058: Look for Measurable Loops

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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, touch time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Hi friends. Welcome back to FreeTime. This episode is building on episode 56, Systems vs. Goals. Today I want to talk about how to build smarter systems by looking for measurable loops in your business. For some of you this is going to be automatic. It is already what you do. You think this way, you operate this way. And I'm not going to be telling you anything new, especially if you're familiar with the startup space or the principles of growth hacking. That's a term that Andrew Chen introduced over a decade ago and then Ryan Holiday popularized in his book Growth Hacker Marketing. Still, even if you're familiar, I find that sometimes we know what we should be doing in our business, but we haven't yet thought about it in a way that resonates or gets us to take action. That's what I'm hoping to help you do today. In episode 56 we talked about the difference between goals or dreams and then the day to day systems of working toward them and that in fact I shared the Scott Adams quote that when we only focus on and even obsess over goals, we're always sort of failing in a way. We're always short of the goal until the one moment in time that we hit it. And then what do we do? We set a new goal. Compared to what he talks about, a systems oriented person is somebody who is happy every time their system works. I also shared in that episode the Peter Drucker quote that I'm sure you've heard a million times. What gets measured gets managed. But the more that I sat with this and really turned it over in my mind because I've just heard it for so long over so many years just because you're measuring something in your business does not necessarily mean you're improving it. My team and I updated a monthly metrics scorecard every single month last year. But when we didn't integrate it into our meeting agendas very well, we. We didn't change anything. We were capturing the metrics. We were. Yes, we could technically look for themes, but even I myself did not do nearly as much with that data as I could have. So sometimes in this topic, people talk about lag measures and lead measures. Lag measures are how much did you earn last quarter? It's a lag measure because the result already happened. There's nothing more that you can do. The result lags from events that you've already taken and steps you've taken in your business. Lead measures are those that are going to tell you are you on track or not for that revenue goal that you set. So maybe a lead measure is the number of intro calls you have with potential clients. If you're a coach, you could see then if the number of intro calls is going up, there's a very good chance that your revenue will also increase. If your number of intro calls is going down, there's a good chance you're off track. And maybe you want to do something differently or look and see what's creating this pattern. Is it seasonal? Is it something in the broader economy? Me, Is it something that you are doing? Maybe it's all of the above. So I'm going to adapt the Peter Drucker quote. Instead of what gets measured gets managed, I'm going to say what gets systematized gets managed. Meaning you need a system to not only track the metrics in your business if you want to do this, but to then do something with it and experiment, test. See how you can improve the metrics that matter most in your business. There are lots of ways to describe this. AB testing is a common industry term. For example, if you split test, that's another phrase for this. If you split test a headline that goes out to your email newsletter, Maybe you send two different headline variations or 3. A, B and C to 10% of your list. So if you have a hundred thousand people on your email list, wouldn't that be nice? You're sending a B and C headline evenly split among 10,000 people. Only once you know which headline performs the best, then do you pick the best performing headline and send out to the remaining 90,000. I'm pretty sure I've seen some podcast hosts do this because I see the first headline that they launched the episode and then a day later, the title has changed. So it gives me the feeling that maybe they're testing, doing some of this split testing. The way that I've been thinking about this in my business lately is looking for measurable loops. Let me explain what I mean by that. Where in your business do you have measurable loops that give you a story about what's happening in your business, A path or process that, with further tweaking, you could repeat to generate momentum? Now, in many businesses, these already exist, whether or not you're consciously aware of them and you've put any attention on them. I don't love this term, and I kind of rail on it in the new book, but the word funnel, I think the reason that this term even came into popularity is because it is a helpful visual. If you think about an actual funnel, like one that you would use in cooking or baking, it has a wide opening, and then you're using it to kind of corral or guide the liquid through a much tinier hole at the bottom that can go into a water bottle or whatever it is that you're pouring this water into. In business, we could think about all the public original thinking you're doing, any marketing, any paid advertising, that's the top of the funnel. Then at every point that somebody interacts with your business, that funnel narrows. And the reason that some of us don't love this term is that it just implies, like, you're just kind of the end goal is a purchase and the customer journey ends there. I like John Jantz's take on this. I'll link to the podcast conversation that we had about his new book, the Ultimate Marketing Engineering. He draws the funnel more like an hourglass. So, yes, you're funneling people in to a narrow point where