How Often do you Raise The Bar?

How Often do you Raise the Bar? In Blackboard Fridays Episode 88, Jacob talks about Productivity, Business Financials, and Leadership. Need this implemented into your business? Talk to the international business advisor who can do exactly that – Contact Jacob, Learn More, or Subscribe for Updates.

While I get the awesome job title “Director of Strategic Advisory”, I’m not the only business advisor at businessDEPOT. Not only do we have our own Financial Advisory experts led by Andrew Holmes CA, the man in demand is often our esteemed “Managing Director” John Knight. On any given workday, there’s usually an organisation or group of CEOs somewhere in Australia benefiting from either or both of us at the front of the room.

So when our schedules aligned to welcome John to the Blackboard, I asked him to share one of the simplest and more powerful financial tools he knows.

We all want to “Raise the Bar” in our business, but have you ever asked what that actually means? Or how to do it? In this week’s #BlackboardFridays, John explains:

  • What the “Bar” actually is, and how to calculate it
  • How to “Raise the Bar” in your business
  • How to apply this technique whether you’re measuring salespeople, product lines, interstate operations, or any other division of results that you want to see improving

And let me know what you think of “Oh Captain, My Captain”. Based on this episode, I think we’ll be inviting him back for more. Click below to watch.

Who is Jacob Aldridge, Business Coach?

“The smart and quirky advisor who gets sh!t done in business.” Back independent since 2019.

Since April 2006, I’ve been an international business advisor providing bespoke solutions for privately-owned businesses with 12-96 employees.

At this stage you have proven your business model, but you’re struggling to turn aspirations into day-to-day reality. You are still responsible for all 28 areas of your business, but you don’t have the time or budget to hire 28 different experts.

You need 1 person you can trust who can show you how everything in your business is connected, and which areas to prioritise first.

That’s me.

Learn more here. Or Let’s chat.

Transcript

Often in business, we’re asked to provide some guidance on how to improve performance within their business.

There’s obviously many different ways that you can tackle performance improvement within your business, but sometimes the simplest ways can have the biggest impact within your business and one of the little ways that I like to help people focus on profit improvement, and continuous improvement of your profit in your business, is using a little tool that I call Raise the Bar.

Quite simply, you just wanna get two different metrics of your business. Now, that might be as simple as, it might be a salesperson and it might be which particular salespeople and what dollars are they actually selling every month.

I like to do these things in a very visual way on a whiteboard or blackboard in this situation, and we might get our different salespeople across the bottom and we might chart in there the performance of the different individuals within the business.

You could do this with anything within your business, it could be a particular division’s performance, it could be a person’s performance like we’ve done here, or it could be a particular product. Now, once you’ve obviously mapped those on your graphic there, draw a line across the middle at the average, oops, draw a line across the middle there, with your average.

Once you’ve got your average, what are we then going to do? We’re going to focus on those people that are below the line. Now, if we’re looking at the people below the line, it’s not because we wanna sack them, or it’s not because we wanna cull them from the mix, but what we wanna do then, is we wanna focus on how do we improve those particular performers in this situation, which are below the bar? Because what’s gonna happen?

Once we improve their performance, it’s going to lift our bar up to a new level, as well. Now, you can apply that to many different metrics within your business, as I said, but apply that on a continuous basis and you’ll constantly be improving the average or raising the bar of the average within your business.

Next Steps

Want to learn more about how this can apply to your business? It costs nothing to chat:

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