In today’s episode we’re sharing a presentation from MacLawCon 2020. Our originally scheduled MaxLawCon 2020 speaker Brian Mittman presented LIVE to the Maximum Lawyer Guild community and today we share his talk: Know Your Numbers, Really Know Them.
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Transcript: “Know Your Numbers, Really Know Them” with Brian Mittman
Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.
Unknown Speaker
In today’s episode, we’re sharing a presentation from Max con 2020. Our originally scheduled Max slot con speaker, Brian Mittman, presented live to the maximum lawyer guild community. And today we share his talk know your numbers really know them. Let’s get to it. All right, so today we have Brian Mittman. And he’s gonna do his Max law con 2020 presentation. So I’ll let you just introduce yourself and let everybody know what you’re going to be talking about.
Brian Mittman
Okay, hi, everybody, Brian Mittman mark off and Mittman the disability guys, and this is coffee with the disability guys figured I use my fancy poster. I’m based out of New York, actually based out of Westchester, New York, in fact, the epicenter of this wonderful pandemic we’re all living through right now. And I’m going to be talking about knowing your numbers and what that really means today.
Unknown Speaker
Perfect. All right, feel free to take over.
Brian Mittman
I figured I was just gonna give my basic presentation that I was planning on anyway, and then we’ll go from there. Alright, so hello, everybody. Today we’re going to talk about Don’t be fancy here. Know your numbers. I didn’t pick these numbers for any particular reason other than I just want to play with animation on PowerPoint. It’s kind of a lot of fun. Okay, so who am I, I’m an attorney by day. And yes, I took up ice hockey when I was 30 years old, and I am now at least 20 years older than that. And I am still playing ice hockey. The Disability guys, we are a New York based workers compensation Social Security Disability firm. We like to look at ourselves in as an 87 year old startup. And we’ve been going out for a while. So we have a lot of really cool history as well as a really cool future. So that’s who we are. Today, I wanted to talk about knowing your numbers. Jim had done a great podcast a few weeks back on on knowing your numbers. And I think anybody who is in the group, and anybody who has been in this world of marketing and different thinking and mindset with business, hears Oh, no, your numbers really know your numbers. And I’ve always kind of lived with that. But I never really knew what it what it what it meant. And, you know, again, 87 year old business, my father in law had taught me lots of stuff about the business. And I’m always looking at top line revenue and stuff like that. And you’re like, oh, okay, that’s what it means. But that’s really not what it means. And as I dove deep into this, we’ve really begun to learn it. So today, I want to talk about what some of the things mean, some just very basic stuff, but also some real world examples of how we’ve actually implemented this stuff. Because if any of you out there have even begun to try, you know, how friggin hard this entire thing is, you can be like, Yeah, I know my number. And then literally, like, walk into a glass door. And don’t do that I actually did walk into a glass door in my office, and I broke my nose in April of 2017. And after 47 years, my wife finally got me that get a nose job, a whole different story. Anyway. So here is where I, you know, kind of really got inspired by this number idea. I have I have a buddy of mine who once said to me, you know, Brian, imagine that you own a carwash. Okay, and if you could only know one number from your car wash that will tell you everything you need to know, because maybe you’re out on the golf course or the ice rink or on the beach, what would that one number big? So I want everybody to think about for a second? Would it be the number of cars in the carwash? Would it be the temperature outside? Would it be the chance of rain? Would it be your daily receipts, average price of a carwash at the location? What is it these are all really good numbers? It would actually be the amount of water being used. And we’re going to figure out what your water usage is. That’s what the key is going to be for your success with numbers. It’s what’s the one number that if you knew that, on any given day, whether you’re working from home, whether you’re on vacation, whether you’re in the office, you wanted to say my gosh, if I had one number I needed to know that could then tell me everything else. What would that number be? And it took us some time to figure out our number and we’re continuing to tweak it. But could it be you know your revenue that’s not a bad number, but you’ve heard the old mantra. Revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity and cash is king. Right? That comes right out of the whole scaling up world. And this guy, Greg Crabtree who does it with this really cool book called simple numbers I have that listed at the end of this presentation. Could it be the number of new cases you have coming in? Could it be the number calls could be the number of settlements, depending on what you do. Could it be credit card swipes? Or is it something else, every business, it’s different. And just because it’s right for one person doesn’t mean it’s