they become a customer, but then you're also funneling out in terms of breadth and depth of the relationship that you build with that person. So let's say a generic marketing funnel could be you have 10,000 website visitors, which then leads to 1,000 newsletter enrollments, which then gives you 300 people who might be interested in your services. Then you get 100 or 50 of them to schedule an exploratory call with you, and 20 become new customers. Well, this would give you a lot of valuable information that if I get X number of visitors, I can reliably predict about this many new customers. The reason I like to think of it as a measurable loop is that sometimes it doesn't exactly mirror the customer journey, but it still provides a path and it still shows you a path that you can measure every node of that path. So, for example, I don't do one on one coaching anymore. I have a wonderful team of pivot coaches who do this. You can learn more and enroll@pivotmethod.com coaching. The stages of this measurable path or measurable loop are aware. People become aware of pivot, the pivot method, and the option for coaching through things like the Pivot podcast, the book, the newsletter, word of mouth. Some people come from Google searches or articles. Business Insider has done a couple features on pivot coaching and that actually generates more interest than any other method. So once people become aware, then they explore. They go to pivotmethod.com, they click on coaching maybe. Then they click on meet the Team and after that point and I could measure page views of just pivotmethod.com coaching or I could even measure page views of the meet the team page. Then a certain percentage of those will schedule an intro call. So they'll choose the coach that resonates most. Schedule an intro call, and if that goes well, the coach would encourage them to enroll. We do pivot coaching on a monthly retainer. Good until canceled. So two sessions a month, email in between. It's just easier that way. There's no minimum. You can cancel at any time. But we like to do it on a retainer just to reduce the friction of scheduling and payments invoicing. This way, everybody gets invoiced monthly. It's automatic. The sessions again are at a recurring day and time. So the next node of this measurable path is at least one month. There is a crucial moment that somebody stays on that retainer. So going into month two, that would be another note that month two really signifies, yes, they're here to stay. They're not just here for the intro call. You know, some people, what do they call it? Kicking the tires. Some people like to just do intro calls and they never had any intention of signing up. Maybe some people pilot for one month, but they're not that interested in long term coaching. So the retainer is really our kind of success marker. Not only, oh, did we get a customer, are we adding enough value that they want to stick around? They want to deepen that relationship and then at some point down the chain, they would close out. In business circles, they call, you know, closing down a membership churn. It's another term I don't love. I just don't think that it's very customer friendly. Oh, like churn. It just Sounds like, what are we churning butter? But when it makes sense and it's in the highest good, great. We want our clients to move on and go to the next type of professional they might need. Or maybe they've landed the dream job or finished their pivot in process and they need a break. No problem. So you could also measure the stats of how long, what's the average duration that somebody stays with coaching, and then what's the average number of months or when do they close out? We also do a feedback survey when they wrap up so we can get any feedback, positive testimonials for the coaches or areas for improvement. What I just described to you is a measurable path for pivot coaching. So not only have we collected these metrics on a weekly or monthly basis, but then we could actually look for how do we improve at all of these steps in the chain. And again, this is not new for some of you. This is just what you do already. One thing that I found helpful is to challenge and invite every team member to not just report the metrics for the area of the business that they're running, but also to share, whether it's every month that we're meeting or every two weeks, one a B test that they are going to conduct for a metric that is meaningful for the business area that they're managing. So what is one a B test that they could set up to evaluate, objectively speaking, what works better, A or B, what leads to more kind of favorable numbers at this point in the chain? Here's another example. Many of you are here because of episode 157 on Cal Newport's podcast, Deep Questions. So this is a measurable loop or path for book sales and even members joining the BFF community. That's my private community for heart based business owners. So the start of this path is a podcast interview. And in this case, let's talk about the one that I did with Cal that aired on December 20th. I actually don't know how many podcast listeners Cal has, but there's a tool I use. It's kind of a sneaky tool. It's called podscribe AI. It's for transcription, but it gives you a very, very rough estimate of how many subscribers a show might have. Some people that some fellow podcasters I've talked to say it's really accurate to what they understand their numbers to be. Others say that it falls short. So please take this with 10 grains of salt. For me, it just gives me a broad benchmark because even podcast hosts like me, it is very hard to understand how many listeners we have at any given time and how many subscribers. There's no one way to get this information. There's no one unified service that knows for sure how many people are subscribing. Because you can all listen in all of these different apps, whether it's Apple podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Pocket