Momentum Podcast: 767

Avoid Emotional Metrics

by Alex Charfen

Episode Description

Every business I've ever worked with has emotional metrics. This is the feedback that you get from someone when they are frustrated or upset. When feedback is emotional he can make it seem like you have a much larger problem than you do and you may over crack and harm your business.

Alex Charfen, a business growth coach who helps entrepreneurs grow and scale their businesses, gives practical, tangible, and actionable tips that you can implement into your business right now.

The best way to deal with emotional feedback is to get real data and metrics around the issue so that you can make better decisions and stay in momentum.

Your business has the potential to change the world, and the only way to see that potential become a reality is to implement a strategic plan. If you're ready to learn more, go to predictableplanningsystem.com to get started.

Our entrepreneurial journey doesn't end here! Be sure to check out our Facebook Community filled with entrepreneurs just like you who are getting into momentum and building world-changing empires charfen.com/community

If you are an entrepreneur who is listening in and you can relate, then be sure and head over to momentumplanner.com/mps and gain access to one of the most requested business tools to grow and scale your business in any market condition, even in this one.

Full Audio Transcript

This is the Momentum podcast. Today, I wanted to check in with a conversation that actually came up last week, so let me fill you in on what's been going on. I'm in an incredibly exciting place and I'm really pumped about what's going on in our business, and I'm joining you today to to fill you in on a conversation that we had last week at our event. But first, I just did not. Not Justin was conversation at our event. It was a conversation that came up at our event in our grow and scale realm, all the businesses that are over $3 million, the businesses that are scaling. This is a conversation I've had over and over again in consulting conversations, even in my own businesses. It's about emotional metrics. Now emotional metrics will pull you in the wrong direction, will overwhelm you, and they will have you going in the direction you don't need to go. That's why this episode this this this hour, this discussion is so important. I'm Alex Charfen, and this is the Momentum podcast made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers and creators of all kinds, those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny. We define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority. The few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future. And instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution and we always will be. First, I just want to fill you in on what's going on. We had our first live event in 20 months last week. It was not as big as it normally is. We usually have over 100 people there, but this one was probably about 40 in person, another 50 online. And it was so incredible to be back in person with our members to be back in that group energy. If you haven't been to a lot of them recently, or if you have been to a live event recently, you know exactly what I'm talking about. It's just incredible to be with people that are in three dimensions, not just on Zoom. And so last week, in our highest level room in the grand scale room, we were having this conversation and one of our members, Amanda Minear, was bringing up how in her business, which Amanda runs this incredible law firm. Her law firm works exclusively with veterans who haven't been paid their their benefits by the government, and so her firm that manages the negotiations with the government, they manage the entire relationship with the government and then they get veterans paid out on what they should have been paid for disability issues and for challenges that they're having. So, you know, I have this belief that every veteran who's ever served are served. Our country honorably deserves our unconditional respect and if we can, our help as well. And so helping them and makes me feel like I'm fulfilling on that purpose and I do a lot of volunteering with the military. So I love Amanda's mission and what she does, and she was saying that in her firm, what often happens is is they get a case date or they get to an inflection point in one of their team and one of their customers or clients cases. And there's a miss and people get really upset. People in her business get really upset about it, and it affects her and affects the business and affects her decision making. And this happens in every business. You know, this happens in our business. We'll have we'll miss somewhere. And hey, Nick, thanks for being here. We'll miss somewhere and a person will get upset. And because a person gets upset, they'll get upset with one of our team members. Maybe they they kind of they emote or they they communicate with our members or miss this person and they're upset about it. And here's what happens when there is an emotional interaction in your business. I call it an emotional metric. It can really overwhelm what you're doing and it can. You start trying to make decisions fast. You know, every one of us, when there's an emotional situation, it depends on who you are, but we all have a way that we react. And for most people, when there's an emotional situation, we have an urgency in reaction and so on. This creates an emotional metric in a business, and an emotional metric in a business can throw things off. It can have you changing things you shouldn't have. It can more the perspective, which is really challenging for us as entrepreneurs. And it can. It can make us make bad decisions. Here's here's exactly what I'm talking about. All right. Let me share a history here. So in our in our the last product we sold, we rather than today where we have a very high level of focus on fewer customers. When Cadey and I, we're in real estate, we had a ton of members and lower level of focus with each one of them because we were selling a $500 product. And what would happen is every once in a while, a member would call in to our member services department and it would be really upset about something and they would keep the person on the phone and they would continue telling them that we had to change something. And, you know, and whatever it was, whenever there was a really emotional person on the phone, the member services rep would go talk to their manager. And then a lot of the times they would come to me and they would say, Hey, we have this problem. And when it first started happening a few times, I would say, OK, then we need to change something like, Let's fix it, how you know. And here's the question I didn't ask. It was an emotional metric. Somebody got emotional. Somebody got upset. And so it rises up to a management level. It might even rise up to my level. And here's the question you have to ask about emotional metrics. How many times is this actually happening? Because here's what would happen. This is this is where this learning came from for me and having a ton of members with little interaction. Here's what would happen. The members who got emotional and with our member services department, no matter what their problem was, it would get pushed high up. It would get management's attention. It would get my attention because it was emotional. And here's what I started doing. Whenever we had these emotional issues, I would ask How many times is this happened? See, the emotional metric is the person getting upset that pushes things up, that gets us