Stop Hiding From Your Numbers

Most entrepreneurs say they want the truth about their business — but only when it confirms what they already believe. In this episode of Success Is Not Convenient, Bernie Gallerani breaks down why tracking your numbers isn't optional if you want to grow. From lead distribution by hour to production per employee, Bernie reveals the exact metrics that expose the real story in your business — and the five questions every entrepreneur needs to ask before it's too late. If your revenue is flat, your conversions are dropping, or you've been blaming the market, this episode is for you.

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

Hello, everybody. It's Bernie Gallerani bringing you another episode of Success is Not Convenient. You know, we continue to keep breaking down different uh business ideas and challenges that entrepreneurs and business owners deal with. And uh this is, I think, a one true to me and and what I have realized in the time that I've had my business is what really is the truth, what I believe is true or the real truth. And so the title of this uh podcast today is Do my numbers tell the truth or just a story that I want to believe? You know, it's an interesting one because we all have this idea of what we believe the truth is, but in reality, the numbers actually never lie. And so I learned this, you know, 20 years ago about tracking the numbers. And in the reality of tracking the numbers, you also realize that if you're not tracking the numbers and your numbers don't line up, um, there's lots of stories we can tell ourselves in that particular area. So my job today is to help you guys identify what is the true truth of your business and is what I believe in reality how it actually shows up. See, every entrepreneur says that they want the truth of their business. But the truth is most of us only want the truth when it confirms what we already believe. See, there's a thing in our brain that actually tells us we we really believe this to be true, but it actually the numbers aren't showing up in your bank account or in your business. The money's not flowing through, the numbers aren't showing up. And what happens is we continually keep telling ourselves a story on why that is. Numbers are supposed to be the objective, but in business, numbers often become a story we manipulate to protect our ego. It's a hard one, right? Like you think about, well, why would I want to do that? I don't really know why, but everybody does do it at some level. I would say a majority of entrepreneurs are have a hard time facing the real truth. The question every entrepreneur should ask themselves is pretty simple. It says, are my numbers telling me the truth, or am I telling myself a particular story? See, because businesses don't fail from lack of effort, they fail because of a lack of misread realities. I'm gonna say this to you again. Misread realities. And that is where you have a feeling that things are going okay and you're not even paying attention or tracking numbers, that you could be in a downward slope. You know, something happened to us recently where we started looking at our numbers in a different way. We looked at them in a different way. We always track numbers, but we looked at it in a different way. And what we were seeing was our cost of uh online click leads was um diminishing. And so we couldn't figure out why they were diminishing. So as we researched the numbers, the time frames, those leads typically come in. We could actually see that there was a hiccup in one of the software or the programs we were dealing with, and so now we're able to uh address it. Numbers are always the mirror most people avoid. Numbers don't have any feelings whatsoever. They don't care about your effort, they don't care about how hard you work, and they don't even care really how busy you feel you really are. And I we we get kind of get stuck in busy work and we feel like we're well, we're so busy, we're so busy, we're so busy. But are you actually pushing the business forward? Are the numbers reflective to the effort? Numbers tell you what is actually happening inside of your business, but many entrepreneurs avoid tracking them because numbers expose things like poor conversion, weak leadership, bad hires. Oh my gosh, right? Bad hires. I mean, by the way, um hiring is one of the most critical and probably the most expensive thing you can um make a mistake in in your business, right? A lack of discipline, a lack of follow-up. It's much easier to say, you know, the market is slow. God, I've said that for years, like, oh, well, this is the market and this is just the time of the year that we're in. What you should probably should be saying is our performance has dropped. The numbers remove the excuses that you have. The numbers remove all your excuses. See, entrepreneurs love activity, but activity isn't a result. One of the biggest lies in business is confusing motion with progress, progress, moving it forward. Your activity is this, and your progress is this. Explain this one to me. Your activity goes back and forth, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, but your progress either goes like this, or at best it just plateaus. See, what happened is we're working hard, but we're busier than ever. But the numbers say revenue is flat, profit is shrinking, conversation is dropping, customer retention is way down. And being busy feels productive, but numbers expose whether you're actually winning, whether you're winning it in business. Effort is emotional, numbers are factual. Numbers are factual. And so if we don't pay attention to lining everything up, let me give you an example of what this means. We recently hired a growth leader, and the growth leader went through and said, this is hour by hour by hour, what the lead distribution is. By what hour to what hour are you getting a percentage of X, Y, and Z? When is your busiest part of your lead distribution? When are people online? Um, why is this important? Because you could overstaff during um minimal um online um calls or online uh clicks, and you can understaff when it's really the busiest. So are you tracking the sources of your leads that come in hour by hour, day by day? We can tell you not only what hour of each day, but we can tell you what day, what hour in each one of those days, because they're not always the same. They're seven days a week. Saturday and Sunday are different days than lunchtime or after three o'clock. Well, you'll find if you're purchasing online leads or if you're doing some sort of pay click for um driving revenue to or or business