The PDCA Method for Tracking Business Results
For seven years Dave Wood walked around Walmart and shopping malls cold-approaching strangers, and it made him feel like he was heading into a panic attack, and it barely worked. The problem wasn’t effort. It was that none of it was trackable, so he never knew what to fix. In this episode he breaks down PDCA, plan, do, check, adjust, and uses his own most painful failures, plus how Sam Walton actually built Walmart, to show why data beats busy every time. Here’s the episode.
Why Staying Busy Isn’t the Same as Getting Results
So what’s PDCA, and how can it create wealth and lifestyle for you and your business? It stands for plan, do, check, and adjust, and you want to do that based on the data you’re getting from the actions that you’re taking. I remember learning this principle in high school, when I was lifting weights and reading a book by Arnold Schwarzenegger my brother Will had bought. I remember a quote I read which said something like this: you can’t improve what you can’t track.
When I originally started in the network marketing profession in 2002, one of the biggest problems I had, looking back, was that all of the strategies I was using were difficult to track. They didn’t make very much sense. I was expanding, or I could say not expanding, my sphere of influence by walking around and randomly hitting up strangers in Walmart, in shopping malls, if you can believe that. Not only was that incredibly painful, it didn’t create the results that I wanted either, and it didn’t even motivate me to keep doing it. After a while it was like sending me into a panic attack. But for some crazy reason, I continued focusing with the intention of creating results, year after painful year.
I kept track of basic numbers behind what I was doing, stuff like how many people I got business cards from, how many people I approached, how many plans I showed. Here was the problem. When it continued not working, rather than learning a new strategy, I just kept doing the same strategies over and over again. I wasn’t very good at adjusting, even though the feedback I was getting was the universe screaming at me: Dave, this strategy isn’t getting the results that you want. Have you ever felt like that before? Maybe you even feel like that now. I had an activity scoreboard full of stuff that kept me busy. But my results scoreboard had a big fat zero.
Right now, resolve with me to keep score in the game of your life, and to pay close attention to the results that you get. Remember what Arnold said. Sometimes I take for granted the incredible technology I have access to today, and it allows me to improve my business through analytics and data across everything I’m doing, and it’s all easy to look at, you just have to learn how. I can tell how many people see a post, how many comment, how many share it, what links they click on, what banners they click on, how many put their email in, how much of a video they view, and where they drop off. I can even place retargeting tracking pixels and follow people with ads all over the internet. Our ability to create data is mind-blowing.
I remember I had a conversation with a friend about something he thought was off in one of my videos. He disagreed with me, and we were having a friendly discussion about it. He was failing to get his point across to me, since I was going into a convincer pattern, until the data came in and settled it. The data revealed the actual truth of what was going on. My creative pattern interrupt was causing more than a 70 percent drop-off in video views, meaning what I thought was funny, maybe other people didn’t think was funny. They would actually just leave the video in large numbers and not really get it. Does that mean it wasn’t a good idea to put that intro in there? What are your thoughts?
See, we live in a new world where new things are possible, because of access to information and behavioral reporting. This has never existed at any time in the world’s history. That means we can grow our business faster, bigger, and better than before, as we get people to make new decisions and buy new things. You can get rich in a better way.
The Plan Nobody Understood
In the past I’ve had a habit, one I’ve had to unlearn, where I assume people understand what I mean when I come up with an idea, and I just sort of expect them to do things the way I imagine in my head they should do it, because to me it makes sense and it’s perfectly clear. I don’t know if you’ve ever done anything like this. Now, I know they can’t read my mind, they’re not God, but it’s easy to project our own beliefs, our own ability to grasp information, our own life experiences onto others if we don’t study people and why they do the things they do.
A lot of times what I’ve done is come up with an idea, and assumed the internal team, the employees and contractors, understood it. I assumed the affiliates understood it, or the customers understood it. And they didn’t, because it wasn’t clear. It wasn’t planned out in a way that translates across their different learning and behavioral styles. I’ve learned through experience that if you can’t take a plan and read it to your 10-year-old and have them understand it, it’s not a clear plan and it won’t get done the way you want. If it’s not written, it is not a plan. An easy test, if you have kids, is to pay your kid, if they’re over the age of about seven, to read your plan, and then ask them to explain it back to you when they’re done. If they can’t, find out what they don’t understand, and rewrite your plan until they do.
