smile 'til your cheeks hurt, the better human business score

Summary

we got invited to a friend’s lake house this weekend. my kids went tubing for the first time. I was sitting at the back of the boat watching them, smiling so much my cheeks started to hurt. that’s a bad sign that I don’t smile enough, and it’s also where this whole idea started.

1. we run a mastermind at PT Biz focused on growing revenue. that’s the job people hire us for. but past a certain size, the feedback shifts. owners stop wanting more revenue and start wanting more life. and we don’t have a metric that tracks the life side. we should.

2. the better human business score. take your profit percentage. multiply by the days off you’ve taken in the period. that’s the score. 50% profit, 30 days off, score is 15. simple, trackable, and it forces both numbers up at once.

3. profit is the lever for financial freedom. profit is what buys the house, the experiences, the hobbies, the time with the people you love. low profit on 80 hour weeks is the worst possible scenario.

4. days off is the lever for time freedom. 19 vacation homes with no time to visit them is worth nothing. financial freedom and time freedom only matter together.

5. start tracking your score. just look at the last quarter, your profit margin, the days you actually took off, multiply, write it down. then try to make the number go up next quarter. that’s the whole framework.

it’s not a perfect metric. neither is revenue. but a real number that balances both sides is way better than no number at all. try harder.

Transcript

the lake house and the smiling kids

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. Welcome to the better human business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon. And today I’m talking about metrics, but not your typical metrics. So stick around as I dive into what I’m calling the better human business score.

But first I want to say I’m coming back from an awesome weekend. So we got to go to our friends lake house. They invited us down there and it was just an awesome experience. You got to, we got to hang out with friends, have really good food. Our kids had an amazing time. It was just an awesome experience.

And I grew up, I was able to do a lot of like lake sports. My dad got a boat when I was like in middle school. And so I got to experience things like tubing and water skiing, wakeboarding, kneeboarding, you know, very fortunate. We went on a lot of lake trips and all the surrounding areas in Texas and Oklahoma and it was just awesome.

So very, very normal stuff for me, things I’ve experienced, but I always forget that my kids haven’t done a lot of that stuff. And so we got to go on this trip this past weekend and our friends invited us and like I said, it was just a great time. But my favorite part was what our kids got to do. Just they had an amazing property.

They’re running around doing all sorts of stuff, swimming, jumping off the dock, all this stuff. But then we got to go out on the boat and my kids got to go tubing and this is their first time doing it. I didn’t know how it was going to go. I didn’t know if they were going to be terrified because my youngest is five, my oldest is 11.

I didn’t know if it was going to be a good experience, bad experience. It ended up being an awesome experience. And so I’m sitting at the back of the boat watching them tube and they’re just having the time of their lives there. My three kids were there and then the friends we were with, they have three kids.

the limit of revenue as a goal

So it was a combination of them all in this big giant tube and I was sitting back at the boat and I was just, I was smiling. I was smiling so much watching them. I was just having so much fun enjoying them enjoy something. And it was a great experience, but what made me start to think more about these things is I was sitting there smiling and my cheeks actually started to hurt.

And that’s probably from, probably a bad sign that I don’t smile enough, but I was smiling so much without taking a break that my cheeks started to hurt because I was just watching all our kids have such a good time and I was so happy that they were having this experience. And it got me thinking a lot more about quality of life and experiences and all those kind of things.

And in PT Biz, we run a mastermind and the whole goal of the mastermind really is to grow your business. I would say that’s why most people join our mastermind is they want to invest with us and then we help them grow their business. That’s the value proposition as simple as I can put it. But sometimes the feedback we get is that we focus too much on the gross revenue, right?

And my pushback is always, hey, that’s why you hired us, right? You hired us to grow your business, that’s what we’re going to do. So we’re going to focus on it. But as businesses get bigger and bigger and they’re like multi-six figure, they pass the seven figure mark, something like that in annual revenue, that’s where the feedback does start to come from those people of like, hey, I’m not really trying to grow my practice anymore.

I’m really focused on quality of life. Why don’t you guys focus on tracking those things? And it’s not that we don’t think that they’re important. That’s a big part of what we do and that we teach and that’s a big part of the reason why I’m even at PT Biz is because those are the things that I’ve always focused on, right?

Quality of life, making sure that your relationships are good, your health is good, but we’re still growing the business. I really feel like you can grow a business and still have a good relationship with your spouse, a good relationship with your kids. You can still work out multiple times per week.

Experience is very important, but we don’t celebrate it or track it is the problem. It’s not that we don’t focus on it or talk about it. That’s actually really built in to our core structure. If you were to go through any of our process or documents or anything, you would see that we’re very focused on your quality of life, but we don’t necessarily track it.

profit times days off

We put it on you. Hey, this is important, but you have to do it. And so I started thinking more about that just from having a great experience, getting to do some amazing things with friends and my family, and then also getting some feedback recently that, hey, maybe there are other things that we could focus on and track in the mastermind.

And that got me thinking of what I’m calling the Better Human Business score right now. And you hear me out. This is basically a thought experiment. I haven’t fully worked it out. So we were having a conversation, me and my business partners, about what else we could track. And I came up with this score, which is essentially very simple.

