my 2024 goals, data, speed, creativity, less of the same

Summary

back from a podcast break and back to twice a week. here are my five big-picture goals for 2024. not the in-the-weeds quarterly numbers, the overarching themes I’m pushing on.

1. leadership through data. we track 20 metrics across the companies, reported weekly. that’s too many for most teams, but the cadence matters more than the count. if a metric is trending wrong, I see it inside seven days.

2. speed of decision making. when growth gets harder, the answer is almost always speed. if you sit on a change for three months because you’re waiting to be sure, that’s the thing that’s slowing you down, not the strategy.

3. better human business score. number of days off times profit margin. 100 days off at 50% profit is a score of 50. it forces both numbers up at once, which is the only way you actually get time and financial freedom.

4. write and podcast more. I’m a data guy. that suppresses the creative side if I let it. a couple hundred words every morning and two podcasts a week keeps both engines running.

5. less of the same. I don’t need a 5% optimization. I need new approaches, different angles, hockey stick ideas. growing is doing less of the same, not more of it.

january motivation is cheap. the question is whether you stick. if you don’t want to, try harder.

Transcript

leadership through data

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy goals, goals, goals. I’ll be talking about my goals specifically today. So let’s get into it. This is the better human business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon and I’m back. I know you missed me or maybe you didn’t, but either way, I’ve been gone for a while.

Took a couple weeks off and getting back to publishing. Also going to be publishing twice a week for majority of this year. And so you can expect two episodes per week from the better human business podcast updates on what I’m doing to grow and scale companies. Also lessons learned and anything else I find helpful or beneficial for everyone out there.

speed of decision making

Coaches, clinicians, anybody running a business that makes other humans better. So today I’m going to be talking about my goals for the year. Maybe you can get something out of this. If you read between the lines, something maybe you can implement, but really talking about what my big picture goals are.

Now we have as a company and in the different companies that I’m a part of, we do get to pretty granular goal setting and planning, right? So we’re like, Hey, here’s three year target. Here’s the annual goal. Here’s the quarterly goal. Here’s how many widgets we need to spit out this month, numbers, all that kind of stuff.

We get very granular. That’s not necessarily what I’m sharing today. That’s very in the weeds. Those things can change based off of market conditions or just what we’re seeing or anything like that. There’s a lot of pivoting in goal setting. So that’s not the specific goals I’m talking about. What I do is after we set those goals is I like bigger picture.

the better human business score

What do I want to go through this year? Just on the business side, like what are my goals and implementing things and all that good stuff. So here’s what my goals are. Here’s what they are. The first is leadership through data. So I spent the last quarter, so Q4 of 2023, building out basically an operating system for all the businesses that I’m a part of.

And I’ll probably be talking about this more over time, but basically the operating system is just, it’s where the work happens. It’s where everybody’s implementing. It’s where data is reported. It’s where communication’s happening. It’s really robust and it’s been awesome for the company so far, but what I’m planning to do this year, there’s obviously the soft side of leadership where it’s like, you just need to be a good human.

You need to inspire and lead other people on your team, but then there is leadership through data and that’s something I want to focus more on. We’ve always been a data-centric company, but we haven’t been, our cadence of reporting hasn’t been as quick as I’d like. So now we’re reporting basically every data point that we have.

write and podcast more

There’s really about 20 that we’re tracking, which is too many for most companies, so don’t think that you need to track that. So some of them are like variations of other things. So we’re tracking all this data, reporting it weekly, and that’s something that I want to continue to do this year, lead through data.

Hey, if this metric isn’t good, what do we need to do? Do we need to shift people around? Do we need to hire somebody? Do we need to fire somebody? All these kind of things I want to lead through data. The second thing is speed goes hand in hand with that is I do think the harder it becomes to scale, no matter where you feel like you’re getting stuck in your business, the answer is probably speed and speed of decision-making.

So if you are running into problems, bottlenecks, and you wait three or four months to make a change or you’re like, oh, let’s give it six months and then we’ll change, that’s what’s causing you that lack of growth, even though you might know the solution or something you want to try. So I want to implement things faster.

less of the same

So when we have data points coming in every seven days, we can very quickly see if something’s trending in the wrong direction and quickly make a decision to change it. Now on the same token, you don’t want to change things too fast. I don’t want to change things every seven days. It’s just, again, do we have to pivot?

Do we have to spend more money here, put another person here? Those kind of decisions, not necessarily big, I’m going to change my strategic direction every seven days because of the numbers. It’s more of just speed of implementation of filling the gaps, alleviating bottlenecks, things of that nature.

