Service Based Business Society Podcast

SEason 1
Episode 25
Title:Avoiding "Shiny Object Syndrome": Adopting OKRs In Your Business

Hello, and welcome to the service based business society podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany anbox. Our weekly episodes we will take into everything you need to know about scaling your service based business without losing sleep. With my experience in creating over seven figures per month, and a passion for marketing, finance and automation, this show will provide tangible tips and techniques for scaling your business. Let's get started.

Hey, guys, welcome back to another episode, an exciting moment in the podcaster. Today marks our last episode in Season One. So if you have been tuning in since the beginning, thank you so much for being on this journey. And starting next week, we will kick off season two. And guys, when I tell you I'm excited for some of the guests we have in store. I am not kidding, there have definitely been some happy dances going on. As I have been connecting with potential guests and booking those calls. I'm so excited to share everything that's in store next season. Calm the podcast. So thank you so much for tuning in. And if you can do me a favor, and head on over to wherever you tune into the podcast and leave us a review. It really does help the show. Alright guys, today, we are going to dive into OKRs or objectives and key results and talk about what they mean and why you need to have them because they truly are the guiding light. Now, over the last many months. If you have been listening and tuning into the podcast, you know that I often say things like you have to focus on the objective.

Keep objectives in mind, remember your objectives, does that support the objectives? And ultimately, it really comes down to now adding a framework to those objectives. And that are the objectives and key results? When we talk about objectives. What are you trying to accomplish? They are the qualitative goals that are inspiring and ambitious. These are not measurable goals. These are the proper statements that excite you. This is where you're driving towards. When we look at the key results. These are the measurables how you're going to determine if you've reached the objective. Many years ago, I sat in a meeting and we were talking about OKRs at the time. And one of the people presenting came up with their objective, which was to be the very best in the industry. While that is qualitative, inspiring and ambitious. He didn't have the key results that supported that objective. And so this is why it's important to have the two together. Because the key results tell you when you have reached your objective, because comments or statements such as I want to be the best are really up for interpretation, the best, according to who?

For whom the competitors, who are what measures are using the best in terms of customer service sales, you can see how right away there are so many different interpretations of what is the best. And that is where the key results come in. So for looking at an objective such as accelerating our regional growth, key results that could support that objective, hire five new employees, g 500,000. In regional sales, produce localized marketing materials to work our top three services. These are three key results that are either yes they occurred, or no they did. And so we are saying that if we hit those three results, if we hire those employees, if we achieve that sales target, and if we produce that marketing material, we have successfully accelerated the growth. We're looking at objectives. People say how many? How many how long? A great guide is to set new OKRs over a quarter. So the timing of this episode is not by accident. Now is a great time to set your OKRs for q4, and really wrap up the year with such intention with Drive with ambition to drive your business directly to where you want to go. Your objectives should support your overall business mission, your vision, what does success look like for you? You want to break that down into three objectives for q4. And each of those objectives is going to have three key results. three objectives, three key results each may say, what if I don't have that many? That's okay. That's the maximum you would ever want to take on is three objectives with three key results. Now, if you have a huge team, you can obviously take on more objectives. But one person should not be responsible for an excessive amount of objectives. Because you're really just setting yourself up for failure. It's important that any person who is responsible for the objective and key results truly has the power within the organization to execute on the objective and key results. No one wants to be evaluated on something that they cannot affect the outcome.

