Kyle Wood

Strategic Coach

Daily

3 stats worth tracking

Daily ·

A few days ago I told you to stop checking your stats. The idea behind it was to get you to get out of your own way and spend more time doing work that matters.

That said, there are a few metrics that can give you a lot of information about your business and are worth periodically checking.

Retention: How many people are staying with you month to month? For a fitness business we want this to be at least 90%.

(Repeat customer: If you sell individual products, you don’t have to worry about retention, but it is worth seeing if people are coming back to buy something else from you again.)

New customers: You’ll never get retention to 100% so you need to make sure that you’ve got a steady trickle of new customers coming in to your business.

Earnings and Spendings: A very simple rule of business is to simply spend less money than you make. With technology crazy accessible and things relatively cheap, there is rarely a need these days to go into debt for a business. Make sure you are tracking these two figures and that the earnings is always larger than the spendings.

Weekly meetings

Daily ·

There is a trend in business books at the moment to talk about the negatives of meetings.

While I’m no fan of days which are meeting after meeting after meeting, I think for small businesses with teams of 2-5 people a weekly meeting can be an amazing thing.

The key is not to use the meeting as merely a way to pass down information but to use it as an opportunity to connect. Try to make it less about you and more about them.

Here are some guidelines:

  • Keep it short and purposeful
  • Spotlight a team member and let them share something they’ve learned
  • Check-in with how everyone on the team is doing work wise and mental health wise
  • Don’t share things that can just be shared in an email
  • Come prepared with something you can work on as a team

Removing uncertainty

Daily ·

Uncertainty is scary. And uncomfortable.

I used to think that the way to be happy was to work hard to remove uncertainty. But once I’d done that I was still often unhappy.

The problem is that only doing things with a low level or no level of uncertainty usually means doing things with very low stakes. Nothing is being changed. Not yourself and not anyone else.

But having things at stake, having skin in the game, a deadline to meet, doing something you’ve never done before, that’s what work should be about.

Save the certainty for what you’re having for breakfast or making sure the family eats dinner together tonight. Have a rock steady, boring routine so that you can show up and do the scary stuff in your work.

What works for you

Daily ·

I struggle to give step-by-step advice on what daily routine you should have. Or work habits. Or exercise habits.

The reason is that these can be so personal to you that there is no One Right Way of doing things. Anyone who says that they do know the One Right Way is lying or misinformed.

Instead, try this:

Try different things one at a time and see each one as a short term experiment (e.g. 2 weeks or 30 days). After the experiment ask yourself ‘Was this helpful? What did I learn? Will I keep going?’.

Over time you’ll find Your Right Way. You’ll find what works for you.

Note: Sometimes things will change and Your Right Way won’t work for you anymore. That’s okay. Just go back to experimenting and start again.

Stop checking your stats

Daily ·

Just like weighing yourself everyday is not helpful, checking your online stats everyday, every week or even every month, is not helpful.

If the goal is to create work that matters, then stats are only somewhat useful. How many likes or eyeballs a post got tells us how popular something is, not how good it is. And popular and good are not the same thing.

In the old days this was easy to avoid. You could just check your analytics periodically to make sure you were trending in the right direction.

Social media makes this more difficult. Every time you log in stats are being thrust upon you. Do we really need to know every single time someone likes our work?

Two questions to ask yourself:

Does knowing my stats (likes, eyeballs, shares, etc.) really help me make better, more meaningful work? What can I do to make sure I see my stats less?

Happy Thanksgiving

Daily ·

I know it was yesterday, but for my friends in the US, yesterday is today.

We’ll be celebrating Thanksgiving with friends a little later this year. Being in Australia, the Thanksgiving I grew up with was less about family (Christmas is family time here) and more about bringing together friends.

My wife and I try to keep that tradition going by inviting 2-3 couples/families over who don’t know each other. I’m looking forward to trying out Seth Godin’s Thanksgiving reader this year as a way to deepen conversation and help people get to know one another.

This year I’m incredibly grateful for slowing down. A forced routine and limited connection with others at times meant more time with my wife and daughter. It was boring at times. But at my best, I tried to embrace the boredom and look for the subtle changes. After all, a 2 year old does a good job at keeping you on your toes.

I’m also grateful for my circle of male friends. Many of whom I’ve know since I was a small child. I sprung on them an experiment to get to know each other better using Marco Polo, and despite being apart we’ve grown closer and more connected.

The other person I’m grateful for is Theresa Prior. Theresa completed a coaching mastermind I ran last year and I really admired her ability to learn new skills and keep things organised. She started doing some work for me at the end of last year which was just enough time for her to get the lay of the land before the pandemic hit. Like many businesses, we had to pivot quickly and Theresa was instrumental in that speed and helping our community feel cared for and supported. Thank you T!

I should know what I’m talking about

Daily ·

The longer I run my online business, the more I feel like I have no idea what I’m talking about half the time.

That is, until someone quizzes me about something specific. Then I find myself saying all sorts of things I thought I’d forgotten about.

I think what’s changed is that when I was just getting started online I knew that I didn’t know anything. And that was okay because I was just getting started.

But now, 10+ years in, I feel like I should have it all figured out. It’s the expectation of myself that’s changed.

The reality is that no matter how long we’ve been doing this, we still feel like a newbie in many ways. Fresh faced and ready to make a bunch of mistakes. Perhaps that’s worth embracing.

5 year project

Daily ·

Today, a little group fitness workout web app I created called BootCraft, turns 5 years old.

Creating things on the internet is strange because there is always a bit of a disconnect between yourself and the people who are using the thing you created. I really appreciate the odd email or comment that floats into my inbox from a trainer who uses BootCraft telling me how much it helps them with planning their sessions.

Here are 5 things I’ve learned in these past five years running a membership/SaaS website:

  1. Elevate the super users. Pay attention to who is being most helpful and helping to lead the community. Give them more responsibility and encouragement.
  2. Price for your market. The trend out there is to charge more and more for what you offer, but not all audiences are looking for the most expensive option. Know your audience, know what they’ll pay and price accordingly.
  3. Start with an MVP. An MVP is a Minimal Viable Product. Your site doesn’t need to have all the bells and whistles to begin with. Start with the most basic thing it needs to do and just create then. Then keep shipping updates and improvements based on how people actually use what you’ve created.
  4. Focus on doing one thing really well. Signing up to a new site only to be inundated by features, courses and lessons is a good way to feel overwhelmed. I always wanted BootCraft to be just about the workout ideas. That determined the design and what we focused on content wise.
  5. But keep testing things. That said, you do want to keep testing new features and content in the background so that you can keep innovating and getting better.

Discounts

Daily ·

“Never discount your products.” is good advice.

If your customer is the kind of person who likes to pay full price, you’re doing both of you a disservice if you offer regular discounts and sales on your products and services.

On the other hand some people love that feeling of getting a deal and that drives a lot of their purchasing decisions. Without discounts they may never buy from you, ever. It pays (pun unintended) to know what type of customer you have so that you can serve them best.

It is worth noting that once you choose to discount and run sales, you’ll need to commit to doing them forever as people will come to expect them.