How Setting Up Your SCORE With A KPFM Helps You Get The Win
Oct 09, 2020
Most CEOs and leaders laugh at me when I ask them what their company’s daily score is and if they are winning or losing. Why? Because they do not have a daily score and they laugh at the reality of being able to do this in their business. They tell me that it’s too hard, that they don’t have the information, and they don’t want to bother. Yet they continue to tell me they are missing their “BUDGET” every month.
Building a business is a team sport. If the whole team knows if they are winning or losing on at least a daily basis - better faster decisions will be made to achieve the team goal. We do not play on a soccer team and say “oh darn we lost” when the score flashes up at the end of the game. No, when we play a soccer game - whether you are in a U6 league or masters league or professional league - you are constantly looking at the score and looking at the time left in the game. Why? Because each team member will make better faster decisions on how they play, where they pass the ball, where to move to next, and they will ask for help or offer help to others in order to win the game. There is clear visibility on what the score is, how much time is left, and the team effort required to warrant a win.
In business we want the same scoreboard – the daily score, in the context of time.
After I’ve asked the question if they know their daily score, many teams tell me they get a daily email with a dashboard that shows all the company numbers or they show me a live dashboard where people can log in and look at the numbers every day. I then asked them what yesterday’s score was, what the target was, and where did we end up? At this time, they generally start fumbling with their computer or cell and they start looking for the score they can't remember.
A daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly score provides the context of time married up with what we need to do to win. A score is very human.
You're probably wondering “How do we set up a daily, weekly, and monthly score for the company for your team to work together to achieve?”
Step one create a KPFM (Key Process Flow Map). The KPFM is the foundation of execution. It is based on the understanding of three to five key company functions that work together to make your company money and how can we maximize these functions working together for maximum profit and cashflow.
It's simple. It's a “chunked up” view at the very highest level of your organization to provide the team with the simplest view of how the company needs to work together in order to achieve the company's goals. It shows each function, the owner of that function, the key measures of that function and the interdependency on the other functions.
This simple view allows everyone on the team to understand the key functions and how the company will make money. It will show what things flow through the company. These things are non-fiscal metrics. We call them Widgets. These Widgets can be things like raw leads, marketing qualified leads, converted sales opportunities, number of contracts sold, number of products manufactured, number of cases shipped, number of invoices, number of days to collect on invoices and so on. Why non-fiscal metrics? Because these are the things that team members relate to and effect every day. Fiscal metrics are hard for the whole team to relate to.
It's not good enough to track the Widgets (things) that flow through your company - your key process flow map. Best practice is to forecast 12 months broken down into 52 weeks broken down into 365 days. You're probably reading this and thinking now that's a huge daunting task. It is. But we don't have to approach it in this way, we can approach it more in a human way. In a way that your team will want to forecast the score. Make it as true as possible. And then make the best plans to deliver on that score and then, of course, deliver.
Every day in the team’s huddle, each owner will say what the forecasted number was for the day before along with what the actual number was and then what the forecast is for today. They will also share the week to date actual for the week forecast and do the same for the month and the quarter.
Now you are really thinking – there must be a better way than this manual way. As I said, the score is very human. And the behavior – tracking the score every day and saying the score every day – is the way the team stays focused on what matters and reduces the risk of going off track and missing their “BUDGET”. (I really dislike the word “BUDGET” and strongly recommend from now on you use the word “FORECAST”. A budget is a license to spend a forecast and is the opportunity to win with the team every time.)
Metronome Growth Systems just added the KPFM to their Business Behavior Accountability Platform that is used by coaches and companies all over the world. It provides an easy way to design your KPFM, add the owners, and score (metrics) to be reviewed each and every day in the Meeting area with the team who owns it. It tracks every update to stay focused and knows exactly where the team is each and every day to make better faster decisions for the win. Everyone loves to win together and this is one of the simplest ways to do it in business.
