. You need to be strategic around your growth, and so if your business is solely organic growth based right now.
My simple advice would be before you invest too heavily in better operational efficiency, make sure you're investing in sustainable, predictable growth of your company.
So establish clear metrics and KPIs that you're gonna measure to see if you're actually getting a return. And then you wanna run a cost benefit analysis rather than just measuring your return. You need to understand what you're looking for in the first place. And that cost benefit analysis starts with understanding the outcome that you're trying to achieve.
If I'm going to invest. $50,000 this year in this part of my business, I am expecting that long term that generates a hundred thousand dollars or whatever it is, right? I wanna have a clear metric that I'm aiming for so that then I can run a legitimate cost benefit analysis on doing this or not doing this.
I'll give you a great example. We brought on a business development manager recently at one of our organizations and one thing that entrepreneurs do. Is underestimate the total cost of strategic investments.
So for example, bringing on personnel, a business development manager, she has her base salary, she has a commission bonus structure, and there's all sorts of other costs associated with bringing this person on.
What if you think, Hey, I'm gonna bring on a business development manager and we're gonna pay them $50,000 a year base salary plus commission on every new client they acquire. Like, you're only thinking about that $50,000, but that's not the total cost of bringing on that person.
Well, first you have the $50,000, then you have obviously payroll tax and all the, the implications, health insurance, all that type of stuff that comes with that salary. This particular role is a commission-based role, and so the majority of this person's income should come from the new clients that they acquire.
And it feels like, well, if we're bringing on a lot of new clients, that should just pay for itself. But the reality is, in a commission structure like this, in this particular business, that commission, that we're paying to that person for every new client they bring on pretty much sucks up our profitability on that new client for the first three months.
And so we're really not profitable on that new client for about 90 days from when we bring them on, and you've gotta account for that because that's lost revenue, because now it's going to compensate this person. So they're quite a bit more expensive. When you think about that. Then there's everything that we do to provide this person the tools and resources to go and succeed.
In their role. For a business development manager, that's gonna be a lot of costs on marketing events, networking tools like this. $50,000 a year salary quickly turns into well over a hundred thousand dollars a year expense in your business.
So first we've gotta be very realistic with the total cost of our strategic investments. Especially when it comes to personnel that are gonna need resources to succeed that you don't already have. Those costs really add up.
We see entrepreneurs routinely underestimate the cost of strategic investments by like 40 to 60% depending on what it is they're investing in. 'cause they're only kind of thinking about the base level investment. They're not thinking about all. The associated collateral costs that come with it.
And so now we know. Okay. A BDM really costs like a hundred thousand dollars a year. Okay? So what does this person need to accomplish in year one for this strategic investment to pay off how many new clients they need to acquire for us to be satisfied with the return that we're going to get on our investment?
Well, this particular role is in a recurring revenue style business. And so we're very happy with this role if we're breakeven on it in year one, meaning we're gonna spend a hundred thousand dollars and we're gonna generate a hundred thousand dollars in revenue in year one based on this person's success.
That would be fantastic because we'll retain those clients after year one. The upfront cost with acquiring those clients only was on our books for year one. Now she's generating business in year two, and we're still getting paid on clients that we brought on in year one, and so we're really happy with the revenue.
Just matches the expense in year one and we're basically flat break even. That means that the business is healthy, this role is paid for, and now we're gonna start to really see the profitability of all the year one work show up in year two, and then so on and so forth. That's a very specific example to that role, but you understand my thought process here.
I've gotta understand what my cost benefit. I've gotta understand what it is that I'm trying to measure, what I'm trying to accomplish, and then just do a basic cost benefit analysis.
I'm gonna invest a hundred thousand dollars. I expect to get a hundred thousand dollars back in year one, so I'm flat. And then I know going forward, that same a hundred thousand dollars from the year one work will be there in year two plus another a hundred or 150 or whatever it is.
