Bradley Hamner compares red-zone efficiency in football to quarterly business planning: just as teams convert scoring opportunities into touchdowns, founders need to turn quarterly goals into operational wins. He recommends building 1-3 concrete playbooks each quarter to create a system that doesn't depend entirely on the owner's presence.
Hey everyone, well, football is back. Wow, look, nothing really is going to take away from my first love of basketball, but really not much beats college football Saturdays. And yes, for you NFL fans out there, I mean college football. Fight me. Anyways, did you know that one of the key metrics that teams look at in football, college or NFL, is red zone efficiency. You see, it's really a key metric in the NFL, especially measuring how well teams convert trips inside the opponent's 20-yard line into touchdowns. They've done, of course, statistics on this, that teams that are efficient in scoring TDs in the red zone tend to win more games, as touchdowns clearly are much more valuable than field goals. And historically, if NFL teams that excel— NFL teams that excel in the red zone efficiency, they often have better records and they make much deeper, deeper playoff runs. Well, cool. What does this have to do with us in our business. I think every quarter in business— and we love to kind of think about the year in terms of 4 quarters, not simply because it's maybe a tie to football specifically, but there is Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4. And that's one of the main rhythms that we set targets for. In fact, we call them quarterly targets. And so every quarter we really have the opportunity to start stacking wins by building and installing playbooks in our business. Those playbooks, over time, they begin to form a real comprehensive operating system, so the business is not solely dependent upon us as the owner. As one of our clients actually just mentioned this week, he said, and I'm kind of paraphrasing the quote a little bit, but, you know, I felt last week I didn't take much time off. He's referring to over the Labor Day holiday. My business does not run without me yet. You know, I only took a couple days off. I wasn't gone very long, but I feel anxious around my business. So it was really a good learning experience. Have you ever felt that way yourself where things aren't moving forward without you? I mean, it's the feeling that if you're not at the office or not working in or even maybe on the business, then the business isn't going to move forward if you're not there all the time. Well, that could be a sign that you're still operating really as the rainmaker. Of the business. You're really effectively the center of gravity, so to speak. If you're the center of gravity of the business, everything is rotating around you in the business. It's all dependent upon you. And so if you start to make this shift at the first, uh, an identity shift, but then when you do that, you start to get the ball in the end zone with some of these systems and processes. Systems and processes get put into playbooks. And so think of it this way: if you started to design 1 to 3 playbooks each quarter, that's it, 1 to 3. I'm gonna be very clear, I think it's really hard to do more than that in a quarter if you do them right. But if you start to design build and deploy or install into your business 1 to 3 playbooks each quarter, just imagine where the business will be in a year. Look, if nothing less or nothing else, it's going to be less dependent upon you. And isn't that the freedom we all wanted when we started down this path, isn't it? Look, in a couple weeks from the time that this is dropping, We're going to be running the quarterly for our members, and we'd love to extend an invitation for you to join us. And in the quarterly, what we do is we reflect on wins from the past quarter. What are some of the balls that we actually got in the end zone? End zone. And then we'll put together a game plan for what we need to get in the end zone in Q4. And so we'd love to help you. And so if this has been helpful, if you go to abovethebusiness.co, you can register for the quarterly. It's completely completely free event. We'd love to serve you and help you start to get into the rhythm of reflecting on the previous quarter, and we'll guide you through exactly what that looks like to get the wins from the previous quarter. We'll pull forward some of the good things that you did, we'll capture what were some of the playbooks that you actually designed and installed into the business, and then we'll specifically get a game plan we'll get a game plan for what needs to get done by the end of Q4. What are some of those other playbooks that we want to get the ball in the end zone? So I'd love to see you there. Go to Above the Business, abovethebusiness.co, abovethebusiness.co. And for those of you asking, no, I'm not doing well after Auburn's performance against Cal Last Saturday. When does basketball season start? Until next time, lead well.
