Our leadership team is addicted to checking our monthly profit and loss statement to see how we did, but by the time we get the financial report, the month is already over and we cannot fix the problems. How do we shift our management team's mindset from analyzing lagging financial reports to actively running the business on weekly leading indicators?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

To shift your team's mindset, you must demonstrate the direct causal relationship between weekly activities and monthly financial results. A profit and loss statement is a lagging autopsy of what happened weeks ago. You cannot manage a business through the rearview mirror.

Start by taking your main monthly financial targets and tracing them backward to the weekly activities that create them. For example, if your lagging goal is monthly closed revenue, look at the activity required to generate that revenue.

- First, how many proposals must be sent weekly?
- Second, how many sales presentations must be delivered to send those proposals?
- Third, how many outbound discovery calls must be made to book those presentations?

By tracking the weekly discovery calls and presentations on your Scorecard, you are measuring the leading indicators. If discovery calls are down this week, you can predict today that revenue will be down next month. This gives your team the power to adjust their daily actions to fix the gap before the month ends.

Once your team experiences the power of predicting the future by looking at weekly activity numbers, they will stop relying on lagging financials to run the business.