Casts, you name it. So there's no. There are ways to guess and guesstimate, but we also don't know with the number of downloads. For example, did you finish listening? I mean, there is smarter and smarter data through services like Chartable, but it's more of a guess than a perfect science. Okay, so based on Podscribe, let's say Cal's podcast Deep Questions has 17 to 20,000 listeners and let's call those subscribers. So he probably has many, many more downloads than that per episode. During that conversation he mentioned the bogogo, the buy one, get one, give one pre order campaign from that group of listeners and from that plug. Fifteen days later, 125 people, plus or minus, had submitted proof of purchase to get early access to the audiobook. If you were one of them, thank you so much. I can't tell you how encouraging it was because this is really the first big show of the podcast tour. Oh, and to just have a sense of going from zero to one like it's working, you're here. I am so grateful for every single one of you. But now we see how our path went from the scope of people listening to those of you who pre ordered and submitted for the audiobook. And then this is actually the most we've had in a long time at any single moment in time, six new BFF community members, which is incredible. So of the subset who pre ordered and I'm guessing that there are certain listeners of Cal's podcast who might have pre ordered but they didn't submit. Maybe they just haven't gotten to it yet. So maybe the number of pre orders is more but that the ones who actually submitted and then put in to say sign me up for the early audiobook access 125 from that six new BFF community members and remember, that's my community for heart based business owners. We're having so much fun. We just relaunched the Circle forum. I do a monthly Q and A call and it's really for those of you that really want to work through the free time principles together and give and receive feedback among a group of really smart heart centered people. We also had seven free up founder time mini course sales. I think one or two more just came in. That's a $20 course. It was actually the precursor to the new book. It's an audio course. The lessons are really short. If you have early audiobook access, that's the more in depth built out version. But I think some people are finding the bite sized nuggets in that mini course helpful. So, you know, seven or eight core sales and with the membership subscription, that's monthly recurring revenue. So now I can actually tie. I mean, I don't like to think of it this way all the time, but I'm just doing this to give you an example. Like we could tie a dollar value to a podcast interview. Now. And I'm not saying that everything you do is about the dollars and the money and the revenue. Absolutely not. But it is helpful to know that if I go on a podcast, these are some of the next steps down the chain that I could measure and almost start to predict as results. I will also say that because free time is so new and I've been so focused on writing the book that my podcast listenership was teeny tiny. So I don't know that it's still too early to say because I'm recording this. It hasn't even been a month. It's just been really two and a half weeks since Cal's episode came out. But I already saw that my download numbers for December doubled, so there was a 200% increase in downloads. Again, that kind of dramatic increase has more to say about how tiny my current listenership is. Tiny but mighty. I love you all, don't get me wrong, but I think it went from, you know, 400 typical downloads for an episode to 800 for the few most recent. What does this measurable loop tell me about my business? For one, I friggin love podcasts. I love recording them, I love being a guest on them. It was certainly the most fun I had during the Pivot launch. And I could contrast that with how much I hate writing articles. I don't know why. I feel like I give the books the best that I have. And some of my friends are so good at writing articles for big name sites. Fast Company, Entrepreneur, Forbes, you name it. For some reason, I just procrastinate. They're at the bottom of my list. I never get to them. I don't know what to say that I haven't already said in the book or on the podcast. So by looking at these measurable loops, especially the energizing ones, I can start to say, okay, this is going to become part of my strategy and the more podcast interviews I can line up for the book. Now, at least with this book and these offers, I could start to say, okay, this might lead to a certain range of results in different business areas. Now this is also with a caveat, maybe Deep Questions is so aligned. Of course it is. Cal's the COVID blurb for free time. It's so aligned with the book and the topic and the offer that maybe that one performed much, much better than another podcast interview will for a different type of show. But that's part of the measurable loop. That's part of the assessment to say what factors, what variables here are affecting the outcomes. Look for where you have these measurable loops in your business. Where are they already happening and you just haven't yet? Put some systems and metrics tracking into all the different nodes and you can work backwards from how people purchase your products or services. What is the customer journey? What are the steps that happen behind the scenes that you could kind of separate out as well? And how can you make this path clearer or more powerful? How can you a B test or split test at each moment, at each crucial juncture in that journey? And by the way, split testing isn't just what's in it for you, the business owner, but also maybe for your customers and clients. You can streamline the process and make improvements and take out the friction that they might be experiencing. Because as the other business adage goes, confused customers don't buy.

