Ashley Alderson (Boutique Hub) explains the value of a weekly company scorecard—a short list (often five) of leading metrics that let a CEO know if the business is healthy even when they are fully disconnected. She contrasts lagging metrics (sales) with leading indicators (conversion, traffic, AOV, return rate, dwell time), recommends a weekly 'date with your numbers', and ties team accountability and hiring/training decisions to scorecard performance.
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Business can be a lonely game. But it doesn't have to be. Welcome to Boutique Chat where we explore community over competition and how to scale your company with the balance and the happiness that we all seek. We'll hear from product based businesses of all types, retailers, e commerce and wholesale brands, along with industry experts shaping the future of our industry. I'm your host Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub and and I can't wait to chat.
Hey guys, welcome back to 5 Minute Friday. This is a topic that has made such an impact on how I run my own business here at the Boutique Hub. How I've coached our Mastermind members, our million dollar group members, and so many of our members in retail bootcamp at the Boutique Hub as well. And this simple little strategy is your company scorecard. Now, several years ago, my husband Eric and I went all in on the EOS process. If you're not familiar with eos, it's entreprene operating system. And it all stems from a book called Traction by Gino Wickman. And one of the first things, once we hired an EOS consultants who started to meet with us every single quarter and help build out our accountability chart and our systems and processes and so many measurements of success for us at the Hub. One of the first things we implemented was a company scorecard. And the idea is this. I have coached for a long time for you guys on how to become a CEO versus an entrepreneur, right? I want you to be a CEO that values time, right, More than diying and saving money along the way so that you can have a life that you love to live and a business you don't feel like you are always chained to. So the best way to do that is the company scorecard. The idea is if you were to go on vacation on some beautiful island and you didn't have any communication with your team and your business, right? None of your employees could call you, text you, message you, no social media, nothing. The only way you knew that your business was either being successful or or had been burnt to the ground was you had five metrics that you received on a company scorecard and that was your only measure of success. So every week you got the scorecard, every week it was red or it was green and you were making the decision, should I stay on this island and enjoy my vacation or should I come back home? So my challenge to you is, what's your company scorecard? What are the five metrics that do or die you and your company operate by? I can guarantee you it is not sales alone. Sales is a lagging indicator of what happened in the week prior, but it's not a leading indicator that's telling you what is going to happen in the weeks to come. So if I were you and I were considering what were a few of my scorecard numbers I might look at. I might also consider average order value, traffic, customer acquisition, my customer return rate, my dwell time. I would look at what is my conversion rate. I would look at what was happening in some of my different categories and classes, and where were the sales actually coming from. You can slice and dice your company scorecard however you like. My ask for you today is that you simply start one. When we talk about in retail bootcamp or in membership at the hub, having a date with your numbers, this is as simple as it could be. It might be just having a spreadsheet with these few metrics that every single week you sit down and you fill in what's really neat to watch happen. And we've watched this happen again and again with retail bootcamp is one of the first things we do together in retail bootcamp is we go through and we have a massive company scorecard that we give you and you can assign, you know, what am I going to keep for myself to fill in for the scorecard or what is my team going to help me fill in on a weekly basis? And it's just holding you accountable to tracking those numbers. The feedback I often hear when retailers fill in this company scorecard is, wow, I felt that I was having a really bad week. I felt that I was struggling. I felt that I was, you know, falling behind and for this and that reason, whatever. But when I actually did my numbers and I actually looked at the scorecard, what I realized was I actually had a really great week. The quote is, this only attract number grows and when you target nothing, you'll reach it every single time. And that's what happens before we have a company scorecard is we're really targeting nothing.
So it's easy to reach it every.
Time and it's easy to leave our success or fail failure, if you will, to the emotional way that we feel at the end of the day. So I challenge you to get rid of the emotion. I challenge you to get rid of the variables and actually drill down and create a company scorecard for yourself or if you've been through retail bootcamp to just continue using the company scorecard that you have access to so that you can stay on vacation on that beautiful island and know that your team is operating smoothly. And soundly with you. Now here's the next step. Once you have your company scorecard in place, you have a date with your numbers. You have a process. Your entire team should be held accountable to what's happening on the scorecard. So you would hire, you would train and you would fire based on performance of the company scorecard. Everyone on your team would have a metric that ties back to your company scorecard metrics. That way they all know what game they're playing, they know what quarter it is, they know what the score is and they know what they have to do to succeed. Succeed and to increase the score on that scorecard in order for you to be on a winning team. So get the company scorecard started. Keep consistent with it. Train and really reward your team members by their participation in the outcome that they see together with you on your company scorecard. That's it for this week's five minute Friday. You guys, thanks for joining me. As always, I will see you guys inside of membership here at the Boutique Hub where I hang out every single day inside of our groups or our two time a year retail boot camp like college for boutique owners. I can't wait to get to know you and your business. You guys, thanks for listening. I'll see you back here next week.
Thanks for listening guys. I hope you took away all kinds of nuggets and new ideas from this week's episode. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a rating and review. We love to hear your feedback and give you a chance to be featured on the show each and every week. For more information on our spirit of community over competition and and to access guest downloads and bonuses and all the resources we talked about on the show, head on over to the boutiquehub.com and join the community. We'll see you next week.