Why do you want to be that clear? Well, I was just reading the Harvard Business Review Guide to Creating Business Plans, and one of the things they talked about was that a clear business plan helps rally people around your idea, gather investors if you need them, and motivate all of the people involved to create your vision, because they understand it and can get behind it. Your unconscious mind is in a lot of ways like a little child in the way that it understands and follows through automatically on instructions. If your plan isn’t perfectly clear, your own unconscious resources won’t be able to help you create exactly what you want. And you’re not going to get rich as quickly as you want either.
Here’s another thing I learned about planning. You can’t work with other people if you don’t schedule things. This is a struggle for me, because I’m not good at being on time to stuff and holding myself to written specific schedules. I’m just not naturally good at it. I could make the excuse that I have an overtilt version of ADHD, which is completely true, and so I don’t remember things or pay attention. So I’ve got to have accountability and external check systems, because I’m not going to let some dumb thing keep me from getting rich and creating the results that I want, and neither should you.
I also tend not to mind if other people are late. But one day I asked myself a question. I said, how do those other people feel about me not being on time? Well, they feel disrespected. They feel undervalued. Good business people won’t tolerate disrespect of their time, because to them it’s valuable, and the only resource you can’t get back if you lose it. Planning is going to ensure that not only are you respecting your time, but you’re respecting the time of the people that you value and care about. Planning is actually a way of respecting and valuing yourself, and treating yourself like you’re really worth it right now, because you deserve financial independence and time freedom.
I work with a lot of independent entrepreneurs online, and they all struggle with keeping a schedule, all of them, with very few exceptions. And the reason is they don’t like having things mandated on them. They have to make it themselves and stick to it. Our education system doesn’t train us to create a vision, to plan, to communicate it, to work the plan in an effective and compelling way. If we all learned that in school, the world would be a very different place, full of entrepreneurs changing all kinds of things.
How Data Built Walmart
Let me give you a powerful example of how planning and tracking can change everything in your business and life. Everyone knows who Sam Walton is, the creator of Walmart. So what was it that actually gave Sam the resources he needed to build the largest retail chain in the whole world? Well, it wasn’t investors. It was the advent of computer systems that could automate inventory tracking, so he could get the scoreboard of his whole business right in front of him for the very first time. This has never been available to any emperor in the history of time, previous to this last century. Without the data, he could never have built Walmart.
The most powerful resource in your business is your data and analytics, because with that you can always make more money in a faster and more efficient way. Online, one of the first things I learned was that tracking is the key to good marketing. If you don’t know the conversions on any part of a sales process, you can’t improve that process and you can’t make it better. And every part of your entire sales process matters, because your products matter, don’t they? I hope that you say they do.
Full episode transcript
Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.
Hello, my friend. It's Dave Wood, and today I'm going to teach you a results creation strategy called PDCA. Before I get into exactly what that is, I have a question for you, and that is, do you want to learn a powerful concept that can help you get rich and create the lifestyle of your dreams? During this episode, I want you to focus inside on the things that you want to create in your life, whether it's to travel to the beaches of the world, rent private charter planes to go on vacation with your family, or just be able to go enjoy your life and enjoy the incredible things around you. What do you really want to create?
Welcome to episode number four of The Daily Shortcut. If you're new to the show, be sure to pay attention carefully to every detail. Share this on Facebook and also leave me a thoughtful comment telling me what you've learned. If you do that, you'll enter to win a free copy of the book. I'm currently reading, which is Resolved, 13 Resolutions for Life, and it'll be shipped to your house on me.
Register for your free bonus PDF audio and system below, and I'll send you something new Monday through Friday at 9 a.m. Eastern Time as my way of saying thank you because you are awesome. So what's PDCA and how can it create wealth and lifestyle for you and your business? It stands for plan, do, check, and adjust, and you want to do that based on data that you're, that you're getting from the actions that you're taking. I remember learning this principle in high school when I was lifting weights and reading a book by Arnold Schwarzenegger my brother Will had bought.
I remember a quote I read which said something like this. It said, you can't improve what you can't track. When I originally started in the network marketing profession in 2002, one of the biggest problems that I had looking back was that all of the strategies I was using were difficult to track. They didn't make very much sense. I was expanding, or I could say not expanding, my sphere of influence by walking around and randomly hitting up strangers in Walmart safely in shopping malls, if you could believe that.