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At the start of this episode, I mentioned Andrew Chen, who pretty much, I think, came up with the term growth hacker. He just had a new book come out. I've only just started it, so I do not know if you would like it yet or not but I'll put it in the show. Notes the new one is called the Cold Start Problem. It's about network effects. Andrew Chen in the early days he described growth hackers as a hybrid of marketer and coder. One who looks at the traditional question of how do I get customers for my product? And answers with AB tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability and open graph. The entire marketing team is being disrupted rather than a VP of marketing with a bunch of non technical marketers reporting to them. Instead, growth hackers are engineers leading teams of engineers. Ryan Holiday in his book Growth Hacker Marketing he also quotes Aaron Ginn or Gin I don't know if it's a hard G or not G I n n. It's like the gif jif question. I always say gif. Aaron Ginn says the end goal of every growth hacker is to build a self perpetuating marketing machine that reaches millions by itself. Whether you resonate with the term growth hacker or not, I like the idea of doing more with less rather than just throwing a bunch of marketing dollars at a problem or just like spraying and praying in your business. What I do love about this mindset of growth hacking or guerrilla marketing, word of mouth marketing, is that you can do more with less. Because when you measure and improve and improve things by 200% just by making things clearer or more efficient, then you haven't had to spend any money other than your time and energy and effort on that point in the chain or of the measurable loop. And yet you can improve the entire thing. This can also inform what you offer and how you offer it. So there's a podcast I love Chandler Boltzmann Self Publishing School I'm going to put a link in the show notes for any of you who are aspiring authors or authors already. This is my third go round of launching a book and I still find every single episode and his questions so helpful. Chandler had an episode with Russell Brunson, who is really big guy in the online marketing space. But Russell's also known for what he calls a free book funnel. He will ship you a free book if you fill out a form and you do have to pay for shipping, so I think shipping is somewhere around 9.95. But while you're checking out for your free book, Russell is delivering a number of upsell offers related to that topic at every step. And in fact Chandler recommends in this interview he's like go through for the free book funnel just to learn, just to study from A master. Because before you finish checkout, maybe the next offer is $49 product. And these are crazy good offers, like they are giving jam packed value and then okay, you say no, I'm not interested. Well then the next offer might be a $297 product. That's also seems crazy interesting if you're interested in this topic. And then maybe the third one is a $999 997 who knows product that is like everything the kitchen sink, everything you could ever want to know and then some. And a free membership to his software. It goes on and on. So by sending a quote free book, he's really getting to pitch his products in a sense. So for $10 that you're paying for shipping, Russell gets to basically walk you through this free book funnel. And then the numbers start to work out if every time someone submits for a free book, the average order value could end up being hundreds of dollars. So this can become very profitable. And instead of him paying for marketing, you are, we are all basically paying him. Chandler Bolt has done this really well with he just published his book, a revised edition of the book published. It's a lot of the same word in there and you same thing, free book funnel. So he's doing this really well too. And one thing I really like that Chandler does is in the Kindle edition, the very first page says do you want the audiobook for free? Because he knows that it's very valuable to know who's reading. So if you say yes and you go submit a form to get the free audiobook, the next screen is offering an intro call with his team. He's saying, great, so happy you're here reading and do you want to write and publish a book this year? If so, schedule an intro call. This is just brilliant. So talk about measurable loops and also a really clear path. Someone who's interested in his book published goes to the Kindle, is immediately offered the audiobook Amazing two for the price of one. And then for many readers it's a great thing to know. Oh hey, I could schedule an intro call with his team if I'm really serious about this. Another service that's really helpful for testing, conducting these split tests is Pickfu Shout out to Rohit, the publisher at IdeaPress who helped me set this up when I was debating what book cover for free time, what title and even what subtitle. I'm going to put a link in the show notes because I'm pretty sure my affiliate link will get you a discount. So just check out the show notes if you want to run a sample poll on pickfu but they start as low as $50. I think I ran one. I really wanted to test the free time cover among business owners. So if you segment the audience you have to pay a little bit more. But I might have paid a hundred dollars so that I could split test a few different cover versions with with a completely random group of people. 