As this person grows and scales, and now my return is significantly greater. But if I'm not sure what I'm looking for before I make that investment, I could be really let down with the results and
i'm not sure if it's working. I'm not sure if it's paying off. A lot of people will do something like bring on a business development manager and think that it's gonna pay massive dividends in year one, and in specific businesses it might, in this particular business, I would not expect to make a dime off of that strategic investment for a minimum of a year.
And if I didn't know that and if I hadn't thought deeply around that strategy. I'd be pretty disappointed that I invested a hundred grand and just broke even. And then I might move on from that person and think that they weren't being successful when they really were. I just had a totally misguided idea of the return that I should expect from that investment.
So think very deeply around what it is that you want to accomplish, and then run a simple cost benefit analysis to see if this is the right time to go and invest in that particular thing. If I'm investing in something like operations and new technology and automation,
that might pay off a lot more quickly than investing in a new person who's gonna go and strategically grow my business. That might be a longer term play. And I need to have the right expectations around the return that I'm expecting and the timeline on which I'm expecting that return.
So think very deeply about those things before you decide where to make strategic investments in your business. So let's put all of this together and kind of tie a bow on it. You'll know that you're ready to make strategic investments in your business when your business is already healthy.
That means depending on your industry and seasonality three to six months of operating reserves in the bank. I do suggest making those three different accounts and investing 10% of your cash flow into that strategic investment account when it matches 10% of your total annual revenue.
Now you know that you've got both boxes checked. I've got healthy operating reserves and I've got 10% of my total annual revenue saved up in strategic investments. Now it's time to deploy. And I can deploy a dollar for every 50 cents of operating reserves that I have comfortably.
And by the way, it's like per year, not one total lump sum investment. I would space that out over the course of a year, but now I know that I'm ready to make that strategic investment and I'm not putting the health of my business at risk.
And then I've gotta think deeply around where are the most important places to invest in my business right now? If I'm gonna invest in automation and operational efficiency, what can I expect in return? And how do I measure that? Am I expanding the capacity of my team so that we can handle more business without expanding personnel? Or am I just straight up growing the business and investing in lead generation and new business in the door, and how long am I gonna give that to achieve my desired result? I have to level set my expectations to know that I'm headed in the right direction at a reasonable timeline based on whatever the investment is that I'm making.
And then I've gotta know how I'm going to measure it. I have to know what success looks like early on before I can really see a tangible return. If I'm investing in a new marketing strategy, I know it's not gonna pay off day one, but what is happening on day one or day 30 or day 60? Am I getting more opportunities? Am I getting more at bats? Is my pipeline filling up, right? If I've run my business for long enough, I know that a certain pipeline is gonna translate into a certain amount of new business. Am I seeing the trends? And am I confident that we're on the right path to get the return on investment over the right time horizon that I'm looking for?
Same thing with the automations and the operational side. Is the thing that I'm implementing actually being used, is it expanding capacity? What does the scoreboard look like and how is it improving or not improving? Since I've made this investment that I spend a whole bunch of money on something that I thought would work, but my people don't know how to use it, and so now they're not using it, so I either need to retrain them to use it, or I need to reimagine if this is even worth it in the first place, or I need to reimagine if my talent is the right people to be using it.
It's gonna tell me a lot about the business, but I have to have a basis for measuring my return before I make any strategic investment.
If you follow these simple guidelines, you're not gonna be perfect, but you're gonna be so far ahead of most entrepreneurs out there that are really just flying by the seat of their pants when it comes to reinvesting back into their business. Be disciplined about this. Build the right framework, make sure your business is healthy, and then think deeply about where strategic investment can improve your business and how you're gonna measure the returns and hold them accountable.
I would love to hear how this framework is working in your business, how it's possibly π changed or helped evolve your mindset around when and what to invest in your business and what you're seeing as a result of this way of thinking. Drop a comment below.
Send me a message, get in touch with me. I really appreciate you listening to another episode, and I'll see you next time.