Episode 162: Show Me Your Scoreboard

So the big question is this: how do small business owners like us grow our leadership, develop our teams, and scale our business in a way that allows us to get our products and services out to the world yet still remain profitable?

That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers.

I'm Bradley Hamner, and this is the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.

Welcome to The Bottom Line, a new weekly podcast series that we drop every Thursday to complement our weekly Monday podcast interviews with the industry leaders. These podcasts are going to be designed to give you short, impactful, and value-driven information that you can start using right away in your business.

I value your time and attention and will do my very best not to waste it.

Just get what you need and go. So with that, let's get into today's episode.

Are you an agency owner looking to grow your revenue, increase your bottom line, and better manage your taxes? Club Capital is here to help. Club Capital is the largest accounting and advisory firm for insurance agents in the country, providing monthly accounting, tax strategy, and CFO services. Way more than bookkeeping and your everyday run-of-the-mill tax prep, Club Capital is focused on providing financial and tax advisory services that help you plan and forecast your agency's performance. Their financial dashboards and agency forecasting tools help you better understand your agency's historical performance, create, measure future targets, and see how your agency compares to your peers around the country. Imagine what it would be like to understand the impact to your bottom line when deciding to hire a new employee, or forecast the impact rate changes or commission rates will have on your business. With over $200 million in tracked annual revenue and $140 million in tracked annual expenses, Club Capital has the data and the team to help you make better informed decisions for your agency. They will help you turn that back office stress into the backbone of your agency's success by giving you the tools to take your agency and your leadership to the next level. Visit club.capital today to book a solution overview with one of our business consultants. Club Capital, way more than a CPA firm. Are you an agency owner looking to grow your revenue, increase your bottom line, and better manage your taxes? Club Capital is here to help. Club Capital is the largest accounting and advisory firm for insurance agents in the country, providing monthly accounting, tax strategy, and CFO services. Way more than bookkeeping and your everyday run-of-the-mill tax prep, Club Capital is focused on providing financial and tax advisory services that help you plan and forecast your agency's performance. Their financial dashboards and agency forecasting tools help you better understand your agency's historical performance, create and measure future targets, and see how your agency compares to your peers around the country. Imagine what it would be like to understand the impact to your bottom line when deciding to hire a new employee. Or forecast the impact rate changes or commission rates will have on your business. With over $200 million in tracked annual revenue and $140 million in tracked annual expenses, Club Capital has the data and the team to help you make better-informed decisions for your agency. They will help you turn that back-office stress into the backbone of your agency's success by giving you the tools to take your agency and your leadership to the next level. Visit club.capital today to book a solution overview with one of our business consultants. Club Capital, way more than a CPA firm.