Brian Mittman
right for another person or wrong for another person, I happen to be in a contingency business. Other people are in, in, you know, a pay for service business, whatever it might be. So it’s figuring out that number or numbers, but I’d like to keep it at one. And there are questions that you can ask yourself. And those questions are going to be things like, you know, what functions are what process, you know, a calendar events, what items what thing, you know, if you measure it gives you the best, right, it gives you kind of that instant, instinctual understanding of how business is doing. So imagine this, you know, that it takes, let’s say, 100 gallons of water to wash one average sized car? Well, from that number, you can figure out my God, if we had 1000 gallons of water being used, and that means we wash 10 cars, right? 10,000 gallons, we’ve washed 100 cars, you can then figure out, you know, what’s the average sized car that your carwash washes? What’s the average price that somebody pays for that carwash? How many people does it take on? How many? How long does one carwash take and therefore you know what your labor costs are and things like that. That’s that number that leaves all these other things that then leads to the byproduct, which is called revenue, and then your profitability and stuff like that. You know, does this number easily allow you to tied into all things in your office? Right, it’s great to know that you had $10,000 in revenue this month. But what does that really mean? It’s what they call a lag, as opposed to a lead indicator. You don’t know about it till after the fact, right? Oh, yeah, we got to $10,000. But what were all the things that we did to get there? So you’re trying to always figure out that really kind of that sweet spot? And then is that number you’re thinking about high level enough, but not too aspirational? To provide real world value? Right? Oh, you know, if I’m making $500,000 a month, it’s great. Yes, it is. But I don’t know if any of us on this call are making 500,000 a month if we are way to go, let me know the secrets for what that even means. Because if you’re making 500,000 a month, but your profits 5000 a month, I’d rather make 10,000 a month with a $5,000 profit. So it is a process of iteration. I know that I think my director of success, Melissa is on the Facebook watching. And she knows because during the past 11 years, my gosh, we have gone through a period of testing and failing and succeeding, testing and on and on and on. And then we had an aha moment. So this is a printout that you see here, guys, this is a printout of just kind of a daily calendar that we have. So it shows me that I got a bunch of hearings in different locations who’s covering it, the types of hearings, there was a deposition that got canceled, stuff like that. So this became our aha moment, because we realized that we generate fees when we have a hearing, or we have a specific decision that gets issued by the Workers Compensation Board or Social Security. And we know and we have figured out from that what we did. So this is what our calendar, that prior image, and I’m going to go back to it right. This is what that one thing that calendar gave us. It told us stuff like the items on the calendar, it tells us about upcoming hearings about depositions about new client meetings about it, what’s called administrative decisions. Those are things where we actually didn’t have to show up. But we had submitted a bunch of paperwork, and the board sent it to us. We know wow, how many of these things which we call feed generating activities. That’s our internal metric. We call it the F G. A. That’s our number. How many feed generating activities do we have? And we have figured out for instance, in order to meet our specific money goal for the quarter, we need 1500 fee generating activities. And we know that each activity averages to be about 600 bucks. All right, you know, whatever the number is. And based on that we then work our way back, because then everything that the paralegals do everything the attorneys do go into getting one of those little things onto the