Business is often compared to sports. We talk about ‘close of play’, as if we’re all involved in this big match every day. We frequently ask each other who has the ball, remark that the ball is in someone’s court or grimace as someone drops the ball. One I use a lot is about something being in my ‘wheelhouse’, which is a baseball term for the area within a batter’s swing where they’re most likely to make contact with the ball.
I can see a lot of commonalities between work and various team sports. There’s a lot of competition, whether that’s between companies for business or co-workers for that bonus or promotion. There are scouts out there, looking for talent to bring on to their team. We’re all goal driven and will spend time working with the people around us to hit specific targets. We even go through training to stretch our various ‘muscles’.
Where it diverges, though, is that in business we don’t always know if we’re winning or losing. Beyond what makes it to the bottom line, there often are very few items on our scorecard to really give us an idea of whether we’re winning or losing throughout the journey. When I speak to my customers, I often ask them if they genuinely know before the finish line if they’re going to win or lose.
I’ve seen businesses that have to take out short term loans to buy materials in because their cash is all tied up in stock that’s not due out to their customers yet. I’ve seen rapidly deteriorating margins on jobs where costs start to creep in from all sides while nobody is looking. The sales pipeline should be somewhere that has a visible traffic light on it, but I’ve seen a number of examples where it’s a hope-filled work of fiction.
You should have a scorecard at your fingertips, so that when you’re having your orange slices at half time you feel pretty good that you’re going home with a trophy. This is something that businesses miss, time and time again, and never really know until it’s too late to change something critical and then they just see the carnage as it decimates the bottom line.
The good news is, your business is very likely to actually have this data lurking in the shadows, covered in mud and hidden away. All it needs is a bit of a hose down and clean up to make it into something beautiful and streamlined to lead you and your team to greatness.
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