Hey everyone. All right. So the last couple of weeks we have been talking about these 5 key questions that every business owner should ask themselves. So in week 1, we talked about what are your priorities? Week number 2, last week we discussed, well, show me your calendar. Do you have those things actually integrated into your calendar on a weekly basis? And what exactly does that mean to have priorities on your calendar. And to me, we talked about that's kind of the epitome of working on versus in, which is thinking, planning, assessing, reflecting, etc., on the business and having some margin in your week as a leadership discipline to be able to do that versus just having your week completely controlled, every bit of your time scheduled. So today is question number 3, and obviously you can already see by the title of this week's episode, what it is, and that is, well, show me your scoreboard. How are you actually keeping score? You've got to be able to keep score so you can tell the winners from the losers. And that is a quote from— I'm pretty sure that's a quote from Warren Buffett. If it's not, it's Bill Gates, but I'm pretty sure it's Warren Buffett. You got to be able to keep score. At the time I'm recording this, I'm going to be going to the Auburn-Texas A&M game with my son this weekend. and I'm really excited about it. And so, you know, Auburn has this just massive scoreboard at Jordan-Hare Stadium, and, you know, there's a lot of things on that scoreboard, but what is the most important thing? It's going to say the Auburn football score, and it's going to say Texas A&M score, and it's going to have, um, uh, the time, how much time is left. I think about our scoreboard the exact same way, and I specifically use, for me, scoreboard, uh, versus saying scorecard. So when I think about scorecards, I think about that with your individual team members. And look, that's just me. I'm a golfer. You guys have known and heard me say that before. So I think about scorecards, creating a scorecard for your individual team members, okay, so that you're able to keep scoring how well they're doing. But you need to have a scoreboard for the business. Now, if you go back the very first solo episode I did back in June, I did a whole episode around this called VFR. To IFR, and that is the transition from going from visual flight rules. That's an analogy with, talking about like flying, VFR to IFR analogy, going from visual flight rules to instrument flight rules in your business, meaning being able to, to not only just what do you feel and see when you're in your business, but actually using data, numbers, analytics scoreboards, in my case, and then some associated dashboards to be able to see actually how are we keeping score. And the other thing is with that, are you showing that to your team? Do they see? So you may be able to see whether or not you are winning or losing relative to the targets, outcomes, aka goals you have for the business? Now, you know, I'm not a big goal-setting person. I'd rather use other things, but, you know, for discussion purposes, goals. Are you keeping track? Do you have a scoreboard for your business? Now, I think all of these build upon one another, and that is, here are the priorities that we have. And for many of you, you may be measuring way too many things. In other words, you've made everything a priority So, your scoreboard literally looks like a Boeing 747, you know, cockpit. It's just numbers and dials and switches all over the place. And for your team, when they look in that cockpit, it would be the look that I would give if I literally walked into on a Delta flight and looked to the left and I said, my goodness, look at all those dials and switches. Well, you would never want me to fly the plane if I said that. And I sure as heck wouldn't want the next time I get on a plane to hear the pilot say, look at the cockpit and go, oh my gosh, look at all these dials and switches. It's like, I'm getting off this plane. Well, I think we can take that analogy a little bit with our team is if we're just measuring all these numbers. I mean, oh my goodness, this is kind of embarrassing. I had this time that I had a room, and I had printed off all these graphs. Now, having graphs was actually a good idea looking back on it, but oh my goodness, I every week printed off— I mean, it was probably like 25 different graphs I was measuring. And what I did is I actually taped them on the wall. Now, there was some good aspects to that. Now, I didn't even think about sharing this until I started doing this podcast right now, but there were some aspects that were good. I mean, there was— it was graphical. It wasn't just numbers. And so there was— and then furthermore, there was trends. And so I was showing the trend lines of different things. So some of that was actually really good. What was really bad is— I'm not kidding— there was probably 20 of them on the wall. And I would— people would come into the office and they'd have to kind of walk by this room. And they could see them on the wall and they'd say, oh my gosh, look at all this stuff, you know. And it was like I was a proud parent to show, oh yeah, look at all these things I was measuring. Well, I could tell the score. The team had no idea. They had no clue. So what good was it doing? Now, this is not for this podcast. There are definitely some things that you as the owner, entrepreneur, leader are going to have that are dashboards that are only for you, for sure. I get that. Maybe some specifically around your financials, you, you want to show those. Obviously, it's what Club Capital does incredibly well for insurance agency owners, is that they're going to be able to put it in a way that you're going to be