calendar. And if we can do that, even if it says wow, what canceled, right? I know though, that on average, that was a $600 cancellation because my average fees will generate that. So we run our weekly fee reports and the calendar items. We figured out that again more calendar items, the better. We figured out the average fee per item. And again, this took a lot of time. then after, but it’s well, well worth it. It’s things you don’t think about. Now, it’s, it holds true, we need a certain amount of new cases to feed this whole machine. So then we can go back and say, Well, what’s my right? Return on Investment? What’s my cost per lead and all that stuff? Build, like a big pyramid into this ultimate number? And then the floodgates open? Everything our paralegals do, everything our attorneys do is generated on these FTAs. Now, we don’t tell our clients Oh, sorry, all we have to do a fee generating activity. You know, this is an internal metric. We’ve, we have a much happier external metric, right, we measure client happiness, and we talk to our clients about the unexpected legal experience, right. But this is, this is our, our metric. And I know, for instance, the more medical reports with scheduled loss of use evaluations that my paralegals get, the more chance I get of getting a settlement, the more legitimate requests that we make to the worker’s comp board or Social Security to have a hearing, the more likelihood we’re going to get a fee. And the cool part about having 87 years of history is we look back now I’m only looking back five, six years, but we have this group of data that we have been able to really dig into and say, Wow, look at this, you know, we know, no matter how good or bad, you know, it’s been this average amount of money over time, our fee generating activity average fee has fluctuated, probably about $150, up or down over the years. So as long as we can start honing in on that, this is the type of thing that’s going to make us better. It’s the type of thing that you got to make better, I don’t care what you’re doing, you can figure out those items. You hear people talk about, oh, figure it out, and then stop doing the things you shouldn’t be doing. This helps you maybe not stop doing those things. But to focus on the more important things of Oh, my God, I have so much stuff on my To Do lists, yes. But of the To Do lists, what are the best things that you’re doing? And then we just keep breaking this down, the more cases we sign the more fees and on and on and, and it gets your head spinning. If it’s you or somebody in your office, find somebody who loves numbers, because you’ll end up with something like this. Wow. Right? What’s that mean? The important thing here is that red line is what are one number means. So you see this little red line here, and you see the little red line here. So the blue are these few generating activities are one number that we’re measuring. And you can see, we went up and we came down and we go up since 2017. And down and up. But overall, guess what it is going up, we can see our trend. Now I am not the numbers guy, my partner, Michael Amaan. Height is the numbers guy. And let me tell you, he figured stuff out like, Oh, this is your average seven day trend. Like, when I’ve been watching all of this pandemic stuff, I laugh because I’m like watching them talk about all these statistical things that if I actually knew it, when I took statistics in college, I would have passed the course. And then what we’ve done though, is we then tied to specific metrics, right, the earned fees, and these types of settlements, we call 30, twos and SR us right. And we even made it so that they would all sit in the same spot, as you can see, as the number of section 30, twos goes ups and downs, and then the fees go up and down. And there’s a dip here, and then there’s a spike here. What we noticed though, was you basically have the same thing, these two lines are more or less trending in the same way, all from that one number. And we have 10 or 12 different items that go into that, that list. And these are just two of these items. And we realized that these are the two most important items. So now we’re spending more of our time on these, these two these two items. And as you can see back in, you know, the second third quarter last year, it was sucky. We, and we saw come in and we knew it was coming and we did a lot of stuff to dig out of it. And and, and it’s been great. So again, try to think about what your numbers are. And I am open DM me, call me, you know, face to whatever, you know, email me. I’m happy to like talk through with any of you guys about what it might be in your business because this has taken a lot of work, but it has been the best work, especially based on what’s going on now.
Unknown Speaker
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Brian Mittman
What’s tied to this. So and this is kind of, of the precaution is can numbers motivate, right? Some people get really jazzed by numbers and other people don’t I have two years as a mechanical engineer before I switched to political science, and became a Lawyer Go figure. But, you know, I like numbers and puzzles and figure some things out a lot of people like lawyers math, and they avoid numbers completely. Nothing wrong with that. But you want to make sure that the numbers mean, something if you’re a baseball fan, and I am some baseball statistics are super important. Others don’t mean anything unless you’re a total, you know, a geek when it comes to sabermetrics and everything. But you have to ask yourself, what do the numbers mean? And how can we help our team understand the numbers not for the numbers sake, but for what the mission is, and I didn’t put it in the slides. But if there’s one thing you can do, is you got to tie your values, and your your ultimate purpose of being and what you’re providing and your why you have to tie that to the numbers. And what we’ve done and I have some pictures later with our staff is although we’ve gotten them to dig into the numbers, we also tie it to client happiness. And we try to get like the softer metrics tied to the actual hard metrics. So it’s not just somebody, you know, I’m getting this number no matter what, I’m going to steal another story from the scaling up world. Tracy Boeve, I think it is she’s with Salesforce. She goes around the world and talks and talks about all this stuff. And she told us great story about KPIs key performance indicators and numbers. And she’s on the phone, you know, on her cell phone, it’s not work and she calls up and they say, Hey, Danny, they’re talking talking at 29 minutes, the guy says, Hey, can I call you right back? She’s like, okay, he hangs up calls right back 29 minutes goes by, they’re still trying to fix it. Hey, can I call you right back? Sure. Cause you’re right back, happens a third time. She gets the problem fix. She’s very happy. And then what she realized afterwards was, he had a number, his number was his calls had to be less than 30 minutes. So at 29 minutes, he hung up and then called her back. He was really good. He got it done. But that’s a internal metric, right? How I said the FGA for us is an internal metric. So it’s great that he was following that, but it was not great for her experience. Because one, what if you didn’t call her back? What if she didn’t get reception? Why was this guy keep calling me back. So you have to be careful. That’s kind of my caveat about balancing numbers, but the positives, you can personally know where you are against your own goals. The team goal, the office goal, it’s really important. There’s a sense of accomplishment as you move forward, things are going bad. Remember that slide? Right? You know, oh, my God, we were we were stinking it up here. Last year about boom, we took off afterwards. And we were able to figure out what had caused that. And actually, most of that was outside of our control. But we were set up that when the workers comp board finally woke up again, we took off, and then knowing your numbers let you recalibrate if things aren’t quite working. That’s it. This is iteration, you’re never gonna stop asking about the numbers and what they mean. The negatives are the cautions, right? You focus solely on the number and you miss other values and less measurable but important items, the happiness factor. You could be measuring the wrong thing if you’re not looking at it and misunderstanding what it means. So again, it’s always asking questions, and we’re lawyers are good at asking questions. So ask questions of yourself. And I can tell you and Molly is shaking her head right now is when we have screwed up. It’s because we generally take our eye off the ball, and we weren’t really asking the right questions or asking the question so. So numbers can motivate. And one of the ways we do it, and in this how we get our teams involved here is we spent all of last year developing key performance indicators or KPIs. You could call them all different things. There’s all different words and ways to do it. We happen the follow up, we have to follow the scaling up methodology of Vern Harnish and the Rockefeller habits. There’s lots of other things out there traction and E POS system and whatever it might be, that one just feels right for us. That’s why we’re doing it. But what we have done and what we did was we spent the entire year last year, each quarter, we were, we had a different theme. And we introduced key performance indicators to our staff. Then we introduced that was sort of their individual numbers, and we started measuring them. And we had some incentives created around that. Then the second, the second quarter, we said, hey, you know, what, how does your number affect my number? So we started building and how it ties together. And then the third quarter, we tied it together with Hey, how does your number my number, intersect with all of our numbers? What’s next? And that’s how we got out of that little valley and really kicked butt because everyone was doing it. And in the fourth quarter, all of a sudden, it was all coming together. And people were like, wow, you know, we’re close to meeting our goals. Most people met their personal goals, we met the team goals. So that’s this right here. I mean, it’s not I call it a pyramid, but it’s a straight line. But right you have your individual goals that go into monthly goals and quarterly goals and annual goals and the business goal, the big, hairy, audacious goal, right, your B hag. And things to change are our big, hairy, audacious goal is in the next 10 years is to help a million people have an unexpected legal experience in the world of disability, and injury. So, you know, there’s lots of things that go on. And one of the important ways to do this is to provide visuals for people. So every week, every Thursday, this morning, at 915, we did this, the entire office gets together. And we’re now doing it on on teams. But we all get together and we go through the individual metrics, not the people, but the team metrics to see where we are in a particular quarter, towards our goal. So this is an example. Whatever day this was, at the time, we were at 46.6% of our revenue. Some people might not want to share actual dollar numbers with their staff. And I understand why because sometimes people say, Oh, you guys made a million dollars. Oh, my God, why am I only making 40,000? You know, there’s a lot behind it. So we have shifted really a lot to percentages, because it shows a lot more. I think we were about halfway through the quarter when we were at 46%. So, you know, when I presented that number, I said, Hey, guys, you know, we’re, we’re 5% behind where we want to be, you know, keep working out, keep doing it. What goes into your number, what goes into this number, guys? Right? The legal squad. They know their FTAs are few generating activities for the month, they were at 62%. For the quarter, they were at 54%. Our Social Security Department was at 67% of its goals and theirs. And they talk in more detail about it because they tell us what goes into that. But it’s this is high level stuff, right? Wanted leads, that’s something we use to figure out the of all the leads that we’re generating, how many did we want? Well, we’re at 29% of the number of leads we wanted, we know that this particular quarter q2 of 2020 is not a good quarter. And this is actually where we’re hurting in terms of bringing in new cases. And we were at 32% of the signup cases for the quarter, we were at 33% of the cases, we wanted to refer out the welcome team, which is our front desk, we use a metric for them. We you know, these Voice over IP systems have all this great reporting, we found this one number, that base called abandon calls, don’t worry about what it means. But we wanted under 10%. And we’re at 7.3. When we started, we originally wanted it under 20%. And then we kept increasing the goal or decreasing the call client referrals. That’s a metric to see how many of our current clients are referring cases to us. We’re at 33% of where we wanted to be Field Marketing. We don’t worry about that right now. Because I have one person who goes out and visits doctors offices, which obviously has not been happening.
Brian Mittman
And then up until yesterday, all of our Google reviews were pending, because we all know that Google was holding reviews, but they started to release them. So our numbers are picking up. And this is our online version. When people are in the office, by the way, this is what we have. It’s a little bit more fun. It’s a little more colorful. It’s a gigantic soundboard. Right, and we all gather around and then we get people by video or by telephone. We share our numbers, it’s to say it’s the same circles. And we also talked about client happiness, how many positive case reviews and things like that because we’re always trying to tie it together. And then our our our brand is having the unexpected legal experience. And we have at least one person share that every week. So even We started out with numbers. We’re trying to tie it to real people and to real things. So given all that, right, that’s a lot of stuff had been thrown your way. Outcomes doesn’t really matter. Well, it does continued business success. I told Jim, this is after his talk last year at max con. I had I had that death knell where, you know, we were facing, you know, Are we closing up shop type, situation. And we really dug into all this. And we’ve not only, you know, bounce back, we’re doing, you know, better than ever q1, pre COVID. It was our best quarter in non quarters. And q2, we’ve mapped out things like we used our numbers, and we mapped out a best case scenario, a medium case scenario, and a worst case scenario. And I’m happy to say we’re trending between our medium to best case scenario a lot better than I actually expected, given all the chaos going on, right, we took the pandemic gut punch, but we’re back at it, and we’re seeing what’s going on. And we haven’t, we haven’t changed our goal. Because other than the fact that everything just kind of stopped, everything else still exists, all the stuff that we’ve been doing. Our long term plan is on track, we’re looking at things like the four day workweek all because of our numbers. We’re looking at how to better incentivize people, because we know our numbers. And I got to tell you, two years ago, when we had some serious fiscal issues, and I got a call from the bank about not renewing the line of credit, I spent a couple hours walking around a local park on, you know, what the hell am I going to do, and I didn’t really know, soon as the governor of New York closed everything on Friday, the sixth, or whatever the 23rd of March is Monday, the 23rd of March. It sucked. It was crazy. We were in you know, all hands on deck mode like everybody else. But guess what we knew our numbers, we could turn to things we figured out. What are we spending? Where can we cut with with common sense? You know, what vendors? Can we call to reduce things? When we put that money off until later? How will we pay it back? What are we going to do when we applied for a PPP loan? It was fantastic. Right? It was literally like, Hey, here’s the numbers, here’s the loan. Thank you very much. That’s what this means. And as a business owner, it’s not good enough to just feel like you’re doing well, or, you know, one of our biggest profit centers is when I get a personal injury case that I can send out to another attorney. Right? I cost of whatever it took to bring the case in and I refer it out. I don’t do any work and you send me money in the mailbox. It’s beautiful. So, but I don’t want to count on that money. I don’t want to say oh my god, we really focus on how do we make our core business be the sustainable business so that we can do all the other things. So that’s the outcomes. Bonus slide. So there’s another way and another thing that we did it, this is really important stuff, because this stuff is not easy. You got to get out of your own way. You have heard that but you really do. We now have bookkeeping and controlling services, we hired a virtual bookkeeper. We had used a we had had a bookkeeper, and then they laughed. And then we were using a bookkeeper in India and it was working out okay. And we got used to doing things virtually and then, but we still didn’t understand the numbers. And my accountants always trying to tell me things but you see your accountant once in a while, not every day. And we ended up with a bookkeeper and controller, which I’ve never had a quote controller before. And it’s amazing. The reports, the data, the information we get, you can make decisions, good and bad. But with numbers and evidence, and because we’ve been knowing our numbers, we’re starting to do things like make predictions, right? Most attorneys suck. Most businesses suck at making predictions. Oh, well, you know, a lot of customers come in, and that’s great. But predictions. Now we know, I can tell you that. We know how many section 32 hearings we had. So we know what revenue we generated. We know how many section 32 hearings are coming up. We now measure going all the way back to how many had been submitted to the court, how many had been submitted to the carrier for signature, how many have been submitted to the claimant for signature. And we just track all those numbers inverted now very simply. And at a glance, I can say how our section 32 is doing. I can look at a spreadsheet that we have and see. Right there’s a visual component to it. Learn what a balance sheet really means. Again, I’ve been at this for 26 years. And for 20 years of running the firm. I thought I knew what a balance sheet was. I thought I knew what a profit and loss was. All I looked at was Oh do we have money in the bank and did we make money and how am I making payroll next week. And then even more importantly, especially in this Time is really understanding cash flow, or how much cash you’re really making, right? Because I said that in the beginning, right revenue is vanity, profit sanity, cash flow is king, because having the cash in the bank, or knowing that the cash is coming in, really, really helps you. There’s a story about Dell computers, where they talk about the idea that when I forget who the guy was, when he came into Dell, in the 90s, Dell was basically getting paid 65 days after they spent $1. So you know, they built a machine and then got from, like, 65 days later, by the time that guy left, they were getting paid 21 days ahead. Right, so now all of a sudden, you know, they knew where their cash was coming, they could do things, they don’t have to worry about borrowing, or if they did borrow, they know how they’re gonna pay it back. And you have to know your actual bank balances too, because you really do need to know
Brian Mittman
the payroll. But these are, these are some additional things to really, really know like, this is the stuff as a owner, like if you’re gonna sweat, and night, this is the stuff to know and and to really try there’s a lot of really good resources on the line just to understand what does a balance sheet really mean for years, my eyes would glaze over while my account talk to me about it. I remember when I first started talking about cash flow, and, and I’m constantly re looking up definitions and asking again, and kind of because you begin to get a feel, and it gives you the health of your, your business. So that’s important stuff. And some of the resources that you can use, there’s a great book by Michael Moss, mentor, chelski, whatever Profit First, he also wrote the Great Pumpkin Plan, which I think is a phenomenal book. But Profit First is just giving a little mindset mind set shift in terms of how you think about profit, in terms of how you break it down. So you’re not thinking oh, profit comes last whatever’s left over, it’s, it’s been very disciplined and very deliberate to say, Hey, this is the profit I want. And then working backwards from it. As I said, scale up by Vern Harnish. The Rockefeller habits, if you read it, it is a dense, technical book. But there’s a lot of great stuff and resources out there. As I said, there’s also other other resources out there that may work better for you traction, or other things, all good stuff, check out accounting department.com, I do not get anything for, you know, plugging them in, I’m not but them and a lot of others, a lot of these entities have come into existence. These, this is the virtual bookkeeping account, bookkeeping, controlling and accounting services. And it has changed our management life within the office to truly be able to wine, get reports be held accountable for going over them and looking at them and to make really good decisions. Business intelligence. I don’t know what case management system you may be using. But a lot of them have business intelligence tied into it, there are programs out there that basically allow you to like set it up and pull all these reports without you manually running all the reports all the time. And they’ll give you a dashboard. So again, you create a dashboard. So you can quickly look at it and say, Okay, there’s the core number, there’s the other four numbers. That’s my dashboard. I feel good or, oh, you know, it’s time to change tires, because something’s wobbling over here. Yeah, how do we fix it and change changing? Harvard Business Review, I think is phenomenal. It is totally worth getting in the online subscription. They have an unbelievable amount of very digestible articles and helpful stuff. And they had some great stuff about balance sheets. And as I also said, you can reach out to me, there’s my information, and just know your numbers. It really has made such an unbelievable difference in our world, and, you know, going through a really crappy time, like we’re recently going through, you get through it a lot faster and feel better, because you know, the numbers don’t lie, you might misinterpret the numbers, the numbers don’t lie. So that was kind of my take on knowing your numbers. And again, given what Jim hacking had spoken about, I forget the fellas from Germany who interviewed him, it that is well worth a listen as well, because he dove a little bit deeper into some other things about really figuring out how to understand what your average case value is, or why are you doing that if this is going on. And it’s the you know, it’s the oil that runs the machine. That’s what I got.
Unknown Speaker
Awesome. So we had a question, how, how different is Rockefeller from traction?
Brian Mittman
So I was reading traction, and you know, One of these guys I constantly read, then we tried to implement constantly re implement, and I was in the middle of traction. And I actually stopped reading, I said, Wait a second, I got to pick one or I got to pick the other. A lot of the core concepts are similar, I think traction is actually a little more digestible. For smaller businesses and smaller entrepreneurs. It’s just for some reason with scaling up, it had struck me the right way. And then my entirely, there’s six of us, our entire leadership team, we actually took an online course with it. So that’s one of the reasons that we stuck with it. Even if you, you know, quote, pick traction stick with, you know, you can still read scaling up and get out and get I get a lot out of it. I know that both behind the scenes, both businesses have systems and coaches and tools to use, and there’s a lot of crossover, you know, different words that they use. For me, I think it’s just a question of what kind of strikes you when you’re looking at one of these processes, and then really, you know, taking that deep dive and saying, Hey, I’m gonna at least try this. And what we did was about two years ago, we said, what, you know, what are we doing here, and let’s get into this, and, and we got a lot of stuff done. And we’ve recently hired a scaling up coach, and he’s really happy that, you know, we have all this stuff. But when we went through this checklist, when we looked at, we’re like, Oh, crap, you know, we thought we had done so much more. Or we thought we had done better, but we realized that we were on the right path. So that’s kind of my best advice is whatever you seem to like the most, I don’t think one is going to be better than the other clearly, going out there and picking one of these big industrial processes, sigma six, and lean two and all this other stuff out there. I don’t think that’s necessary for the entrepreneur. But the either of these really, really helped skill helps you grow.
