by Justin Colby December 22, 2017

How to Track KPIs

One of the things every business person needs to be taught from the beginning is how to track KPIs (key performance indicators). KPIs are what show you the nuts and bolts of what’s happening in your business, what’s working and what’s not working, how effective your efforts are being in real-time, and what you need to change to make things move forward more rapidly. But most new business owners DON’T know this simple approach and spin their wheels more than they have to. This coaching call provides a spreadsheet tool that will enable you to track KPIs like a pro. Make sure you watch.

What IS a KPI? Click To Tweet

It’s important to know the terms, so let’s break down what we mean by a KPI. KPI stands for “Key Performance Indicators” and it’s the basic metric any business needs to look at in order to understand how effectively business is really happening. It’s going to include goals, steps required to meet those goals, all the avenues of marketing, setting appointments, conversations with investors – the whole works. This coaching call walks through how to assess your KPIs effectively so you can make the most of your business.

The purpose and power of weekly meetings to assess KPIs Click To Tweet

Even if you are a one man or one woman show, you’ve got to be on top of your KPIs. In this coaching call, Justin Colby makes the suggestion that you conduct a weekly meeting to look over and assess your KPIs so you can make the ongoing tweaks needed to make your business efforts more and more effective. It’s time you set aside to assess, plan, and flex, so that you can make success possible. Find out how you can do it in this hands-on Wednesday Wisdom session.

What should be tracked as a KPI? Click To Tweet

You may wonder what sort of information needs to go into your KPI spreadsheet. What should you be tracking? The short answer is, EVERYTHING. Any efforts you are making to drum up business, start conversations, build a list of buyers, close deals, etc. should be tracked. The reason is that you want to be able to do more of what is working and less of what is not working. And you want to see where your systems have inherent weaknesses so you can fix them. Without knowing the real data at all of those points you’ll be shooting in the dark. That is where the weekly look at your KPIs is so powerful. Be sure you watch this Wednesday Wisdom.

Outline of this great episode

[0:14] What everyone should be taught when first starting out in business.
[1:36] What IS a KPI (key performance indicator)?
[3:52] Breaking down the goals, understanding the numbers (weekly meetings)
[7:53] Including JV deals in your KPIs
[12:18] Why KPIs are so important

Resources & Links mentioned in this episode

andrea@reww.com – email Andrea to get your KPI tracking spreadsheet

The Monday Mindset & Wednesday Wisdom calls are group coaching calls included in the REWW Academy. These live calls are hosted bi-weekly by Justin Colby and Pat Precourt and cover a specific topic each session – ending with live Q&A at the end of each call.

These calls are designed to empower students to be effective entrepreneurs, creating business that thrive and make money through real estate investing. Students are encouraged to attend the calls and bring any struggles or questions they have about business or real estate.

The REWW Academy program combines our complete suite of software applications with our personalized coaching and a community of like-minded entrepreneurs to provide you with the most comprehensive real estate investing program available.

Below is the full transcription of the Probate Leads – How to Use Successors Data Wednesday Wisdom call with Justin Colby.

Justin Colby:

Cool, cool. All right. What’s up. It is Wednesday, which means we have our Weekly Wednesday Wisdom Call. Today guys what I want to be going over with you today is how to track your KPIs and this is something I wish I had someone teach me when I first started getting into business because when you start getting into this business you have a direction but you don’t really know what you should be paying attention to. And there’s a lot of things out there that can take your eye off the ball and help you lose focus.

Though you think you’re doing the right things, if you don’t actually put effort towards tracking what is happening, the results you are getting, you really can be spinning your wheels for a lot longer than you actually need to. Today we’re going to be focusing on KPIs. My good friend and business partner Shawn Terry has offered up his KPI tracking spreadsheet to everybody so if you don’t have that, we will make sure to have that but you primarily should have that in your Smart Academy. If you don’t have Smart Academy just make sure you go over to email andrea@reww.com, andrea@reww.com, and we’ll make sure you have this spreadsheet.

That’s the importance. Let’s just jump right into it. I’m going to share my screen. I wanted to say what’s up to everybody as I know I have a lot of loyal Weekly Wednesday Wisdom viewers and attendees so I want to say what’s up to Stephen, Rafat, Vicky. What is going on?

