Get out of the group chat

When we owned our coffee business, I watched the sales numbers every single day.

It was a new company, so of course we were paying attention at a micro level to see what was going on.

Some days sales were up. Some days they were down.

And invariably every swing turned into a group chat where everybody was overreacting.

And it could just be something weird, like an extra day in that month, or it rained that day, or school was in session for a makeup day, and it changed things.

We'd build whole theories on a single day of data.

That's fine. But the real problem was when started making decisions based on the anecdote of yesterday, rather than the trends that were actually going on in the business.

Because there's a balance you have to strike as a CEO or owner:

You should be looking at the data and talking to your customers and getting anecdotes.

But you should always balance the day-to-day against the 50,000-foot perspective — month to month, year to year, even decade to decade.

It's a lot easier said than done.

One of the best ways to hold the big picture:

Manage to a short list of KPIs, instead of reacting to yesterday's number.

Pick the 3–5 numbers that actually predict the health of your business. Then look at them weekly as a trend line, instead of as daily, isolated dots.

Next time someone brings you a one-day panic, ask one question: "Does the trend agree?"

Usually it doesn't.

Ryan Deiss — a longtime member of the small business community I founded Scalepath — wrote a whole book on running a company this way. It's called Get Scalable.

The entire system is built around managing to KPIs instead of the daily noise.

Highly recommended if you catch yourself living in the day-to-day numbers like we did.

Thanks,

Michael

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