You take your gross revenue or your gross profit, sorry, gross profit, your profit, let’s just call it profit, and you multiply that by how many days you’ve taken off. And you can track this quarterly, annually, monthly, it doesn’t really matter. You can track it however you want. So if you were, if you had 50% profit in your business, you’d multiply that by, let’s say you had 30 days off over the last year.

So 30 times .5 would be 15. That’s your Better Human Business score, it’s 15. And so now we have a new number to track. And this one should be celebrating a lot more of the quality of life. Now I could get into the weeds with people. We could track a lot more. We could track how many workouts you did.

We could track out, we could track how subjectively feel your relationship with your kids is or how subjectively feel your relationship is with your wife. But again, I’m not a therapist. I don’t want to get too into the weeds in people’s personal lives. That’s just maybe me. I don’t want to go down that road too far.

I want to help you grow your business and make sure you have a good quality of life and good relationships. But I don’t want to, I don’t want to start setting definitions of what a good relationship with your wife or your spouse is and a bad relationship with your spouse is. I don’t want to start making those determinations.

But I want to free people up to be able to do those things. And that’s where I think this score actually really shines because it’s tracking profit. And we all know profit is like the most important part of business because a low profit business where you’re working 80 hours a week but you have next to no profit, that’s like the worst case scenario, right?

financial freedom plus time freedom

You have no time. You have no money. And all you’re doing is working tirelessly. That’s not fun. Tracking profit is huge because one, it’s just a percentage. So the big businesses or the small businesses can play with the big businesses and we can all just have a profit margin. So if you are that 50%, it doesn’t necessarily matter where you’re at, but you get to how much money you’re making.

It just matters how much you get to keep, which again, when you get to bigger businesses, I think that’s really important too. So if we threw a threshold of that, hey, I make a million dollars per year, but my profit is this and this is how many days off. So anyway, what profit does is it enables you to do all the things that you want to do.

If you want to buy a big new house, profit is what buys the big new house. If you want to buy an airplane or boat, profit from your business is going to do that. Or if you want to start a new hobby, you want to learn how to play the guitar or you want to enter endurance races or you want to pick up any hobby you can imagine, it’s going to take time and it’s going to take money and that’s what profit is going to do.

So I know some people aren’t into things, right? You might not care about a car or a house or those kinds of things, but you might be more about experiences. You want to travel and you want to do these things. You want to have these hobbies, whatever it is, they, everything you could want to do costs money and that comes from the profit of the business.

So we’re tracking that. Now the days off, the reason I think that we should track that is because this gives you the time. So we have financial freedom. Now we have time freedom because if I have, if I own 19 vacation homes and two airplanes and I also have the best guitar money could buy, but I don’t have the money to learn, or I don’t have the time to learn how to play the guitar, I don’t have the time to go visit any of my vacation homes, I don’t have the time to fly the airplanes, if I don’t have the time, then the money doesn’t matter, right?

Like they have to go in conjunction. It’s financial freedom, it’s time freedom. And so once you lump those two things together, now you have an opportunity to do whatever you want and I don’t have to fill in the void of what you should be doing. If you have all the money, if you have all the money you could want or you have financial freedom and you have time freedom, then you can work on your relationship with your spouse or make that a major priority or not.

That’s up to you. You can take a trip or if you hate traveling, you don’t have to take the trip. If you want to buy a nice car, you can do that and you have time to drive it around. So again, it removes me from having to set any kind of definition of what you should be doing, but it gives me a number to track where it’s, hey, this person’s making good money, they have a lot of profit in their business and they have a lot of time to use that profit and experience life more how they maybe want to.

track this in your business

Now we have the better human business score. So that’s what I want you to do, take a look at and maybe even push back. Maybe I haven’t thought through it enough, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. So go ahead and track this in your business. So just look over the last quarter. How many days did you take off?

And then also what was your profit as a percentage? And so multiply those two things and what’s that number? Now you can start tracking that quarterly and it will make you a healthier business owner because now you’re tracking more days off. You’re trying to increase those, but you’re also trying to increase profit.

Very hard to do. It takes leadership. It takes mastery in your field to be able to get both of those things. So I really feel like this score could go a long way in improving the lives of a lot of entrepreneurs if it’s tracked in something that you really stay on top of and you actually try to improve.

Now I’m not saying that the goal is 365 days a year off. Like I enjoy working, but I might have a goal of, hey, I want this many days off per year. So that’s the goal I’m going to shoot towards. But if I can achieve that time freedom, now I can just focus more on the profit side. Or it can go in reverse.

It’s like my profit is really good, but I don’t take enough time off. So I think it’s a really good balance of, hey, I’m getting time off to experience things, do the things I love, but also still do the work that I enjoy and that I love. So I think it’s a really good score. Implement it in your life, in your business.

See if it applies. Give me any feedback. Let me know what you think about it. But if you don’t want to track all that stuff, it’s too much work, you got to pull up, find the gross profit or the profit margin. I get it. It’s a lot of work.