Is Your Business Passing The Beach Test

The Beach Test

On any given, we make sure we can pass the beach test.

What is it?

Imagine you're lying on a beach somewhere thousands of miles from home. You are without your computer, phone, tablet or any other connection to the real world. And each day, a pigeon delivers an update with 5 numbers about your business.

With those 5 numbers, you have to decide whether you can lie on this beach for another day, reading, drinking and relaxing with your family or pack up and go home because your business needs you.

What are those 5 numbers?

We track these 5 (6) numbers, otherwise known as key performance indicators, on a dashboard (in most cases, a google sheet) and review them weekly to assess how our business is performing.

When those numbers are green (healthy), we give everyone a high-five and carry on as business is normal. When they are orange (falling a little behind), we acknowledge them but generally carry on as business normal, but when they are red (off by more than 20%), we stop what we're doing and fix the problem.

Knowing what these numbers are in your business and determining how well your business is performing with just them is called passing the beach test.

If you can't, then you don't know your business's mission-critical metrics.

Notes:

The beach test is a simple sense check tool. 'Is my business okay?' When it is, we carry on; when it isn't, we stop and fix.

Building Business Wisdom

At the end of every quarter, we complete a business review.

In these reviews, we want to learn whether we got what we said we would do done and if doing those things got us the results we wanted.

We’ve been doing this for 3 or so years, and they don’t disappoint. Every time we learn 5 - 10 unique insights and lessons about our business that help us improve.

Here’s what this looks like;

• Note these reviews are OKR or Rocks (If you’re an EOS guy) focused, not regular work.

Insights and takeaways are then collated into a publicly available doc called ‘What have we learned’ that our team has access to, organised into types of work like Marketing, Management and so on.

And we do a show and tell at our end-of-quarter team meeting to reflect on these learnings.

Notes:

How you get here is less important than getting here.

A business learns so much from its wins and failures. Collecting and sharing those lessons raises the collective wisdom of its people.

It’s like the aphorism a rising tide lifts all boats.

The Forgotten Hero

The 10x engineer has reached a god-tier status in silicon valley mythology.

These rare beasts are supposedly the difference between every founder's hopes and fears, the difference between becoming Mark Zuckerberg or Elizabeth Holmes.

As they're more colloquially referred to elsewhere, these high-performers or A-players have a long history of being dramatically over-celebrated by the tech world's neo-maniacs.

See virtually everywhere else in recorded history - the pirates, generals, scientists and philosophers thought of someone else more highly.

Rather than the problem solver (whom I'm sure we appreciated to), stories, books, plays, and statues praised the problem preventer's feats.

Instead of showering in flowers, the driver who took miraculous evasive action to avoid a crash, we cared more about the unbeknownst fellow who topped up the brake fluid before leaving home.

The general who avoided a trap, the ruler who avoided a famine, or the philosopher whose guidance steered an empire away from civil war.

Yes, it makes sense to reward those who do good, but just as rightly, perhaps we should reward those who help us avoid bad.

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