Track Everything

Want to become a world-class operator? The kind of person everyone reaches out to as they start a new venture or when they see an awesome company in need of someone to make it run?  

Track everything.

Track your wins.

Track your losses.

Track what you do every day.

Track your finances.

Track your company’s finances (be less public about this one).

Tracking is awesome, but at the end of the day it’s only step 1.

The real magic happens when you start using that information you’re tracking to improve it. You’ve done this subconsciously every time you think “I’ve got to spend less money” or tell yourself you need to carve out time in your calendar to finish a project. You may not have it laid out in front of you, but your gut says you need to change something.

We’ll call that passive optimization.

Passive optimization is letting issues come to you and then solving them. It’s great you can solve those issues and have a great gut instinct, but that’s not the level of an operator everyone wants on their team.

And how do we change that to active optimization? Tracking.

And then learn to siphon information from that tracking.

Look at your personal finances. You can track how much money you make, how much you spend, how much you plan to spend, and how much you put into savings, investments, cash, etc. Active optimization is looking at that and saying “that’s good, but how can we make it better?”.

Can you move your spending down 10%

Can you find a way to increase your earnings 10%

Maybe you want to increase your investments 30%?

That doesn’t happen without tracking all of those numbers, and now you can start to model out a plan.

Where could that 30% come from? Can I move my spending down and move that over to investment without increasing my earnings and still hit my goals? Maybe I have a clear way to increase my earnings, but it will also come with an increase in spend, so does that plan also allow me to increase my investment or do I need to look for another route?

I use personal finance as the example because it’s the easiest thing to look at and optimize because you have access to all of the data and have full control of every variable. But you can also do this with something as simple as your calendar. Check out the Rob Dyrdek interview with My First Million for a look into how you can dive into your calendar (possibly way to granular than you ever wanted to go – but you’ll start to see how just how far optimization will take you when you start to listen).

These are awesome ways to perfect a skill that then get’s used in business, and trains you to start looking at ways to optimize what is happening within your company.

Say you need to reduce costs.

Should you move your supply chain?

Should you change up the size of your packaging?

Could you simply change up where and how you fulfill products?

Because you’ve been tracking all of the data, you can now start modeling out what different changes to the business would look like. Different scenarios have different costs associated with them as well, but as you’ve been tracking all of your current data, you know what variables you need to be looking for with the new model.

I explain more about the move in this article, but a brief overview of how I’ve used this was moving a past companies supply chain to go through a Canadian fulfillment partner, slightly increasing fulfillment costs, but avoiding tariffs for nearly 60% of the business. Eventually I’ll put up the cash flow and forecasting sheets I created for this, but tracking allowed us to review everything that was currently happening in the business and say “yes it’s profitable, but how could we make this even better?”

So track everything. Learn to understand what you’re looking at. And then make it better.