Luke Murray, a former physician and entrepreneur, shows how a brief moment of eye contact and curiosity from a client with severe mental illness signals progress in his mental-health day program. He argues for tracking small, controllable actions and early wins rather than waiting for enrollment or revenue to decide if a program is working.
Are you not making sales and worried that your business may never turn the corner? If so, then this video is for you. Uh, I'm gonna talk about how in one of my companies where we try to get people with severe mental illness to come to a day program to help improve their daily living skills, I tell the team a story about how we didn't get someone to come, but we still touched their lives and that that is progress. It's about a 1-minute video and I'm gonna take you into the actual the actual meeting and show you how it happened. If you don't know who I am, my name is Luke Murray. I am a former physician. I've been an entrepreneur for about 20 years. During that time, I've done about $100 million in revenue. I currently have a portfolio of businesses that does about $3 million a year. And I make these videos because I would like to have ambition without the bullshit. And I'm guessing you would too. So let's get to this video and then we'll see what we've learned afterwards.
I don't know, I think you were with me when I was talking to, I can't remember his name, but like, you were like, I need help. Or maybe it was Candace. But I like, I literally held my hands out and I said, do you like food? He's like, no. Do you like friends?
He's like, no.
Do you like fun?
And he's like, no.
But I also was like, tell me about your gaming system. And he like, he did not look up. And he looked up and he like looked up and like looked at me for a second and then looked back down. And I was like, That's some fucking yardage right there. So again, our job is not— I mean, yes, we got to get them on the bus. That's a big deal. We don't have a company. We don't have a business.
We don't get to exist if they don't get on the bus.
But we're here to care about people. And we don't have to score touchdown or whatever you want to call it. Just getting some yardage is improvement. And I don't know if you guys heard this from the— The state guardian, she's like, I have been in this business for 10 years. I have never seen folks like so many of my people make so much progress through any, any other kind of program. So, and that's not just because they're getting on the bus every day. It's what's like happening before they get on the bus. And then of course you guys in the classroom, all that stuff. Okay.
So for some context on that video, each time we go in to ask these folks if they'd like to come, we want to make sure that we are controlling what we can control, which is reminding them of the reasons and the benefits that they might want to come— food, friendship, fun, learning— and we want to make sure that they know that we care about them. And so I was telling them or demonstrating, hey, as long as you are going through and making sure that they get an offer to leave and improve their life a little bit that day, that is winning. And it just so happened that when I asked him about his video game system, He's like, he made eye contact. And again, that's not a successful turnaround of their entire existence. And it's not something that's going to show up on any type of dashboard, but it is what we call a leading indicator, one of the earliest leading indicators. So just because this person hasn't come all the way through the system, gotten care, we've been paid, and then they've shown up a bunch of times and their actual, um, condition is better doesn't mean we have made progress. And it's very, very easy if you're not on the front line and you're not paying attention to leading indicators to think that this isn't working, but it absolutely is. If you're looking at the entire spectrum of things that need to happen between, in our case, someone not even knowing about our service and someone not needing our service anymore, which is the ideal situation.
So.
In your own business, where do you think there are probably some leading indicators, ideally ones that you have control over, that you could look at to really ask yourself and get an honest answer of, is this working? Are we making progress, or should we just pull the plug? Let me know in the comments, and thanks for watching.