First thing that I want to review, what is a KPI? What is it? It’s a Key Performance Indicator. It truly is indicating where your performance is. Where your performance lies. We’re going to be going through if you were doing direct mail, if you’re doing PPC, if you’re getting JV deals, if your wholesaling, whatever you may be doing you want to start tracking all of these things on a weekly basis. On a weekly basis. Because it doesn’t matter how you’re utilizing or how you’re marketing for deals or how you’re running your business, if you’re someone like myself who started with no money at all, I had to cold call all day long.

A lot of people will ask me, “What do you do if you had to start it all over again?” I would be cold calling. That is the cheapest, most structured way for you to figure out how to run your KPIs, get your first deal, without spending a bunch of money. Now, now that we’ve made money and I have a pretty large marketing budget I spend a lot more money on direct mail but we also still have a cold calling division of our company because it just simply works. We track all of it. Again, I’m going to jump off the camera. I will see you guys here at the end to answer some Q & As but I want to bring up, actually you know what I can do, I can do this. And then I want to bring up, let’s see here, boom, boom, let’s bring up this.

All right guys. Let me know that you can see me. Let me know that you can see the spreadsheet. That would be greatly appreciated. You should be seeing me and the spreadsheet. If so say yes. If not let me know if you’re just seeing me or if you’re just seeing the spreadsheet or what you might be seeing. Yes. Okay, cool. Add your questions on here if you have any. I won’t jump right in to answer them but I will answer them at the end. I will answer your questions at the end. This is relatively broken down simply.

You have your quarterly goal. As you see here at the bottom everything’s broken out into quarters. You have your quarterly goal. You will look at total 30 day pipeline revenue. Whatever you’re looking to bring in the pipeline for revenue for the next 30 days is the number you should have here. Then you’re going to have the total revenue for the week and future weekly revenues. Now, this is where you want to be looking specifically for your 30 days and your weeklies.

Now as we’re going to look here as we go down, here are the totals for what you’re going to be wanting to hit. How many closings are going to be happening in the quarter and then per week? You want to have your weekly meeting. This all goes back to the book Traction, which myself and Shawn and Kent all have been such big advocates for because you want to be tracking everything every week. You should have weekly meeting every week. Even if it’s just yourself.

A lot of people think, “Oh, well I don’t have anyone to have a meeting with.” You need to be looking at it for yourself. Every week you have to sit down, whether it’s Monday. Our weekly meeting is on Wednesdays. We just actually had it this morning. You want to be looking at this. How many deals are supposed to be closing in last week? How many are closing this week? Postcards mailed. Maybe you’re doing mail, maybe you’re aren’t. You’re going to put in your number. I mailed 500. Maybe you mailed 5,000. You’re putting in your numbers. Maybe this is one, maybe this is two. You are simply adding the numbers in so that you can look for the week and you have all the quarters and then you’re going to have all your totals. So what your goal was, the total of where your goal was. He’s really laid down quite nicely for you to be able to again track your KPIs.

Now for the lead manager, if you happen to have a lead manager, how many leads are coming in? Now again, even if this is you, that’s okay. How many leads came in? How many cold calls did you make? How many direct mail leads came in? Maybe you had 25 direct mail leads that came in. How many people did you speak to? Contacts spoken to. Maybe you’re cold calling and you talked to 35 people. Appointments made. Let’s say out of the 60 people you talked to, you set 35 appointments. Let’s go 40 appointments. How many contracts were accepted or emailed out? Say you did eight.

Now again, these are your numbers. I’m just arbitrarily making up numbers relative to how this spreadsheet’s made out. But you’re going to have your own numbers. Now, down here we have a team. Now this is because when Shawn created this obviously he has a full blown business. I have a full blown business. I break it out per salesperson as you see here, JV deals. This is exactly where you should be putting in how many JV deals have you been doing?

Now, you could even do one more tracking matrix here if you so wanted to. I’ll just go in here. Insert. Okay. I don’t want to insert there. I’ll just delete this. Go up. I want to insert above this. There you go. See, you could say meetings and what meetings would mean is how many other investors have you met? Number of meetings by week. Now the reason why you’d want to do that is so you could wholesale their deals. These are people that you want to be calling or meeting with so that you can wholesale their deals. Because if you’re listening to myself or Kent or Shawn, it’s really important to have a great buyers list because then you can just grab everyone else’s deals and one of the quickest and easiest ways to wholesale a property is by co-wholesaling or doing a JV partnership.

