The number in your business is a gauge. It shows you what is happening, and the thing that is happening sits behind it. If you try to move the number directly, without touching whatever produces it, you move only the needle, and the business stays exactly where it was.
The booklet describes three ways people work on the number instead of on the thing itself. Almost every owner uses one of them, and it helps to know which one is yours.
The gauge and the engine
The source states the principle in two short lines, in capitals. A statistic, or stat for short, is a number compared with an earlier number of the same thing, and it is an indicator of the object it represents. Push the indicator and you do not obtain the object.
In plain words, moving the number leaves reality where it was and changes only what the report says.
The source picks a very simple image: in 1 apple, the 1 and the apple are two different things. It sounds obvious, until you count how many of the decisions owners make after a weak month contradict it.
Suppose a studio owner decides to raise her number of enquiries and opens three new channels. The enquiries go up and the sign-ups go down. She moved the gauge. Now suppose she had looked first at what actually produces good enquiries. The same number would have risen more slowly, and the sign-ups would have risen with it.
The source gives three figures who work on the number instead of the thing. Each one is familiar, and it is worth spotting the one that looks most like you.
Mr. Stat Pusher
Picture a cold room, with the staff in overcoats and wrapped in blankets. Mr. Stat Pusher goes to the thermometer on the wall, sees a very low reading, and yells at it to go up. When nothing happens, he yells at the staff.
Nobody switched the heating on. That is the point.
His address is wrong. He talks to the thermometer and to people who are freezing, and the heating stays off.
In a small business this looks like a copywriter who pins a revenue target on the wall and talks about it at every planning session, while nothing in the way she sells changes. Or like an electrical contractor who demands more leads of his one employee and never asks where the leads come from today.
Mr. Stat Ignorer
The source calls the second figure the strongest of the three. He is driving, and the speedometer shows 15 mph. He glares at the needle for a moment, pastes a piece of paper over it, sits back, and drives on contentedly. Had he looked, he would have found three flat tires and an engine close to running out of oil.
Notice that he acted. He handled the number, and the number is the one place where he has no influence at all.
Suppose a photographer stops opening the monthly report because it only stresses him out. The report does not change because of that. Someone who does the opposite pins the graph up opposite the desk in the worst month of the year, and sees the recovery a fortnight before feeling it.
Stopping measuring because the number is bad means deciding to drive with no instruments.
Mr. Stat Faker
The third figure expects trouble if his number is down, so he invents a number and draws it on the graph.
In a one-person business nobody is there to answer to, so the faking takes another shape. You count a quote that was sent as though it had closed, an enquiry as though it were a customer, money that has not landed as though it had.
Suppose an electrical contractor counts as customers two people who asked for a quote and never replied. The number looks good and the income does not. Then he adopts one rule: count only what has been paid. The number drops by a third and becomes usable.
When nobody is there to answer to, you end up faking it for yourself, at exactly the same cost.
The source sums up all three in one line: what they share is an absence of skilled management. The first yells, the second hides, the third dresses the number up, and none of them touches what produces it.
What the booklet has on this
In It Was a Slow Month, this chapter closes with two exercises: diagnose, and correct. The chapters after it teach you to read the gauge: how to read a trend, and how to turn the slant of a line into the name of a condition.
Shouting at a number does nothing for it. It rises when something in what it measures changes.