to your uh to your website, there are certain times of the day that are more prevalent than others, and there are more different days that are more prevalent to others. The story we tell ourselves here is where things get very dangerous. Entrepreneurs start creating narratives to protect their identity. The market changed. Well, the market changed, so there's not a lot I can do. Our people just need more time, right? We are building momentum. This quarter doesn't really count. That's a crazy one, right? You know, I had a I had a time where uh all of these excuses were a part of my business, right? Like, what's really happening inside of my business? Because the numbers are saying something really different. The numbers are actually telling us that it's broken. Let me give you an example. I'm in the real estate business. So when the interest rates were really low and the market was crazy in 2021 and part of 22, boy, it was great, right? It was feast or famine, man. You were just like, oh, it was so fantastic. But then things changed. And what we did was when the market changed and the interest rates went up, we said, well, the interest rates are going up, so it's slowing the market. And we actually believed that for about six, eight months. And then it dawned on me, well, what does the interest rates have to do with my level of production? Some agents, ones that always want things the same in my world, they really what they wanted to do is go back to what we had. But that wasn't realistic. And so we had to look at is it really wasn't about the interest rates going up, it was about the training and conversation we had with the potential clients. So, are you a business owner today that tells yourself a story instead of really looking to see what's broken? But instead of fixing the system, many leaders just protect the story. And it's easy for me to continue to keep believing that the interest rates were the reason that things were slowing down. And in reality, that wasn't it at all. And when I changed the narrative, when I really started focusing the most on the behavior and how we were going to coach the behavior within the company, things really changed. And so I was proof just based on what we're talking today that we could have stuck on one story, but yet we flipped the narrative on that story and just said, this is a training opportunity, this is a coaching opportunity. And we really want people that work with our company to buy into what we're doing and telling so we can increase production. Changing the story means basically admitting that you're wrong, right? That the strategy we originally thought failed. A leader failed, a hire failed, or we just failed to execute. And as an owner, as an entrepreneur, you have to face the realities of really what the situation is. That's pretty uncomfortable, I think, for any entrepreneur to face is that, hey, listen, we have all the control to change the behavior inside of our company that ultimately dictate the level of success of our business that our business will have. See, the brutal discipline of knowing your numbers is absolutely critical. High-level entrepreneurs don't avoid numbers. I mean, we track numbers for every single thing. We have a list of what we call measurables, right? All these measurables. Um, and every week we go through every single thing. And even our growth leader, every single day, will go through certain things and go, hey, listen, we're missing the boat. Normally on Mondays we do this. This Monday we did this. Let's get ahead of this. What happened? Let's launch Tuesday and see what happened on Tuesday because we have a glitch in our system somewhere. Okay. So you hunt down the problem. I want to know why business is changing because I want to business is always going to change, but I want to know that it's changing by the second that it's changing. So I can put an effort into turning that around. So what is my conversion rate? What does that cost me to acquire a client? What does each employee produce? What activities generate uh revenue? You know, it's interesting about what activities generate revenue because I remember being in the real estate business, I would have all these different zip codes and areas that I would purchase lead distribution from. And it wasn't good enough that you could have online purchasing where leads came in, like, okay, that was an online lead, that was whatever it was, TV, radio, uh, billboards, whatever it might be. But what I want to know for the online leads is what zip code are they coming from? See, if I box in all my numbers as just one category, then I'm thinking, well, there might be some profit in that category. But you might have a third of that that you're actually losing money in. Wouldn't you rather get rid of that activity that you're losing money in so you have nothing but profit? Because that's going to increase the bottom line. So watching every zip code that you market in, everything that you do, everything by territory is super important. The best operators run their companies like a scoreboard. And it is a scoreboard, right? You know, you've watched these athletes we'll call NFL. They can tell you how many yards after uh catch, and they can tell you how many scrimmage yards and how many passing yards and how many things go past a certain, you know, X amount of percentage of the quarterback's passes are 12 yards, 15 yards, very few deep balls, whatever. It tells you a lot about that person, right? And so what we as owners have to do, like those coaches do, we have to monitor every single in and out of the company because the scoreboard tells you we are winning, we are losing, and winning companies know their numbers weekly. We know them weekly, but we also in some cases know them daily, and in some cases, we know them hour by hour, right? It's not a yearly thing. How can you make a correction if you're only doing it every year? It's not a quarterly thing, it's a weekly thing. And in some cases, it's a daily thing. It's a daily thing because you have to see sometimes a week's too long if something's going south. And in my world, a week could cost me thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of marketing dollars without getting it affected. It might save me a thousand or two thousand dollars every day if I catch it today versus tomorrow. So numbers create a level of accountability. And when numbers are visible, excuses start to disappear. You can't hide poor performance when the scoreboard is clear. It's clear, it shows you what it is. There's no more denial. Great businesses measure things like the production per