Not only was that incredibly painful, it didn't create the results that I wanted either and even motivate myself to do it. It was, it was like sending me into panic attack almost after a while. But for some crazy reason, I continued focusing with the intention of creating results year after painful year. I kept track of basic numbers behind what I was doing. Stuff like how many people I got business cards from, how many people I approached, how many plans I showed, stuff like that.
Here was the problem. When it continued not working, rather than learning a new strategy, I just kept doing the same strategies over and over and over and over again. I wasn't very good at adjusting, even though the feedback that I was getting was the universe. It was screaming. It was like, hey, dude.
Dave, this strategy isn't getting the results that you want. Have you ever felt like that before? Maybe you even feel like that now. I had an activity scoreboard. It was full of stuff.
It kept me busy. But my results scoreboard had a big fat zero. Right now, resolve with me to keep score in the game of your life and to pay close attention to the results that you get. Remember what Arnold said? Prove what you can't trap.
Now, sometimes I take for granted the incredible technology that I have access to today and it allows me to improve my business through analytics and data across everything that I'm doing. And it's all easy to look at. You just have to learn how. I can tell how many people see a post, how many people comment, how many people share it, what links they click on, what banners they click on, how many people put their email in, what they look at, how much of a video that you view, and where they drop off, where they're from. All sorts of things.
You wouldn't even believe. I can even place retargeting tracking pixels. And I can follow people with ads all over the internet to create more results and give free stuff away. Our ability to create data is mind-blowing. I remember I had a conversation with a friend about something he thought was off in one of my videos that I put up.
He disagreed with me, essentially. And we were, you know, having a little friendly discussion about it. Now, he was failing to get his point across to me as I was going into a convincer pattern. He was failing to get his point across to me as I was going into a convincer pattern. He was failing to get his point across to me as I was going into a convincer pattern.
happened. The data revealed the actual truth of what was going on. My creative pattern interrupt was causing more than a 70% drop off in video views, meaning what I thought was funny, maybe other people didn't think was funny. They would actually just leave the video in large numbers and not really get it. Now here's the interesting question.
Does that mean that it wasn't a good idea to put that intro in there? What are your thoughts? Let me know why you think what you do and be detailed in the comments. And whoever has the best answer before 9 a.m. tomorrow will contact you and we will send you a free book.
So back to the miracle of technology and how it can help you make money faster in your business. See, we live in a new world where new things are possible because of access to information, behavioral reporting. This has never existed at any time in the world's history. That means we can grow our business faster and more efficiently. We can grow our business faster and more efficiently.
We can grow our business faster, bigger and better than before as we get people to make new decisions and buy new things. You can get rich in a better way. In today's market, if you take action now and pay attention to illustrate this, let me share a big, painful, expensive lesson with you. Let's take both of these and put them together into some lessons that you can apply in your business. And no matter what you do, you can make more money with this immediately and over the long term.
See, in the past, I've had this sort of habit and I've had to unlearn this where I assume people understand what I mean when I come up with an idea and I just sort of expect them to do things the way that I imagine in my head they should do it. Because to me, it makes sense. And to me, it's perfectly clear, right? I don't know if you've ever done anything like this. Now, I know they can't read my mind.
They're not God, but it's easy to project our own beliefs, ability to grasp information, our own life experiences onto others if we don't study people and why they do the things that they do. So, you know, a lot of times what I've done is I've come up with an idea. I've assumed that the internal team, the employees and contractors understand it. I assume the affiliates understand it or the customers understand it. And they didn't because it wasn't clear.
It wasn't planned out in a way that translates across their different learning and behavioral styles. I've learned through experience. I've learned through experience. I've learned through experience that if you can't take a plan and read it to your 10-year-old and have them understand it, it's not a clear plan and it won't get done the way that you want. So in episode three, the other day, one of the bonuses I gave out was a workbook that had an assignment that helps you think through the process of getting perfectly clear for free.
An easy test if you have kids is to pay your kid if they're over the age of about seven to read your plan. And if it's not a plan, let me repeat that again, if it's not written, it is not a plan. And then ask them to explain it back to you when they're done. If they can't find out what they don't understand and then rewrite your plan until they understand. Why do you want to be that clear?