You are an entrepreneur and you're like, hey, I don't have a team. It's just me, my business is new. Or maybe I know, and you enjoy being a solopreneur. three objectives, three key results strategically set up so that on New Year's Eve, you are taking that moment to just realize how far your business has come and that you have made great strides towards your end objective. we're maximizing the impact of objectives. There are three key questions, are there too many or too few. So this is really what we were just chatting about. Your objectives should help drive you in the correct direction, but they aren't to become a new job for you. You know, I'm an advocate of working smarter, not harder. And building key results that are easy to track is essential. You want to ensure that you have access to the data that you need to measure your success. Second question, are they actionable? Whoever's accountable for an objective also needs the resources to deliver it? And the third most important question of all, why should anyone care? The best test for whether you should keep something as an OKR is to ask yourself, why would anyone care about this? So often, we see businesses set OKRs, for things that really don't matter. You want to think of your OKRs not as you know, the organizer of the nuts and bolts of your business, but really more like the map to success. If you think of success as the treasure, your OKRs are really the map. And your key results are the milestones. We've all, you know, received those directions where you know, head down the road, you'll see a gas station on the right, turn right. Go a little further, you'll see a grocery store on the left, turn left. Think of your key results as those milestone markers in your journey. Yes, I see the gas station. I'm going the right way. Oh, look, there's the grocery store. Perfect. We need to turn here. Setting milestones that lead directly to the objective ensures that everything that you are doing is really towards that end objective. Key Results determine whether an objective has succeeded or failed. The golden rule of writing key results is that a reasonable person would agree that completing all of the key results would guarantee completion of the objective. And sometimes you might think, Oh, my objective is far too complicated to only have three key results. And that is when you really need to take the time to break it down into three pieces. And that might take a couple of attempts. Another question we often hear is, what's the difference between an OKR and a KPI? So we've got our objective and key results versus our KPIs or key performance indicators. Business original say do I need to use OKRs? If I'm already tracking KPIs, yours is the framework used for strategy.

While KPIs are the metrics used to set goals, KPIs overlap, and share some later Are these, but both have a different intention. If we talk about the differences between OKRs, and KPIs, KPIs are usually linked to a process something along the lines of, well, here's a KPI that I just chatted with a client about last week. How many receipts do they have left to post for a month? My friend, standard operating procedures cannot start until all of the receipts from the previous month have been uploaded into one of the KPIs that we can then set is how many are sitting waiting to be processed. We know that at the end of each week, that number needs to be decreasing towards the end of the month. So that when we are ready to start our reconciliation process, the number is at zero. This number really only affects the process. This is a key performance indicator. This is not about upping your objective. This is really just about completing. Okay, ours are inherently focused. And KPIs really cover the whole organization. They're not limited to any one area. So the end answer is you really need both. One of the other challenges that we often see with OKRs is that people are accomplishing them all. That's so challenging if your OKRs should be ambitious, they should really drive and challenge you. You may have heard the expression b hag or big, hairy, audacious goal.

This is the goal that's supposed to scare you. It's discussed. A lot of times when people are creating business plans, or different business documents, like five year goals, 10 year goals, you know, what is your B hag, ultimately, the true B hag that you are working towards, not a pipe dream to have something different. A true B hag needs to have a little bit of weight behind it.

Starting with your B hag, your big hairy goal, you can then reverse engineer to determine what your OKRs need to be. In order to reach that goal. There is so much power in reverse engineering, it's like you wouldn't choose the route of your road trip. If you don't have a destination, you have to know where you're going. So whether you use the terminology B hag, or whether you just like the term, five year goals, 10 year goals, whatever term works for you, ultimately, you're still needing to create an actionable plan for how to achieve that goal. When we look at OKRs you know, another example that we could do objective, become a leader in the insert your niche here, market, key results that could support this 25% of our revenues come from x implementing key KPIs. Okay, ours, any kind of metric tracking? So we've chatted a little bit about what they are, we talked about, you know how we'll lay them out. But really, the next question is, how do you get started, I recommend really taking the time without distractions.

Developing OKRs typically takes multiple sit downs, multiple sessions, but they still need to be distraction free. So I would recommend starting with an afternoon, clean notebook and a distraction free environment to really lay out your overall objectives and your q4 objectives from there, depending on how long that takes you, I would recommend potentially doing your key results in a secondary meeting by meeting. So how do we implement OKRs? Well, there's no right or wrong answer here. And many people achieve the same result with multiple methods, but I'm going to let you know when I recommend creating OKRs if you don't have any experience doing so can actually be a fairly involved process. Depending on how much thought you've put into your overarching goals and bigger objectives will really then tell you how difficult it's going to be to build out your q4 objectives. Once you have created your objectives, I usually recommend an afternoon in a distraction free environment.