able to visually see, and that's helpful for you. And maybe you're not— you don't want to share that necessarily with your team. I'm not saying you shouldn't share it with your team, but some of you may not be comfortable with that. I get that. Okay. But we're talking about forward-facing things. And there wasn't a— the other thing that was wrong with that is that there wasn't a clear delineation between, okay, here's all these different numbers, but here are the 3 things that actually matter the most. I wasn't prioritizing every— anything. I was prioritizing everything, which is completely opposite of priorities. So hopefully, this is all being able to kind of sink in. You're following? You got to choose your priorities first and foremost and be able to communicate that to the team. Two, you've got to be able to dedicate time of your personal calendar time to make sure that those things are being hit— reflecting, assessing, planning, thinking. And then the third thing is go build the Scoreboard so that you and everybody on your team is actually showing the score to those priorities in the business. And if you can do that in a way that has actually have a— it has a cadence to it. It's not for today, but we've talked about communication rhythms. So like on a weekly basis in your weekly team meeting, you're sharing that with your team, maybe on your daily huddles, even if you're doing daily huddles, that they're able to see the scoreboard. I mean, look, at the end of the day, imagine I go to the Auburn game this weekend and we're in the fourth quarter. I was literally in the fourth quarter of 2022 when I'm recording this, and someone comes up to Coach Cadillac, Auburn's current interim head coach, and they say, Coach, what's the score? How much time we got left? And they can't see the score. There's no— there's nothing on there. But only Cadillac can— knows the score, and he has to communicate every single time to every one of the other coaches and to the players on the team what the score is. That doesn't make any sense. He wants them to be able to look at the scoreboard knowing this, how much time we got, and, you know, whether we're winning or not. And that makes so much sense in, in sports. This is one of the, the times I think the, the blend between sports and business is really healthy, and I think there's a really good parallel there. So can you build a scoreboard that is that simple that the team can actually see it? And the last thing I'll leave you with, with this is oftentimes the best scoreboards are created by your team. Now that was hard for me to do. Go back to the how I got it wrong. Me having a room, I've got 20 different graphs up there. I'm updating every week. They were great for me. The team had no idea what those things were. It was too many of them. I didn't prioritize anything. Way too many of them. They were just walking by them and saw a bunch of graphs and whatever. Furthermore, they were not engaged with it because they didn't build it. And if you've read the book Four Disciplines of Execution, and I had Jim Huling on in last year on one of the episodes, What do they talk about? Have your team build the scoreboard. I think they use Scoreboard. Have them build it. And that's a great, that's a great place to start because you've communicated clearly. You've done your part to communicate clearly. What does it matter if the thing is on a, is on a slide deck, if it's on a PowerPoint, if it's on an Excel spreadsheet? If it's on a digital fancy screen that's flickering through. I mean, if that, that's what you want to do, great. There's all kinds of things to do with that. Sometimes a whiteboard, a flip chart, a poster, whatever, is better because the team actually engages and interacts with it. And that's where I'll leave you. So question number 1: what are your priorities? Question number 2: show me your calendar. Question number 3: show me your scoreboard. Hope this served all of you. So grateful for you. Uh, if this was helpful to you, would you consider sharing it with just one other person? Look, there's really no specific way— it's interesting, uh, to grow a podcast, there's just like no real way to grow a podcast except through word of mouth. And so how, how did you find out about the podcast? Did somebody share it with you? Um, and if, if they did, maybe you found it on social media, would you consider reposting it, sharing it just with one person saying, hey, check this out? Maybe we were talking about keeping score in our business. So hopefully, hopefully this served all of you today. Till next episode, lead well.

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Well, if you're going to do that, you want to do it with the best.

Work with Coach P Consulting to learn and implement the same strategies that he used to sell over 700 life policies in 2021 alone. You'll get personalized coaching 2 times a week and an in-depth look at how his office is run, and Coach P will train your team alongside his own. Get your first month free when you mention the Club Capital Leadership Podcast during signup. Visit coachpconsulting.com to get started. If you've listened to this podcast for any amount of time, you've heard me say many times, the best use of money is to be able to buy back your time. And one of the best ways to do that is by hiring a virtual assistant, whether it's an executive assistant or creative marketing assistant, Rock Solid has a unique hiring process to net the very best talent, and they intentionally match you with a great fit for you and your team. They value your success as if it were their own, because it is. If you're looking to build a rock solid team for your business, reach out to Tracy and her team at rocksolidassistance.com.