So speed is a second one. The next two are a little bit more personal, but on the business side still. One is I want to track my Better Human Business score throughout the entire year of 2024. I talked about this on a podcast previously. Real quick, the Better Human Business score is something I created.

It’s where you multiply your number of days off by your profit margin, your profit percentage. So if you had 100 days off last year, and you can count weekends, if you had 100 days off last year and you were 50% profit, just to make the math easy, you’d multiply 100 by .5 and you would get 50. So your Better Human Business score would be 50.

So that’s what I want to be tracking this year on a monthly basis. What is the profitability of my businesses overall combined? And also, how many days off have I taken? And ultimately, the reason I like the Better Human Business score, not only for myself, but for anybody listening to this podcast, is because it gives you probably the two main things that you’re looking for.

Time freedom, which would be number of days off, like taking more time off. You have to actually be able to take time off. Not just taking time off and letting the business suffer. It’s like taking time off, but everyone’s doing what they’re supposed to while you’re gone. So that’s taking time off.

It’s the time freedom and then financial freedom. The more profit in your business, the more you ultimately get to take home. So I’m going to be tracking that. I highly suggest you track it as well, because I think it’s really hard to improve those two numbers. It sounds easy. It’s okay to have profit and days off.

But to take days off, you have to be a good leader. You have to have a good team. And to have a profitable business, same stuff. You have to be making a decent margin. You have to figure out how to get costs down and increase prices or whatever it is that it’s going to be to increase your profit margins.

It’s not an easy thing to do, but it’s something that you will need to track. So I think the Better Human Business score is hard to improve after you have a baseline, but a well-worthy goal. After that, like I said, the next one is also personal, so this is number four. I just want to write and podcast more.

I am a very data-driven and analytical person. As you can probably tell from listening to this podcast, I’m talking about data points, all this crazy stuff. But I also consider myself a creative, and specifically in writing. And I think what happens is I can get too data-minded. I can get too in the weeds with numbers, and I’m okay with that.

It’s not off-putting to me, but it suppresses a different side of me. It suppresses this creative side, this creative drive of wanting to write and create. So I really just need to be in the habit of doing those things. So again, publishing two podcasts per week, finding creative new content to post, writing, just getting in the habit of writing a couple hundred words every single morning, just really gets the brain going, helps you be more creative, helps you come up with new solutions, and helps create better content, ultimately.

So I want to write and podcast a lot more, and putting a number on that, two podcasts a week is the minimum right now, and then writing a couple hundred words every single morning is kind of the process goal behind those. And then the last thing I wrote down for the year, again these are like bigger picture things, is less of the same.

This kind of plays into the leadership through data and speed, but I don’t want, even though my businesses have grown in the last couple years, I don’t want to just keep doing the same thing. Like I don’t need a radical change, but I’m talking about when I’m trying to fix solutions, or I’m trying to do something with a team, I don’t want to just do more of the same, like I want to do less of the same.

I want to do new stuff, I want to get creative, I want to think outside the box. I want to, that’s where the real growth is going to be in your business, it’s not just going to be marginally improving a widget by 5%. Like at some point, that’s a part of business, but I think that next level growth that I’m seeking is going to be involved doing less of the same.

And so I’m really challenging myself mentally there to think outside the box, to think big picture and to really think, how can I, not how can I grow 5 to 10% this year, which would still be awesome, but it’s how do I really get that massive hockey stick growth that I want? Like how do we do that? And I think it’s going to be less of the same.

So ultimately, that’s what I’m focusing on this year. Like I said, those are the big picture items, not necessarily the granular in the weeds. I do all of that stuff as well with my goal setting, but I thought I’d give you the overarching idea. So that’s lead through data speed, track the Better Human Business Score, write and podcast more to appease that creative side of me and then do less of the same.

So hopefully you are already crushing it into 2024. I know by the time this publishes, we’re already like a month in, and I’m sure you’ve already done great things, but continue to do great things. I want to encourage you to stick with it. Everyone’s motivated in January, right? Everyone’s got the new habits, new things that they want to do, but real change is behind the sticking with it.

So I want to challenge you to stick with it, whatever your goals are, whatever the new process is, whatever system you’re implementing, whatever ideas you have, get them done. Don’t let them die in January or die after the first quarter because you’re going to get busy just doing what you always do.

Let’s do something new this year. Let’s try to push ourselves. Let’s do something that’s hard. Let’s do the hard things, okay? That’s what I want to challenge you to do, and if you don’t want to do any of those things, I only have two words for you. Try harder.