By Josh Snow, CEO of Try Snow

Everyone has their own version of “The American Dream”. For me and most entrepreneurs like you, The American Dream is visualized as freedom. The freedom to build wealth, pursue our vision, and create something successful that will leave an impact on our families and the world for generations to come.

I am living my American Dream now, mentoring thousands on how to do the same for themselves. I used to think that making money to help my family was what I was meant to do, but not anymore. This kind of mentorship continues to fulfill my purpose day after day. I know from first hand experiences that having a startup is hard work. And when it comes to scaling, the most common mistake I see is that many still think it’s just about adding a ton of clients, sales and additional jobs. They focus on this without thinking about the impact or changes needed in the financials, operations or logistics that come with that kind of growth. Unfortunately, this is the tipping point where close to 50% of startups still fail. The mindset of “more sales, more money, more jobs” distracts them and they actually end up missing huge opportunities, wasting profits, and guessing their way through days. They end up creating an additional “job” or “time taker” that only restricts growth instead of helping it.

There are ways to grow, and there are ways to grow smart. Growing smart involves looking at what's working in your business today, and also making the time to look and consider areas in your business that you may be missing out on. This takes consistency and a process to help bring it all together and lead change and growth for the business.

I learned this over time in my own company, Snow. For a long while, we neglected the Amazon sales channel. We weren’t using it at all, and when we realized how it could connect as an opportunity for us to grow our business profitably, we made the transition quickly. After that successful test and move, we then started looking at our other sales channels, testing, and measuring our ROI to compare and grow. At first we were so busy that we didn't see our best opportunities. And when we focused on growing smart, we found major blind spots that we could turn into growth. We weren’t negative or derailed by mistakes because each of those led us to learn and optimize our operations. We started diving deep into finding opportunities to scale by using KPI’s. KPIs are Key Performance Indicators, which give us data to gauge the current operations as well as future growth. This simplifies things to let us know what is working well and what is not.

KPIs also give us a way to predict future profits and identify areas of concern or opportunity. These measurements are also an important part of what you need in order to pitch to potential investors if you are looking to raise capital in the future. Knowing your numbers is more than just the Profit and Loss and Balance Sheets., it’s about focusing on the numbers or measures that demonstrate what matters most when it comes to managing and driving performance. Here are just a few examples of Key Performance Indicators: Customer Acquisition Cost Retention Rate Monthly Recurring Revenue Customer Lifetime Value

Customer Satisfaction

Margins

Defect Rate

Product Return Rate

When we can measure it, we can manage it. Each business has to determine which numbers they choose to measure growth. It also may be customized depending on the nature of the business and how you get things done. Through KPIs, the company’s growth and performance become more clear in presenting your success as well as opportunities to create or test changes.

Going through this process, and taking the time to build it all, may seem like a big task, but once you discover that one revenue killer, and all of those revenue builders, you and your team will be on track to profit, scalability and massive growth for the company. It’s all sitting right there under our noses, we just have to make time to measure it and intentionally look for these opportunities if we want to get the most out of it.

About Josh Snow

Josh is most known for his achievement of bootstrapping his dental care brand, Snow Teeth Whitening, into a 9 figure company within 3 years, before he was 28 years old. His expertise in the industry has proven itself over and over as he has founded multiple other companies including; Frost Smile Care, PowerHouse Brands, and Inala. Featured as a mentor on “Going Public '', a new series by Entreprenuer.com, he is now looked up to as a leader in his industry and one of the most successful brand builders in the world.