Well, I was just reading this Harvard Business Review Guide to Creating Business Plans. I read a lot. And the other day, one of the things that they talked about in their workbook was that if you can't understand a plan, was that a clear business plan helps rally people around your idea, gather investors if you need them, and motivate all of the people involved to create your vision because they understand it so they can get motivated. There's a bigger part of this though. Your unconscious mind is in a lot of ways like a little child in the way that it understands and follows through automatically on instructions.
If your plan doesn't create perfect, your own unconscious resources will not be able to help you create exactly what you want. And you're not going to get rich as quickly as you want either. And you want to get rich, right? Make sure to download our daily shortcuts and I'll help you do just that over the next little while. Go ahead and do that after this video.
Here's another thing I learned about planning. You can't work with other people if you don't schedule things. You can't work with people without a schedule. This is a struggle for me because I am not good at being on time to stuff and holding myself to written specific schedules. I'm just not naturally good at it.
And so I could make the excuse and I could say, oh, blah, blah, blah. I could use the reason and say I have an overtilt version of ADHD, which is completely true. And so I don't remember things or pay attention. Right? So I've got to have accountability and external check systems because I'm not going to let some dumb thing keep me from getting rich and creating the results that I want.
And neither should I. You need to schedule things. I also tend not to mind if other people are late. But one day here's what I did. I asked a question.
I said, how do those other people feel about me not being on time? Well, they feel disrespected. They feel undervalued. Good business people won't tolerate disrespect of their time because to them it's valuable and the only resource you can't get back if you lose. Planning is going to ensure that not only are you respecting your time, but you're respecting the time of the people that you value and you care about.
Planning is actually a way of respecting and valuing yourself and treating yourself like you're really worth it right now, that you deserve financial independence and time freedom because you do. And you can only gather together with other people in groups, which you have to have groups of people to do anything great. And you can only do that with your time. the schedule. I work with a lot of independent entrepreneurs online and they all struggle with keeping a schedule.
All of them, right? With very few exceptions. And the reason is they don't like it. They don't like having things mandated on them. They have to make it themselves and stick to it.
Our education system doesn't train us to create vision, to plan, to communicate it, to work the plan in an effective and compelling way. If we all learn that in school, the world would be a very different place full of entrepreneurs changing all kinds of things. The fact is we need to change that. We need to help people understand how to plan and check. Let me give you a powerful example of how planning and tracking can change everything in your business and life.
Everyone knows who Sam Walton is, right? It's one of the things I was reading about today. The creator of Walmart. So what was it that actually gave Sam the resources that he needed to build the largest retail chain in the whole world? Well, it wasn't investors.
It was the advent of computer systems that could automate inventory tracking so you could get the scoreboard of your whole business right in front of you for the very first time. I mean, this has never been available to any emperor in the history of time previous to this last century, right? This is something that's new that you could do things that the kings and queens and emperors of the whole world couldn't do, right? So without the data, he couldn't do it. He couldn't do it.
He couldn't do it. He could never have built Walmart. And without the data I get, there's no way you'd ever see this episode. The most powerful resource in your business is your data and analytics, because with that, you can always make more money in a faster and more efficient way. Online, one of the first things I learned was that tracking is the key to good marketing.
If you don't know the conversions on any part of a sales process, well, you can't improve that process and you can't make it better. And every part of your entire sales process matters because your products matter, don't they? I hope that you say they do. Today's assignment is pretty simple then. And I go over it in the bonus PDF that you're going to get right now when you put your name and email in the form below right now.
With the help of my awesome team, we've prepared three powerful bonuses. We call these daily shortcuts to help you make more money in your business. In your first daily shortcut, you're going to get a free PDF. You can print it or you can read it online. You're going to get a full transcript of today's lesson along with a workbook to implement these ideas into your own business and make sure that you're paying attention to the right data and getting the right results.
In your second daily shortcut, you're going to get a free audio of today's lesson and you can download that to your smartphone. You can listen again and again and make sure you understand these ideas and you can implement them with clarity and power. I've found that very helpful. The audio is a powerful tool to change your unconscious knowledge and radically transform the ability that you have to make money in your life. In your third daily shortcut, you're going to get my whole system that I use to make money online and you can work with the team that I have to create the results that you want in your life.
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