Because now if you don’t have a marketing budget you can actually go out, meet with them. Say, “Listen, I have a great buyers list. They’re always hungry for more deals. I need to feed them more deals. How many deals do you have? What type of relationship can we structure?” Now, there’s two ways to structure that deal. One would just be a 50/50 split. If you bring the buyer to their deal, you split the profits 50/50. Two would be, “Mr. Wholesaler, I have a buyer. How much are looking to get for this property 123 Main Street?” They might say, “Hey, I want to sell if for one hundred and ten grand.” “Okay, if I market above a hundred and ten grand can I keep everything that I mark up from a hundred and ten grand,” and they’re going to say, “Sure.”

Then you send it out for let’s say a hundred and thirteen thousand. You get it sold. You keep three, they take whatever they’re going to make from the hundred and ten and you win. Cause JV deals are primarily the best way to go get deals without having a whole bunch of effort put behind you. Again, he broke this down into how much spent, how much spend you had on your marketing. Again, I’m talking to everyone on here. Some of you guys have a marketing budget, some of you guys don’t, but lets say for example I spend a lot of money on direct mail and so I spend roughly $80,000 a month on direct mail. I spend zero on value pack. I spend zero on this. And we do about 120, nope we do about 120 not 1.2 million. Okay. There’s your revenue.

Now you need to track this every single week. Again, this is broken out so you can have your weekly meetings. Very very simple. You shouldn’t have a ton of questions. You’re looking for your goals for this quarter. In this quarter you would also look for your goals. In this quarter you would look for your goals. So on and so forth all the way through and then you would have your totals for the year. And you can see the progress you are making. And you can see where you are not making any progress. What type of marketing avenue is working for you? How much are you, how many appointments are you getting, how many contracts are you getting?

This is not talking simply about how much money you’re making but it’s talking about what you’re actually tracking and what’s actually working. Because if you go in here, and I’m just going to go back into the first tab because it’s the largest, if you go in here and you see you got 30 leads on Google Ads, you’ve got four leads on direct mail, well where do you think you should be spending your money? Or where do you think you should be focusing your time? You got to be focusing on Google. Very, very, very important to be utilizing this. If you just need this so you can go to your own spreadsheet, then that is all you need to do. You don’t have to use this. This is here because Shawn built it in 2015. He’s offered it up to all of our students and so this is something if you don’t have, email andrea@reww and we’ll make sure that you have this.

That’s what I wanted to talk about to you guys today. Go ahead and give me any and all questions you might have. What is your D & TC on your spreadsheet? D & TC, let me. Steve or Stephen, I’m not sure I understand your question. D & TC. If you can just re-ask the question I’m happy to answer it. I don’t know if I understand D & TC. What other questions does everyone have while Steve’s re-asking me the question? I mean again, this is pretty straightforward.

But this is so so important because if you don’t know where you’re efforts are bringing in deals, where your money’s bringing in deals, it’s almost impossible to keep track of what you’re doing. It’s almost impossible to figure out where you should be spending more money, where you should be spending less money. Where maybe you’re not doing as many appointments. Where you’re doing more appointments. This is what really would have been needed if I could have thought of it myself.

Under Brandon, oh, again, Shawn built this. I think it’s just a term. This is probably Dispositions and Transactional Coordinating is what I would guess D & TC, Dispositions, Transactional Coordinating. Cause COO, Marketing, Lead Manager, Sales, JV, CFO. Yeah, the email is andrea, A-N-D-R-E-A, @reww.com. A-N-D-R-E-A @reww.com. And she’ll make sure to get this over to you. You’re very welcome. All right, all right guys.

Obviously again, straightforward. Doesn’t sound like you have many questions. That is it for the Weekly Wednesday Wisdom. Hopefully you enjoyed and obviously you have to be using this. Again, if you’re door knocking, add door knocking. If you’re cold calling, add cold calling in here. If you’re doing more JV deals than anything else, focus on those things. This is how you’re going to be able to run your business. And you should be able to answer those questions. If I came to you and I said, “How many leads are you getting per month? How many leads are you getting per week? How many contracts are you getting? How many appointments are you getting,” you should know them off the top of your head. I meant that’s really how intimately you should ber knowing this spreadsheet.

Guys that is it for our Weekly Wednesday Wisdom. I’m Justin Colby and I will see you on next week. Peace.