employee. Do you do that? Do you look at every seed in your cup in your company? Revenue per client, conversion rates, time to close the deal. What are your profit margins? Here's why. See, because what gets measured gets improved, and what gets ignored gets emotional. Sometimes we can get emotional. Sometimes we're ignorant and we don't even know. We're just too busy boasting on what we did last year. What about this year? What about this week? What about today? The courage to face the truth. See, that's the thing. Do you have courage to face the truth? Or are we too busy living in fantasy land on what we believe is going on? The hardest part about leadership isn't building something, it's confronting reality when things are not working. Great entrepreneurs ask themselves uncomfortable questions all the time. How do I perform better? What am I doing wrong? Where am I lying to myself? Where am I protecting people who aren't performing? Where am I ignoring the data? Because every business eventually faces a moment where the numbers say change or decline. Change or decline, right? I love what my one of my coaches said one time, like, Bernie, man, if you don't have your foot stomped on that gas to go as fast as you can, you're gonna come to a slow roll. And before you realize it, you're stopped dead in the water. See, the question is whether the leader has the courage to really pay any attention and listen and spend time to face the reality of what they're really their business is doing. Numbers are one of the most honest things that a business a business owner could do, getting to know those numbers. You have to be able to work at a level where you're looking at these numbers. And a lot of business owners don't do it because it's an uncomfortable thing. It's meaning change has to happen and people don't really like change. The numbers always reveal the truth. But the danger to entrepreneurs is this if you don't face the numbers, you'll create a story that protects your ego. And instead of protecting your business, and eventually the market exposes the truth anyway, you're going to get exposed. So the real question isn't how hard are we working? The real question is what do the numbers say? Because in business, the scoreboard always tells the truth. Here are five questions that I want to ask you that maybe we can identify as things to help. If I looked at your numbers right now, would they confirm your story or would they challenge it? See, many entrepreneurs they say things like, We're growing, we're doing great, we're gaining momentum. But if someone walked into your business today and pulled the real numbers revenue, profit, conversion, production per employee growth of that particular seat, would the data support your belief or expose a gap between belief and your actual reality? See, this is the part about being real. Number two is what numbers in your business are you avoiding or not looking at? Every entrepreneur has them. I have them too, that are harder numbers to look at. It's tough when things aren't going your way and you have to come up with a solution to change that, right? The metrics we check daily and the ones we intentionally ignore, it might be profit margin for an employee, productivity for customers, and retention and cost per lead. Have you ever looked at that? Like, what is it really costing me to retain a client? How much of that is wasted? When we hired our new growth leader, he came in and goes, Man, you got a bunch of leaky pipes over here. We sure this thing up, our margin and ROI per lead is going to increase at a high, much, much higher level. See, the numbers you avoid looking at usually point to the biggest problem in the company. What is that problem for you? What if you looked at those numbers and really looked and were honest with yourself? If you're the entrepreneur, you're the leader here. Nobody else is the leader but you. You're the person in charge. Number three is are you measuring activity or just measuring outcomes? A lot of businesses track calls made, meetings, hours worked, marketing campaigns launched, all those things, all those types of things. But activity is not the same as results. So we talked about that earlier, right? Where you can be really busy, but it doesn't mean that you're actually producing anything significant. Here's the real question: what percentage of that activity actually produces revenue? Number four, if nothing changed in your business for the next 12 months except the numbers continuing exactly as they are, would you be proud of where you end up? This question forces people to face the trajectory because most businesses don't collapse overnight. See, people, it's already showing up. The question is what are you doing about it? They slowly just drift out of the limelight. They slowly let people go, they continually keep blaming blaming other things for the market. They keep talking about why things aren't. See, small declines in performance today turn into big problems a year from now. Numbers tell you where the business is going, not just where it is today. See, it tells you where it's going. And if you don't get ahead of it right now, it's going to continue to carry, keep stair stepping down. And that's not good. That's not good for you and for your employees. So we have to look at it today to make a correction, or next year we might be out of business. And this is the last one, number five. Are you leading your business with facts or with hope? Hope is very powerful, but hope is not a strategy. And entrepreneurs who rely on hope say things like, next quarter we'll be better. Leaders who rely on numbers say, Here's exactly what must change to improve the outcome of the business. Hope makes you feel better, and numbers make you operate better. Folks, if you want to know the truth about your business, don't ask your team, don't ask the market, and don't ask your emotions. Just look at the numbers because the numbers don't tell you the story you want to believe, they tell you the story that actually is happening. Guys, I just wanted to say this. Thank you so much for the opportunity to share this with you today. Please hit the subscribe button and the like button. It helps us actually get more folks wanting to see our stuff. And so we really appreciate that. And I just want to say this numbers don't lie, emotions are untruthful. And so, what I say, emotions are overrated, but numbers never lie. And so focus it on their numbers and make the correction needed and watch your business thrive. Guys, thank you so much for paying attention here today. And I hope everybody has a great day.