ERIN MARCUS LIVE: HOW DO YOU MEASURE SUCCESS?

Erin Marcus Live: How Do You Measure Success? 

Transcript by Descript

Erin Marcus: All right. All right. Hello, hello, hello. I have a question for you. It sounds really simple, but it’s a complicated question. How do you measure success? How do you measure success? Odds are, if you’ve been listening to me at all, if you’ve been listening to any other business strategist out there at all, you’ve heard this before.

Erin Marcus: If you have a business, you have to know your number. All right. But what numbers, what does that even mean? Much like when I ask people what they want, I asked, I talked to like 20 new business owners new to me, business owners and entrepreneurs almost a week. And I asked people this all the time. What do you want?

Erin Marcus: What do you want? And most of the time they usually start and end with one single number line, gross revenue. That’s what they tell me. They tell me they want a million dollar business. They want a 5 million business. They want to double their income. They want a 10 million business, right? They start and stop with top line.

Erin Marcus: Gross revenue, but also just like when I ask people what it is that they want that number by itself doesn’t provide near enough information to run a business from let alone grow and scale from So to continue i’ve done several shows in a row now where we’re focusing on tools To help you grow your business How can you use tracking business statistics to help you grow your business?

Erin Marcus: How do you use the numbers? Not just track the numbers, but use the numbers. Because one of the mistakes I see all too often is even if stats are being tracked, they’re really only done in arrears. They’re being tracked just to say, okay, I’m tracking my numbers. They’re not being utilized. to create growth or to scale a business.

Erin Marcus: Because the thing is, you don’t want to stop attracting your numbers. You want to dive deeper to determine how do you improve those numbers and then what impact an improved number will have. So, for example, say you have a law firm and each lawyer is responsible for bringing in their own clients. A small increase, say there’s five attorneys, A small increase in billable hours, or a small increase in each lawyer’s closing ratio, or a small increase in fees.

Erin Marcus: all lead to significantly more money for the firm. Or, a small decrease in cost per lead. Or, a small decrease in cost per client acquisition. Or, a small increase in the lifetime value of a client. All of these things can lead to more money. So just like when I say there’s a million different ways to build a million dollar business, there’s an infinite combination of incremental changes, that’s very important, an infinite combination of incremental changes that when grouped together can have a very profound impact on your business.

Erin Marcus: Yes, it could absolutely mean More higher top line gross revenue great, but maybe your business would benefit from focusing right now on lowering costs for client fulfillment or lowering costs for lead generation. Both of those things would actually create a higher profit margin, which might make you as a human and a business owner just as happy as a Vanity metric of top line gross revenue.

Erin Marcus: All right, hang in there with me. I know I’ve kind of just thrown a bunch of stuff at you. So if this sounds like I’m giving you a bit of information overload as in like, okay, you’re telling me there’s an infinite number of ways to do this. How do I know what to do? But it’s kind of the point here. It’s kind of the point.

Erin Marcus: If you aren’t tracking your numbers, you won’t know what to do. You won’t know where to begin. You won’t be able to discern which numbers are performing well and you’re happy with, and where you could actually have an effect that would improve things. And before you get all annoyed at me for giving you information overload, one of the most absolute fantastic things I can tell you is most of the time, we are looking at tweaks.

Erin Marcus: We are not looking at overhauls. It is seldom about doing more work. It’s often about doing different work. You very seldom have to start from scratch and throw the baby out with the bath water on all your efforts. In fact, One of the biggest pitfalls to avoid when trying to grow your business is that all or nothing thinking like, Oh my gosh, this didn’t work.

Erin Marcus: I’m not going to do it at all. We don’t want to do that. That keeps you stuck at square one and never building any kind of momentum. So we don’t need overhauls, we need tweaks, but we won’t know what tweaks we can make if we aren’t tracking what’s going on. You hear me say this a lot, I track all sorts of numbers, they get reviewed constantly.

Erin Marcus: But deep dive, right? We do a big deep dive often at the beginning of the year for big year planning. And when we were doing our 2024 planning, it became absolutely horrifyingly obvious to me that the most expensive, most time consuming and most complicated pieces of our marketing plan. We have a variety of things we do for.

Erin Marcus: To meet new clients, but the most expensive, complicated, time consuming pieces that we’re taking up probably 80 percent of our resources, we’re only producing 20 percent of our revenue. There was no way what became abundantly clear is there was no way that we could get incrementally better at it in enough way to solve that problem.

Erin Marcus: When we dove deeper, When we dove deeper into the numbers, we were able to find the few pieces of our marketing program, of what we were doing, that were having the biggest impact. We did not throw the baby away with the bathwater. We did a deep dive to determine what were the pieces that were working.

Erin Marcus: And then the beauty of this is we absolutely let go of the excess. Remember I said it’s different work, not more work. We just had to let go of the pieces that weren’t working. To free up the time, the money, the energy, all of those resources that we could then pour into what was working. So by the way, it doesn’t mean that the parts that weren’t working were mistakes or wrong tactics, because those same parts worked well for me before.

Erin Marcus: And truthfully, We will go back to them because I know they will work again in the future. It just wasn’t working right now and other things work. So rather than bang our heads against the wall, we just released it, put it on a back burner. We’ll revisit again later. The pieces that were not creating results were creating a lot of work and a fair amount of interaction and engagement, truthfully.

Erin Marcus: There was a lot of engagement with the pieces that weren’t producing results, but that is why it is so, so, so important to track actual numbers that have to do with your business and not just vanity metrics. You’ve heard me say this before because I say it a lot. We’ve all got good instincts, but our feelings will lie to us.

Erin Marcus: You would think it would make perfect sense to think that engagement equals business. Revenue. It’s not always the case. My gut told me something was off, but my feelings were wrapped up a little differently. And we had to do a deep dive into the numbers. Into the numbers. What’s most efficient? What’s producing results?

Erin Marcus: Where can we make incremental improvements that will produce really big results? Tell people all the time, go watch a few episodes of Shark Tank, listen to the questions they ask. The sharks love a good story, right? We see that all the time. They love a good story behind the business. You can absolutely see their emotional attachment to a really compelling story.

Erin Marcus: But the deal, the deal always comes down to the numbers, no matter how amazing an entrepreneur’s story might be. Would you be able to answer their questions about your business? I’m going to put it for you a different way. Imagine what would be possible for your business if each quarter you did a deep dive and just picked a couple of numbers, couple of your KPIs, your key performance indicators, and then implemented an improvement plan for just a couple of things.

Erin Marcus: You don’t need huge overhauls. It’s overwhelming if you try to do it all at once. What if you just quarterly? Picked a few KPIs and created an improvement plan for them. Imagine, just imagine the cumulative effect that would have for your business by the end of the year.

Erin Marcus: I hope you enjoyed this episode of the ready yet podcast. I truly enjoy bringing these stories of success and inspiration to you. Please join us in our mission to empower entrepreneurs to be in charge of their businesses and in charge of their lives by sharing this with anyone you know, who would benefit from our tactical and motivating advice, leaving us a review and letting us know if there are any particular topics you would really appreciate hearing about.

Erin Marcus: See you next time.

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