Once you follow through this process. Typically I recommend key results be done at a second seating. So do your objectives first, and then come back to your Ubisoft's now once you've gone through the whole process of creating your OKRs and ensuring that you actually have the data available to measure. This is a big one, you want to make sure that you can access this data don't create a measurable and something you don't know how to calculate. Once you've gone through the steps, it's a matter of tracking them. Now there's a number of different ways to do so. Sure, Business Management Agency recently partnered with gtmhub, which is a software that tracks OKRs, and KPIs. I will drop our free trial link in the show notes. But that's just one way of tracking them. It's important that much like financial data, we need it to be timely and accurate. It's the same thing with OKRs. So using a software spreadsheet, prior to gtmhub, leaves click up to track. So there's a variety of different ways. But you want to make sure that you have access to the data that is readily available. So you can tell if you're on track, it's important that you can make minor adjustments in a timely fashion versus determining towards the end of q4 that something wasn't quite right and needed a minor adjustment is so key in business to be able to have access to this data in a timely manner.

Financial Data, KPI, data OPR key results, all of these types of things exist, these need to be built into a system where you can be reviewing at least on a weekly basis. If you have to wait all the way into the month and all of your bookkeeping is done your reconciliation, this could be six weeks, a month plus typically two weeks for month end, based on you know, credit card statements and whatnot arriving six weeks out of an entire quarter. I mean, that's a fairly long process. You want to make sure that you have access to this data, very important, from their work through your OKRs with your team, where the coach can really help to flush out any inconsistencies, or really have that discussion of why does anyone care. If your organization has a team leadership team, it's important to bring those people in on the OKRs and ensure that everyone's efforts are going towards the same objective, your team will be so much stronger, if everyone knows exactly what direction they're going from their monthly, okay are review meetings to discuss with the team and ensure that everything is on track and allow for the opportunity to make minor corrections. So guys, to summarize, now is the time to really focus on the approaching q4, and making sure that you are going to wrap up the year, the quarter you can be brought up, and share the objectives with your team. Share the journey, ensure that everyone understands the objective they're working towards. Then choose three objectives.

Three key results for each of those objectives. Find a process or method for tracking, it doesn't have to be anything fancy. If you do want to look into a software or system, a great place to start is click up. If you want to upgrade from there to something that's going to integrate with your existing systems to be able to pull that data for you in an automated way. GTM help, it's a fantastic option. And I will drop that link in the show notes. I will also drop the link to our ultimate OKRs playbook. Also into the comments. If you have any questions be sure to pop by with a Facebook group. And I'm happy to answer any okay awkward leading questions. Well, guys, that's all for season one. I'm so excited to have you. Remember guys that Small changes can make a massive impact in your business. When we start to look at data that is readily available, we can start to look for those little tiny improvements that can make a big impact especially over a quarter look for things that you can improve by five to 10% over a quarter and truly look at the the impact it can make when you have the data readily available. And you can see there for those data points that have room for that improvement.

That is where more profit is created in those little improvements where you can boost sales Converse boost efficiency, boost productivity without boosting costs. See, sometimes it's all about just paying attention, seeing the data, seeing the opportunities, being at the right time and the right place to be able to make the minor adjustment to realize those opportunities to take that money and put it back in your pocket or invest it back into your business. As if there's one thing to go into q4 with. It is a beautifully well laid out set of OKRs. So that's all for season one. Thank you so much for joining me. We'll talk soon.

Well, we are all out of time for today. If you guys have not joined the service based business society, Facebook community, make sure you head on over to Facebook and we can continue the conversation. Be sure to also follow the show by going to any podcast app and searching surface based business society. Click subscribe, click the fifth star and leave us a written review. Have a great week and we will see you soon