50 or 100 people weigh in on this poll. It takes only up to about an hour and they write qualitative comments as well. Now a lot of the results that I did were kind of evenly split. There wasn't always a runaway winner and sometimes I was kind of disappointed by the result. I thought, no, I wanted you to pick this other one. So what I'll say is that anytime you are doing this kind of split testing or polling, I think it's really helpful, especially if you can poll your own audience. I also polled the time well spent newsletter community for free time. I remember asking them early on as well. That was super helpful. But it's probably a third of your polling from your community or from a group of strangers. A third feedback from trusted advisors, close friends, family, business owning peers, and then a third is just your intuition. So I will tell you that the book cover we ended up with, with confetti on it, the first time I saw it, it just gave me a sense of joy. I had a visceral reaction. I felt celebratory, I felt delighted when I saw it. Then of course, the more I saw it, the more I ran polls about it, the more I talked to friends and family, that feeling started to wear off and I was getting a little confused because people were saying oh no, I like this one. Everyone had a different cover that they liked and I got muddled and at the end of it all I just came back to which was the COVID that when I first saw it changed something in me, gave me a feeling. And it was that original, that very first one with a confetti confetti confession is that I became so attached to that cover that this is. I can't believe I'm saying it out loud here. Every single book. I had no idea. But the gold foil, instead of using gold ink, which I just didn't think would look very good, gold foil is costing over A$50 per book. So it's going to convey a sense of wealth, I hope time abundance, time affluence and financial abundance. Because the book cover, the hardcover collector's edition will actually have gold Foil on it. And that gold foil did not come cheap. Of course, tech companies have known about a B testing for a long time. There are legendary stories of Marissa Mayer at Google who would test like 40 versions of the color blue on the Google search homepage, as simple as it was, and would tweak the most micro micro details. Even prior to me starting at Google in 2006, I was an AdWords customer. I worked at a political polling startup that got acquired by YouGov. So you probably see them in the news a lot, running polls when we would set up our ad campaigns. And any of you who run ad campaigns know that this is built into the process. And then when I, by the way, when I moved to Google, I taught customer service reps how to teach this process. So we would always say Write at least 3 ads. If you set up an ad campaign and you only write one version of an ad, you're shooting yourself in the foot. If you write three versions of the ad, the Google Ads algorithm automatically rotates them until one starts winning. And when that winner emerges, it starts showing it more frequently. So you gotta write at least two, ideally three versions of your ad copy. The algorithm starts rotating them and then it automatically highlights and emphasizes the best performing ad. This is the algorithm. I mean, this is what is powering social media now and why it's so viral and sticky, especially TikTok. So TikTok's algorithm is bonkers because it doesn't just pay attention to what you like, what you actually click on. It is paying attention to how long you even watch a certain type of video when scrolling in your home feed. So what's crazy with TikTok is you don't even have to do anything. It is still learning from you. How long did you stay on this type of video? How long on this type? And then it's showing you more like that super sticky. And it's kind of scary because in a way that software knows you better than you know yourself. And instead of you saying what topics and types of videos and people you want to see, it serves them up and it learns incredibly quickly what else to show you that you would find entertaining. To sum this all up, look for the measurable loops in your business. Where are there chains or sequences of events that you could start to dive into? And what is the path for any, if not all of your products and services? What is the path that customers or clients take and how can you identify those nodal points along that path that a you can measure. But as we know, what gets measured does not always get managed. You actually have to create systems to improve those metrics. So start to look at any given node in your business. Do a split test. When you're split testing, I encourage you to just change one thing at a time. If you change too many things, you don't know what actually worked. So change one thing at a time, identify those measurable loops and the data points along the way and then look for joyful ways to improve again. This isn't just about like the numbers and earning as much possible from every single person and growing our business revenue through the roof. I'm all for abundance, but I'm also saying look for joyful ways to improve these interactions at each of the different nodes and what is exciting. Offering and selling things can be really valuable if it's something that your clients and customers and community needs. So just find the joy in all these metrics and systems and experiments. Also find the joy and the joyful ways to improve. And don't forget to engage your team. It's really helpful if you have each person be responsible for an area of the business or the area that they manage. Not just updating data on something like a metric scorecard, but actually encouraging them to make it a regular practice to own those statistics and run these experiments and report back to you. So at the end of every one on one I try to ask, I can do better at this. What experiment are you going to run this month or this week? And this becomes part of their role and part of your ongoing conversation. I hope you found this helpful. For some of you, it's already a regular part of your business practices. Bravo. Let me know what did I miss? What helps you improve these measurable loops or customer paths in your business? And let me know if you have any follow up questions. You can always submit a voice memo@itsfreetime.com ask thank you so much for being here. Listening everybody. Have a beautiful rest of your day.

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