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As a business owner, I get really… tied up in trying to set goals and achieve goals and, you know I go to these events, sit down, or a strategy session, and I’ll end up with this list of goals I need to achieve and we need to achieve as a business. Then, I go back to the office and then within a day or two that list just gets buried, and the whirlwind of just doing business gets in the road of actually achieving those goals. Some of those goals there’s too many in the list to achieve so you never really get to you might get to one or two, sort of half-assed but you you know you still get frustrated because you never quite get all those goals done. So recently a few months ago I started investigating and reading this book “The Four Disciplines of Execution” what an awesome process.
So, I’m going to open up and apply some of this to our digital strategy as KND and then share that experience over the coming months, I’ll do a couple of these videos related to that. In case you’re wondering what the four disciplines are , or 4DX as as we would call them, we’re really just choosing one single goal and parking all the rest that’s it’s important that the goal is wildly important it’s the one thing you really want to resolve in your business to get it done. So, in our digital strategy we’ve been relying for years on referrals from other business we’ve got a great network of different partners in different areas of business that send work to us we don’t have a very high input of inquiry just general inquiry for the site so my wildly important goal is to really fix that.
Really drive more traffic to our site and actually address how many requests for free analysis you know that sort of cold inquiry thing we do you do that everyone does on their site that I promote so much, but it’s a part of this wildly important goal so they call it a WIG, so it’s obviously 4 disciplines so the four steps, the first one is the Wildly Important Goal, the WIG, it’s important that that’s one not many, otherwise you’ll never get never get to them all. That WIG needs to have a from here, to there, by when so and usually they call this setting it’ll be a lag measure. A measurement that you know, like a revenue end of month measure or a number that’s a result of doing all these other things so that is a delayed number if you like now the way that 4DX represent it.
A good analogy is there’s a big rock, it can be very hard to push that rock along and make change to the lag measure you can’t just look at it and change that so this lag measure needs assistance to move, so for us our lag measure is a number of requests for our free analysis video through our website, so that’s our lag measure but to move this rock, I need to leverage it and in an analogy you know you’d put a stick on a log or under the rock to leverage it and move it and we would call those we’re moving the rock with lead measures, things that we can control and and put effort into to move the rock. So let’s call these lead measures.
I really want to keep this as simple as possible so for our team to get involved and so our lead measures are based around out our content because we’re dealing with a digital strategy, obviously I want all this content that we’re generating to work for us so we’re looking at content shares and then resultant clicks elements of the the site we’re changing various metrics around that now I’m going to share with you some of those metrics in a you know future video once I start collecting those metrics over a particular week. The second component of 4DX is our to work, your, ,lead, measures! So what actions are you taking to define those lead measures. So the third component is have a scorecard, score board.
So again I’ll share this score board with you when we start to collect data over the next few months so but we’re really wanting to keep it simple, so the score board needs to be easily understood by everyone in the business, easily updated, visible in the business so that there’s a connection with this number each week so we’re really tracking this behaviour of this number now what what is this tracking this is tracking our lag measure, our WIG always has to be measurable so you can track it, so the lag measure is represented on the on the scoreboard and then the fourth part of this is accountability setting and accountability cadence they call it.
The accountability component is weekly meetings that look at the numbers are allowed around your lead measures and the actions that each of your team members are taking to import that in my mind this process really is simple. It’s the first time that there’s a, for me, in quite a few years of doing business, that there’s something I can connect with that I can take back and communicate to the team in a really clear way that’s a clear process. So I’m going to share this with you over over the next few months and we’ll track our data and hopefully I will have more requests for for free side analysis through the site.
You can do me a favour by asking for one now in fact! But this is the book 4 Disciplines Of Execution, thoroughly recommend it it’s more a process than a book, I listened to the audio version, but it’s a cracker!