As business owners, our gut is often right.
That person we hired, but had a little niggling feeling about, didn’t work out.
The project with a big cash injection, but with a slightly annoying client, ended up draining energy and resources for months.
“I knew it,” we think. “I wish I’d listened to my gut!”
You’re not wrong to listen to your gut: but it’s not always as simple as “your gut is always right”.
Because your gut can be influenced by things which throw it off ever so slightly. Worry or fear about your current business situation. That new hire or new client has the same first name as someone who royally screwed you over in the past. Or, and this is the most frequent, whatever has happened most recently to influence it.
Here’s an example. I was talking with a client about where their leads come from. “I get a few cold leads through this particular directory,” they said, “but none of them have converted.”
I asked how many leads, and they went to check. “Okay so we’ve had four leads in the past year from this particular directory…and…oh actually that one did convert. Okay. Oh! And that one as well, and…. Oh I forgot that client came from there too. Hmmm… it looks like we’ve converted three out of four, and two of them are really good clients!”
Why was the gut saying none of them converted?
Because the most recent lead hadn’t converted. (Yet.)
The gut said “the leads from this directory are useless”, because it was referring to the most recent experience, which was a no from this one person.
But in actuality, although the numbers weren’t huge, 75% of the leads did convert. And most of those were ideal clients, people they loved to work with and who fit with their niche audience.
So if you catch yourself this month thinking something like…
“We never get leads from there”
“Events don’t work” (or social doesn’t work, or email doesn’t work, or whatever platform)
“Whenever we hire through this system it never works out”
….stop for a moment to check the data.
Because there’s a gut feeling about that lead source, the event, the hire…but it could be based on the most recent situation, not the pattern of information over a period of time.
You’re accountants. You get that the numbers don’t lie. They support you and reassure you and remind you of how things actually are.
You may want to quickly check them against that gut feeling.
What’s your gut been telling you this week?
