Do you feel that you’re too busy to sit down and think about your business strategically? 

Are you too busy to sit down and review your plans, review key metrics, key numbers, review your dashboard, review your financials? 

So many business owners feel that they’re too busy. And if you feel too busy, then it’s already too late. 

So many entrepreneurs have the answers at their fingertips, but because they’re so busy, being busy in doing what they do, they fail to look at the important. 

A few years back I was presenting at a seminar, and a gentleman stood up and he owns a signage business. And he told this story about how he’d been in business for 17 years and when he started in the business, the thing to do, was to advertise in the Yellow Pages. So he rang up and ended up spending approximately $15,000 a year on multiple ads. 

Every month the money’s coming out, the ads are out there. 

A few years in, he sits down and he’s thinking, I’m not sure if this Yellow Pages thing is working for me. So he rings up to cancel, and they put him through to a salesperson. And the salesperson asks, “why do you want to cancel?” He says, “I’m not really sure that this Yellow Pages thing is working for me”. The salesman says “oh, look, we’ve got some great technology now. What we can do is we can put individual numbers, on all of your ads, and you can track which ads are working, which ads aren’t and we’ll send you a report every month”. 

He said okay, that’s great, awesome. And they said, “okay, that’ll be $5000 to set that up”. So he pays the five grand and everything is set up. 

Month one report comes through, he’s too busy so he doesn’t look at it. Month two, month three is all the same.

Approximately two years, later,  he sits there and he says, “Maybe I’ll look at one of these reports.”  He opens one of the reports and he sees that there is very little in leads coming through from the ads.  He opens another report, and his gut fear is confirmed. 

The reality is, the data had been sitting there, for years, and he was just throwing money away. Now, keep in mind, part of the reason I think he was throwing the money away was that when I asked him, he said the business was growing. So it was almost like because they were getting growth they weren’t focused on making sure their costs were in check. 

15 years of money going down the drain.

So many business owners are in this predicament. Data is being fed to them but they are not reviewing it because they are too busy.

You need someone to hold you accountable. Stop you when you need to be stopped, Slow you down so you can speed up. Because think about it, $15,000 a year. Year on year, over 15 years. That’s a lot of money, over a couple hundred thousand dollars. Think about what you could do with that money. 

If you need some help with that, you’ve got to find an advisor that can help you with this. That can stop you when you need to be stopped, that can review the data, that can give you a call and say, “Hey, I just reviewed the Yellow Pages report, it’s not working, we need to stop that right now.” Or, “Hey, I just saw your SEO and you are doing really well, let’s pump some more money into this.

So here’s what you need to think about right now: 

1. Where are you haemorrhaging in your business? 
2. Where are you too busy, to be observing things that are costing you thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars?