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The $100M Entrepreneur Podcast
If You Can’t Measure It, You Don’t Have It: The 90-Day Freedom Test
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You cannot manage what you do not measure. That's true for everything in the business. But there's one measure that I want you as the CEO to be thinking about, and that's your freedom measure. How many days could the business keep growing without you there? If you can't measure freedom, you're never going to achieve it. Unless you put it in the plan, it's not going to happen. What does freedom look like? So let me be blunt. If you can't measure freedom, you're never going to achieve it. Freedom in business comes at level six of installing the Action Coach Business Operating System, Mastery Marketing Systems, Team Scale, and freedom. What does freedom look like? Well, there's the negative freedom, of course, which is where you kill the business or it kills you, or the positive two freedoms where you get passive exit or a financial exit from the business. So let's break that down so that we understand. See, freedom often for most people, feels real fuzzy. If you look at this series or this season of this podcast in the 13 episodes. The first few episodes are around the mindset shift from growth to freedom. Okay, right now, episode six, we're halfway through the systems, the financial base and the structure to gain independence from your business. Now, whether you're at a million, ten million, a hundred million, planning for your freedom from the business is a great way to make sure that the business grows to work without you. If you do not plan your freedom, if you don't measure your freedom, you're never going to achieve that freedom sort of thing. So how do we create metrics and measure the personal and business independence? How do we know how independent the business is of you? Now, a simple measure that I get a lot of my clients is like, okay, how many days before you think the business would start going in a negative spin in if you weren't there? How many days could the business keep growing without you there? Most get somewhere between 0 and 30. Okay. Now ultimately I want you at 90 days. I want you that the business can run for 90 days while you're totally away, while you're not there. Yeah, no emails, no texting, no nothing. I want it to be at 90 days. Cause that's when true freedom starts to kick in. So let's get into some details around this stuff and how to make freedom measurable, I guess is the thing. If you look at the freedom scorecard, probably four things we want to look at. Number one, autonomy of the business, which is what most people think. Number two, liquidity. Okay. Because if the business isn't giving you Liquid, it's very hard for the business to give you freedom. So it's going to give you time autonomy first, then it's got to give you cash autonomy, meaning the liquidity of the business third. We got to start looking at the bench and the strength of the leadership. What's the depth of your bench? Okay, how deep is your leadership team when you move to be in the CEO? Building bench strength, leadership depth, management depth is a massive job of you as a CEO. CEOs that don't build bench strength end up having to do it themselves. It's like I remember when I hadn't built bench strength in my marketing team and I had to step back in when the CMO was, was moved on. And so it was like more bench strength, more leadership depth needed in that area. So autonomy, liquidity, depth of leadership and fourth, lifestyle control. Meaning can you work a three day week or can you go away for a month? Can you run it from anywhere in the world? Can you look at a one page scorecard or one page dashboard and go, huh? Yep, yep, yep, yep. Great. When we get to that point of lifestyle freedom, then we've got it defined. Now I said, I, I'll give you an example. Just a few days ago I was sitting with a business owner and they said, brad, I want to work less. I said, less is a fluff. Give me an actual number. And he said, well, I want to be working three days a week. He said, fantastic. How many hours a day on those three days a week? He said, well, I want to be working, I want to go to the gym still in the morning. So I want to start at 9 and be done by 3 to pick up the kids. Fantastic. So your goal is to get the three days a week, nine till three. Fantastic. What about weeks off, months off, vacation time, that sort of. He said, well, I don't really know. I said, well, how much time do your kids get off from school? And he looked at the calendar and he said, well, the kids get off this week here, this week here, this week there. They get off this month in summer. I said fantastic, so let's block that out of your calendar first and foremost. And he looked at me like he was panicking and I'm like, what? Okay, let's just plan to get to that point now. We were planning to be there in two years, maybe three. But you start thinking about it, unless you put it in the plan, it's not going to happen type thing. So getting that lifestyle freedom is definitely a part of it. So freedom gap where does the business still rely on you? Where is the freedom gap being killed? If you look at right now and let's say you had to write down three things where you go, okay, the business relies on me for A, B and C. These are the three areas where you literally have to, to be there, have to do it. It relies on you, and it might not rely on you 100%, but it's like 70, 80, 90% you. That is that part of the business. So what are the freedom killers for right now? If you can define the freedom gap, the gap between the business running without you and the business being able to run without you, and start to close that gap and say, okay, these are the three years I got to work on most. I got to build systems, got to build leadership depth, I got to build bench strength. I gotta build and build and build so that that area can survive and thrive without me type thing. That's where the leadership freedom gap kicks in. So what do you got to track? Let's look at four areas. Number one, the dependency metrics. Okay, so which areas of the business depend on you, how much? We, we just listed the top three. But if you really want to do this properly, if you really want a CEO scorecard, you're going to go through dependency metrics of all of the areas of the business. So if you look at your even let's imagine you got eight direct reports and you look at your dependency metrics of each of your direct reports. This gal, she's a 9 out of 10, doesn't need, she's not dependent on me, she's 90% independent. Fantastic. This one here, 7 out of 10. This is an 8 out of 10. This one here is a 4 out of 10. Yeah, dependency metric is high. So you've got to start looking at either building that person, building bench strength, replacing that person, whatever you need to do so that the dependency metrics are reduced. Second, decision flow. This is one where I can often find where CEOs are failing and failing fast. Where do decisions keep coming back to you? Okay, where are decisions being made by you time in, time out? Where is it that your team is not capable of deciding on their own? Start finding those and you start finding the areas where we're going to have a problem in the business going forward. We're going to find freedom gaps that stop you having the business run without you. Third, cash extraction. One of the biggest jobs for you as CEO, as head of the company, is looking at where does the money get allocated? You know, your CFO ultimately should be doing this, but where is the cash extraction? What part of the company is using the most money? And if that part of the company is using the most money, then that part of the company is the area we're going to have to focus in on. Okay. I remember years ago looking at my IT department and going, holy heck, this is chewing way too much money based on what it is achieving for the organization. So it just took time and energy focusing in on it to change that and to get it to a point where it reduced the amount and increase the result. I mean, it just took my time, my energy to be able to do that. Now, we've built bench strength, we've built abilities, we've built systems, all of those sorts of things. But the, the cash extraction is what led me to that area and that focus. And finally, time leverage. Where are you getting the best use of your time? Where can you move the needle the most in the time that you do? It's like people say to me, brad, why do you still do these podcasts? Because this level of energy and this level of knowledge base being passed on to our top customers in the world is why I do this. You as one of the top Action Coach customers in the world. And if you found this and you're not a team Action Coach customer, fantastic. Love to have you as part of our organization. But getting this information to our top customers on a weekly basis is vital to me to keep them moving, them growing, and them being a great success story for our organization. Having our business unlimited clients learning every week is really important. Correlation between system maturity and freedom levels. Early on, systems fail. We kind of all know this, that if you put a system in, you're not expecting it to be great. But the maturity of the systems over time definitely leads us to more freedom levels in the business. So as you build systems and then you build people, and then you build people who can build systems while you're into a different level of freedom for that sort of thing. Freedom through dashboards. Now, if you're using the Action Coach business operating system, or a boss, or our planning and execution system Apex, you've got your dashboards, okay? But seeing it, and of course, our dashboards are in color, red, yellow, green. It's not too hard to tell you, hey, you're in red, dude. You, we got to fix this type of thing. But when we look at the progress, we start to see it. So reminding ourselves of the 8020 rule, I guess, is a big part of the Freedom Dashboard. 20% of the work will get you 80% of the results. 20% of the systems or 20% of the training or 20% of the habits will get you 80% of the independence. So if you think about what systems do you need to create to create more independence, what training do you need to give people more independence, what coaching do you need to help people get more independence? The more independence you build, the better off it is type thing. So I remember when I looked at, I was looking at bottlenecks in the company because a great mentor once said to me, my job as CEO is to remove excuses. So when someone came to me with an excuse, I'm like, huh, it's gotta be a bottleneck in there somewhere. Let me take a look. What's the bottleneck? When a customer had a complaint, gotta be a bottleneck. What's the bottleneck in there? So I just, I was on a bottleneck thing. It was like two quarters. I just kept hunting and hunting for bottlenecks, and every time I found a bottleneck, I found another way to create more independence. Whether it was independence for one of my senior team, a C level exec, or whether it was independence for me, it created more independence. So people get to work more on growth than they could on dealing with issues and putting out fires and rework and all of that sort of stuff. That made it. So my guess was, I mean, I set freedom milestones for me and I do it with all of my clients. Now, first freedom milestone I set for everyone is to get their hours of work under control. So set the number of hours you want to work. Now in most cases, when I first start working with a CEO, that freedom of hours is getting them down to 40 hours a week. Like not trying to get them down to 15 hours a week, but to get them to 40 hours a week, that's the first freedom milestone. Second freedom milestone is get them out of day to day so that they're still operating, but they're no longer in day to day decisions. They're in week to week decisions maybe, or in month to month decisions. But getting it to that time frame is one of my first ways of looking at, measuring how do we actually get freedom milestones. But also some freedom milestones might be financial in the business. You might say, okay, my first freedom milestone might be at a million, or at 3, or at 5, or at 10, whatever the freedom milestone is that you can do that. And so if, if you were to build your freedom dashboard based on everything we've talked about so far and say, okay, what are the four metrics that matter most to me. It might be hours worked, it might be lifestyle. It might be leadership death. Again, back to autonomy liquidity. It might be number of bottlenecks fixed and or systems created. If I go back to very much in the beginning, I remember as a young man I worked out that every system I created saved me five to 10 minutes a week. And one night I'm just sitting there going, hang on. If I write enough systems, I'll never have to work again. The company will run itself. Like when that dawned on me that if I keep writing systems, ultimately I can't. I don't have to be here type thing. You know, if you go back to the old saying of you cannot manage what you do not measure, that's true for everything in the business. The marketing, the finance, the sales, the productivity, the employee engagement, the Net promoter score. Like all of these measures are important, but there's one measure that I want you as the CEO to be thinking about, and that's your freedom measure. Okay, See, you cannot manage what you do not measure. Even freedom kicks into that one. Thanks for joining me on the Hundred Million Dollar Podcast. If you've got value from today's episode, make sure you've subscribed and share this with all of your friends. Never miss a strategy that could change your business and your life. And remember, the fastest way to scale is to learn from those who've done it. That's what this show is all about. See you on the next episod.