Episode Transcript

What’s up everybody? Welcome back to THE a.m guys, welcome back to five minute rants.

So guys, today I actually want to talk about one of the principles in business that is really important to abide by, and honestly, this applies to everyday life too. Most everything I talk about, just so you all know, is pretty universal. There are unique things I talk about. They’re unique principles, and there’s unique aspects to some of what I talk about, and some of the practicals just apply to certain things. But most of what I talk about, you can take the principle and apply it elsewhere.

And the principle that I’m talking about today is really this, if you have bad information, you will always make a bad decision. It’s guaranteed you’ll make a bad decision more often than not, like you might make the right decision out of luck, but that’s few and far between. So bad information pretty much guarantees a bad decision. Good information doesn’t guarantee good decisions, but it actually supports you and facilitates you in a better way to make a good decision. Just because you have good information doesn’t actually mean you’re going to make a good decision. So however, the probability of you making a good decision is much, much higher with good information.

And I’m saying all of that because if you are just starting business and you want to figure out how much your services cost or how much something’s going to cost, you need good information. And if you’re doing services right, you need to time track everything. Time track everything. So let’s just say you start a lawn care company. How much do I charge per lawn? Well, the competition’s charging this. Okay. Do you have the competition systems? Do you have the competition’s processes? Do you have the competition’s efficiency? Do you have the competition’s deal with gas, equipment, purchases, logistics and those things? If not, you shouldn’t use the competition to set your rate. You need to stop and go. Okay, how long does it take me to run my route? How long does it take me to cut a one acre yard or a half acre yard? How long on average does it take to do all these things? How long does it take me to blow off a driveway of 50 feet versus 100 feet, and then you begin aggregating all this information.

And so when you first price, cool, this is going to be your gut, but you begin aggregating all this information. And then, okay, if I’m paying my guys per hour or per lawn, what am I going to do? And then you’re running out there with information. And now you can actually make good decisions about pricing. The point of this is, this is how all of business works.

Business works off of data, right? And you need to actually be able to understand the data you’re collecting. You need to be able to understand, manage it, look at it, and then utilize it to make good decisions, whether it’s time tracking, whether it’s cost and logistics, whether it’s distribution, whether it’s production, and it’s important to measure those things, because that is where you’re going to find your money. That’s where the profitability comes in.

It’s not just, Hey, let me just charge the customer more. That works. And you’ll hear a lot of people be like, Okay, let’s you, we just charge more for our services. Well, it works, because whatever you’re currently charging probably just barely meets your expenses. So it’s logically obvious that if you charge more, you’ll make more. However, the point is, it would be much better to know why you’re charging more, or if you need to charge more.

So I’m saying all of that because this goes back to information. It’s the same thing with marketing. Oftentimes, marketing does not work, one because of timeline. Everybody wants things yesterday, and that’s not how marketing works. You don’t just turn it on and then immediate results are produced. There’s a science behind it, between collecting data and things, but then also, there is a whole collection science to where you are actually building out how to reach contact, what your customers want. There’s a whole process and decisions that need to be made, and that’s why a lot of people, when they market, they have bad marketing simply because they don’t have correct information to facilitate making good decisions.

This is how everything in life works, though. So if you’re in a relationship and you don’t have a partner who is communicating clearly, it’s hard to make relationship decisions, right? If the vision for your relationship isn’t communicated clearly, you don’t have good information.

It’s hard to make decisions. It’s the same thing with your budget. It’s the same thing with promotion. You’re working at a job, you’re looking to be promoted. Do you have information and is it trackable? And do you have actually measurable achievements for you to perform and do in order to get that promotion? If not, you don’t have the good information. So you don’t even know if you’re gonna get promoted, and oftentimes, most of our fear, worry and anxiety comes because of lack of unclarity. We don’t know what’s going to happen and because we’re not looking or measuring properly.

So anyways, I hope that helps, and hope it helps explain why that principle is so important, just in life in general, I’m out of time guys, so I’ll catch you later. Peace.