The Thermometer

Let's talk about team tracking, how to track numbers for growth. Now, you do it the way you want. I'm just going to give you an idea that I use. This is the thermometer. Now here's what we did. I don't know what the, in your business, what the main, most important categories are, but you can, you got to have 1, 2, 3, you got to have your most important and then maybe a couple more things that are, that you want to grow so you don't get sidetracked. Because if you want to grow your business, you got to keep the focus narrow. So here's what we did. We put a thermometer in here. Now, in our business, when you go into a fast growth mode, you wind up it's like a country that's going to war and it's mobilizing its army for rapid deployment of forces. If you have a growth business, you want to mobilize your business so you can have a rapid deployment of outlets, race for outlets. And so in ours, it was how you get new recruits. So what we did was I went out and I got a roll of graph paper. You can get these at these art supply places and use them for a lot of things. But I got a roll because I was going to be doing. I did this every month and I lay it out, it's like three or four feet wide. And would lay it out there and then I'd get out my big yardsticks and magic markers, lay it out there because you need something visual to unify your people, to unify them and focus. And also to keep it clear, what is the number one thing? How are you going to be judged? So here's what we did. This is for a first example. After we went out our first month, the year we went from 56 recruits to 1800, I knew we had to keep everybody's eyes on the ball. So what we did was this. We went out there and I wrote in, you know, these, the graph paper, nice things that get all the little check mark, you know, the little grid pattern. And so I went up and I simply marked and I went and I marked across there. Last month, last month we had seven. And so then I put in there, say, you know, you'd always have a goal. So you have like your goal. This is our goal. And so we went in and as we started the new month, every time someone had a recruit, we draw a line across there. And so as they're coming in and out of the office, as soon as we had one, I Also called everybody say, we got one, we got two, we got three. But here, this is what everybody. It's the centerpiece of the office. Everybody had to see it. And so you write it in there. You'd write. You know, if you have room, you could write the name and who brought them in so they get credit for it. And you can see here it is, it's on the 10th of the month, and we've already got four recruits. You know, we're going to. Looks like we're going to be able to beat next month. I don't know about our goal, but we're going to at least grow. And so you get up here, and maybe by the 16th of the month, bang, we've broken the record. So now we're all excited, and so people see the success. And as you get going, by having this on there, new, fresh, empty, clean every month, that sends a message that this month, this month is different. Great story. John Addison told yesterday the RVP meeting down in Fort Lauderdale. He said after, you know, they were talking to Nick Saban and their team, the Alabama team, has been on three out of four, I guess, won three out of the last four college championships, which is absolutely impossible to do. But what Saban did, they asked the coach, you know, is it hard to keep. Is it going to be hard to keep your team winning and keep their eye on the ball? And he said, no. He said, that was last year's team. We're working on this year's team. And someone, one of the announcers, one of the players who had been there said what he does is right after the game or like, as soon as they get back home, he gets them all in a room and they congratulate the seniors and take the seniors and every, you know, make a big show of hand, clap their hands and tell them, then send them out of the room. They're gone, they're out. And now he stares at the guys left over. And he said, gentlemen, he said, that was their national championship. And I promise you, he's already had this conversation with his team that just won the recent championship down in Miami over Notre Dame. He said, guys, that was their championship. Now we're going to go to work on you winning your championship. And immediately everybody understood they had work to do. That last one didn't matter. What happens is the normal thing to happen. If you have a record, you know, you surge up. Like if this is a graph, when you have a peak, what happens after a peak? Usually what goes up usually comes down, right? That's that's, you know, most. There's always a bounce. Well, see, this is how he works around the bounce. Now what I did to avoid the bounce was this. I put up a clean sheet of paper, draw all of this out, meticulously out. I put what we did the last month and then I set the goal. So what we did in February, we went in and we wound up with 13. And it was obvious nobody was celebrating the seven that was over. We're all into the new thing and we wound up with 13. So the next month I went in and I said, you know, unbelievable. We set a record. Fantastic. So as soon and I did that, once we got at the end of the month, numbers were over immediately. Overnight, I made a new one. So I go in, start fresh, tear off a strip of paper, draw my thermometer up there. And now what I did was I put 13 and we had a goal of maybe, you know, 25, something like that. And so right starting off the new month, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Step by step, by step we went up. And what do we wind up with the next month, 18. See, we're climbing. We never did have a slump. Now in the following year, in I don't know how long it was before we ever had a slump. It might have been two or three years later after we promoted a lot of people out. But at those points, what I would do is I'd always have what our record was like. Let's just say we had promoted out some people and we were rebuilding, which happens from time to time. I would tell them, like, our record, this is our record all time record, 65, whatever it was, actually was much bigger than that. And then I put in and I'd only put the record in there once we started getting closer to it because no reason to impress them when we're starting over from scratch. But then, so I'd have three things in here. I'd have my last month, I'd have our goal and then I'd have the record. And so what we would do and you know, again, you write the names of everybody when they go in there until it got into where it was like 60, 80, 100 and too much to keep up with because before long we were putting this thing at this was, this was down on the floor and it went, you know that the nine foot ceiling, nine foot ceiling. We had to break it down into pieces, break it down into teams. But this is how we kept it up with. Now once we got the recruiting going, I added in two other columns because there was two other things we kept up with, and that was we did the same thing with our sales, our premium. This was the recruits. And then we did the same thing with our activity numbers, prospective clients, and these are the things that we kept up with. I don't know what your two or three would be now. Once we got humming on these things, I always figured this was like a three cylinder lawnmower, you know, like a three cylinders. If I had. You can't have perfection all the time, but if I had two out of three, I set a record in two out of three. I knew we were humming because sometimes this one would be up, sometimes these two would be up and this would be lagging behind. But then the next month, this would be up, this would be up, and maybe this would lag behind. But it was like a. It's like a three column race to the top. And we were monitoring them every month and they didn't all have to grow every month. We had two out of three. We knew good things were happening to us. That's an idea that you may find useful as you get your team off the ground and you turn yourself into a dominating industry power.