reactive. That makes us think we need to do something. But when I would ask, how many times does this happen? Oftentimes, the person who was really upset was upset about a one time incident or the person who was really upset was upset about the expected an expectation they had, but none of our other members or customers had. And so we would slow down how many changes we make. You know, initially before I started asking, what's the change or how many times does this happen, we would just make changes. We would start making adjustments. We would start making it, making things different when we didn't even have to. And here's what was interesting. Sometimes we'd have somebody call in with an emotional metric, tell us something was wrong. We would go change it. And then we would start getting more complaints about the change because we changed something that wasn't broken. And so when you think about your business, I want you to take just a minute now, take a deep breath. Where are you getting emotional metrics when someone's upset, when somebody has this expectation, when they have the wrong impression, when something happens in the business and someone within the business on your team makes a lot of noise? Maybe are specific people on the team that are good at making a lot of noise, which, by the way, not a great criticism. We want people who are willing to get attention when there's an issue. But oftentimes if the individual makes us reactive, if the issue makes us reactive, we will react to it without verifying that it's a real problem. And so here's how you handle emotional metrics in your business. You have real metrics that back everything up. As an example, with the business, the Cadey That it just used and we used to have where our member services team would get upset about when people are emotional. The question we always asked is how many times has this happened? And we kept a lot of metrics in our member services department, and we made sure we understood what was happening with our members. We understood why they were calling in. We understood what types of issues they were having and because we had solid metrics when there was an emotional metric, we could take it with the perspective we should and we could say this might be a one time incident. One of us should reach out to this person. Let's see if we can turn them around. Let's see if we can help them, but we don't have to make any other changes in the business. This was an expectation one person had or this was a misunderstanding one person, and we don't need to go make a lot of changes. See what happens in a lot of organizations and what my experience is that when we have emotional metrics without having real data, we just have this emotional person and outburst somebody on the team who's upset. We will often change things. We don't need to change. We will often change things without the understanding of what should change and what shouldn't change. We will often adjust things that aren't broken in the business. So if you can see that in your business, no matter where it is, if you can understand that's going on in your business, no matter what's happening, then my suggestion is you start looking at how do you put real measurement around these things that are happening? And here's what's interesting if you'll just sit quietly or maybe the next time you're driving and you think over the last month, what changes have I made in my business that may have been emotional? Here's how you pressure test this. Here's how you figure out if that's what you did. You you think about it and you say, Did I have real data or was I actually making a decision because somebody else was upset? Did I have real numbers or did I make a reactive decision because it was a reactive situation? And start asking yourselves these questions yourself this question, and you will find opportunities in your business where maybe you change something you didn't need to, or maybe there was an adjustment made that needs to be adjusted back. But here's the biggest opportunity. When you ask yourself, where did I make a decision? Because there might have been something that was emotional, where did I become reactive? Because I felt like there was a reactive situation? Here's the biggest opportunity is that is a place you need to go. Add real measurement, real data. So in Amanda's organization, it's like, Hey, every once in a while, things are done and somebody in the business gets really upset or somebody in the law firm, you know, typically an attorney is like, Hey, not everything's done. They're really upset she hears about it. It's loud. It's like her through a megaphone, rattling around in her head, and she's like, Oh man, everything's falling apart. This is what's going on. I don't think that's really what Amanda thinks, but that's where we can go as entrepreneurs. Let's get real. Almost every one of us has met a program of worst case scenario, right? Somebody comes into my office and like this person was emotional and they were upset with us and I'm like, Oh, no, everybody's going to be emotional and upset with us. Everybody's going to quit. The business is going to shut down. Let's do something right now. And so the opportunity when you've reacted to an emotional metric is to actually say, what real measurement do we need to need to put in place? So in talking with Amanda, it was simple. Like how many times a month is this really happening? And out of how many opportunities where things were done? Was there a single miss in a month? And by getting that perspective, look, here's how often we're doing it right. Here are the exceptions to the rule. Does somebody get emotional around them? Yes. Is it very loud? Yes. Do we need to change anything? We probably don't. The more data, real data, real numbers you have, you can put perspective around the emotional interactions you have, the emotional metrics they come up. And so I hope this was helpful for you. And if you want more information like this, we would love to have you check out billionaire kokum. Billionaire Echo Dot Com is one of the frameworks that we use, and coaching is one of the frameworks I use when I'm talking to any entrepreneur. It's the nine levels they show you how to go from startup all the way to over a hundred million dollar business. It shows you exactly what you should be focused on and what you should be doing next. Go to billionaire Echo Dot Com and if you'd like to be at our next summit and join us to understand how to operate your business and how to create a business where you don't have to do everything and you can grow it and have the outcomes you want without feeling like you have to give your life back. Give your life up. Go to billionaire Echo Dot com. Download the framework, and if you're interested, you can schedule a call with a member of my team. I look forward to seeing you again soon and again. Billionaire Kokum, thanks for being here today.

Thank You For Listening!

I am truly grateful that you have chosen to spend your time listening to me and my podcast.

Please feel free to reach out if you have a question or feedback via our Contact Us page.

Please leave me a review on iTunes and share my podcast with your friends and family.

With gratitude,

Alex

Scroll to Top

Simply enter your email address below to get instant access to the Free 90-Minute Predictable Business Growth Training.

We hate spam, so we won't send you any...

We are excited to share the Predictable Planning System with you.

Please enter your email address below so we can share more valuable content with you in the future.

I hate spam, so I won't send you any...