A portfolio company had a 35% revenue opportunity hiding in plain sight: their prospect show-up rate was below industry benchmark. Fixing just that one metric tripled profit in 30 days, and the entire organization realigned around it.
Everything that you are currently working on is not as important as this thing. We had a portfolio company, they were getting a very low percentage of their prospects to show up. And so we said, okay, if we only got the industry standard benchmark to show up to this event, we would increase the revenue of this business by 35%. And given the margin of this business, we would more than triple the profit of this business. Is there anything else we could do? With the resources we have that would give us that kind of a return, a tripling of profit for no risk in the next 30 days? Since the answer was no, then we said, great, everyone in this company, the only priority that you have is to get this number to go up. As a result of that focus, the business did grow by more than 35% because every single person in the company was aligned with it. And guess what also happened? Other things fell by the wayside because prioritization is so powerful. If you get the one thing right, it makes the rest of it irrelevant.
