🔥 This Week’s Agency Insight

From Jordan Ross @ 8 Figure Agency

December, 17 2023

Your business will stagnate or shrink in 2024 unless you have this one process

Every year, mid 7 and 8 Figure businesses drop in profit because they are unable to maintain their standards of performance as they grow

Read this to ensure this never happens & you can break company records next year

Preface:

The issue of a company's inability to continue to perform at a high level as they scale is probably the most common one in the marketplace

At Amazon, we called this the drift

As more employees are added to an organization, it is harder to hold them accountable to perform and hit goals/KPIs

Here is how you can ensure this never happens

Weekly Insight

1- Benchmarking

Most executive teams struggle with goal-setting

In any business, it is the responsibility of the executive team to set benchmarks & targets for their departments

I call this the operational plan (OP)

On an annual & quarterly basis, executive teams should be setting two goals for the upcoming year/quarter:

A- Stretch goal

B- Benchmark

Stretch goals are set to inspire the team and display where the business can be if everything goes well

Benchmarks are set as the new standard for the business

In my opinion, benchmarks aren't goals, they are data points we set as a ‘must hit’

The way we make them realistic is by breaking down those benchmarks into tangible actions per department

Example:

Business X did 8M in 2023

Business X sets a benchmark of 10M in 2024

The executive team identified benchmarks per department that must happen to ensure this is executed

Marketing benchmark: 600 inbound leads in 2024, 50 leads per month

SDR team: 2000 appointments set in 2024, 167 appointments per month 

Sales: 600 deals closed in 2024, 50 deals closed per month

Operations: Onboarding capacity set to 60 deals/mo, fulfillment capacity is 500 clients 

Operations: Churn rate 

Marketing Department added benchmarks:

• Goal: 50k visitors to the website monthly   KPI: 20 blog posts per month

• Email subscriber list at 100k by year end, 5k new subscribers/mo

KPI: 1 new lead magnet created per week to run ads to

This can go on and on

The most important point here:

KPIs should correlate to goals/benchmarks 

We forecast which inputs we believe will lead to outputs on an organization and department level

Then, via our management process, if we didn't forecast correctly, we adjust the inputs

2- Visibility

The #1 reason talent underperforms is because they can

Think about the visibility there is in professional sports

If someone on any team makes a mistake, everyone sees it

Their coaches and teammates give feedback, the fans react and the opposing team takes advantage of the mistake

In business, none of this happens

If a team member makes a mistake, and there is no process to catch it, they are unconsciously reinforced that it is OK to make that mistake again because there is no accountability

The solution is simple:

Standard work checklist and end-of-day reporting

Standard work checklist:

The standard work checklist (SWCL) is a simple project management tool that can be created in any software

For each role in a department, map out:

A- Every daily, weekly, and monthly responsibility they have

B- The recurring tasks that fall under those responsibilities

C- The metrics/goals they're responsible to drive

D- The inputs (KPIS) that lead to those goals

When you have this, you can then create a simple checklist that can be completed daily tracking every project management item as well as each data point

End of Day Reporting

Once each department has its checklist set up, each department should submit an end-of-day and end-of-week report 

The daily and weekly report (as shown above) is a submission of these checklists or master checklists per department

When done well, KPIs are benchmarked against goals and when items are missed, team members must submit a ‘bridge’ as to why items have been completed/expected

A bridge is an explanation on why we missed and how we will execute moving forward (move from low performance to meeting standards) 

The bridge process creates an added layer of accountability

Team members must take ownership of their performance, and publicly show why they’re missing and if they continue to miss, everyone will see

This 2 step process will solve more than 50% of your performance issues

3- Auditing 

Now that we have visibility into all the important KPIs and project management items daily, we must ensure our talent maintains the standards set by the executive team

Via the end-of-day reporting process, management has an easy way to audit the business in each department

Rather than outright providing feedback, the first and most important part of coaching talent is to STU:

Seek to understand

If there are issues with performance, clients, or project management, we should always begin by asking questions around these areas before providing feedback

See below the communication between my COO and one of my consultants

During the week of Thanksgiving, we had a handful of clients reschedule or cancel meetings 

My COO audited our checklist and got confirmation we were back on track

4- Coaching

When we identify our talent is missing an item more than once and needs support, the best way to support them is through coaching

Coaching is the process of developing talent through feedback

Here is the 6-point prompt on how to execute

A- Seek to understand

When talent falls short, don't go in there and blast them right out of the gates

Truly understand what is going on

B- After entering a conversation with questions, we can find the root cause with our employees what led to them falling short

Typically, we will be able to root cause performance issues in two areas:

• Process-related issues (barriers)

• Knowledge gap

When the root cause of talent’s performance issues is processed, it is management's job to remove those barriers by improving the process

This helps talent build more trust with their leaders and makes the business better

When we identify a knowledge gap, follow this prompt:

• Show the gap between where talent attempted to execute and where they should be

• Coach and train towards inputs, items talent can control and easily focus on

• Assign SMART actions with a specific due date

• Schedule a check-in with talent on progress

5- Performance Management

If talent continues to underperform, it's time to introduce development plans and PIPs

Thanks for reading. 

P.S Want to build an hands off, no stress profit generating agency? 

Harness the power of processes, and systems to build a profit generating team that function with or without you. Click here to schedule a meeting

The 8F team will be ready to give you a free consultation.

Killer Content (My favorite pieces of content from last week):

• Podcast: Ultimate: I Spent $50,000 In One Day: 8F Live Recap

• Long Form Youtube: The Ultimate Guide to Conducting an Effective Performance Annual Review

• Short Form Youtube: A Full-Time Professional's Journey from Burnout to New Horizons

Stay Happy

Stay Hungry,

Jordan Ross

CEO & Founder @ 8 Figure Agency

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