I didn’t have long, so I jogged straight past the rip sign at Manly Beach and paddled out as fast as I could. Ten minutes later I was still paddling, flat out, and I hadn’t gone anywhere. If your team is flat out every week and your numbers still aren’t moving, it’s the same thing.
Ten minutes in the rip
I had maybe forty minutes to surf, so stopping to look at the water felt like a waste of time I didn’t have. I just went for it.
Ten minutes later I was still paddling, waves landing on my head. I thought jumping straight in was the fast way, and it was the slowest thing I could have done. I burnt a quarter of my session and hadn’t caught a single wave.
Everyone’s paddling, nobody’s surfing
That’s what a busy team with flat numbers looks like. Everyone’s paddling and nobody’s surfing.
The useful question is how to tell whether your team is busy or actually moving the numbers that matter, and what one change to your weekly meeting shows you the answer every week.
The office manager who sends more reminders
Here’s one I’ve seen often. The office manager owns debtor days, which is how long it takes, on average, for your customers to pay you.
Say it creeps up. Thirty days, then forty, then forty-five. So what does she do? She sends more reminder emails. Same email, same wording, just more often.
She’s busier than she’s ever been, and the number doesn’t move. She isn’t lazy. She’s working harder than anyone, and that’s what makes it so hard to spot.
When a number goes red, people do more of the same
When a number goes red, people go back to what they know, and they do more of it. More emails, more calls, more hours. It looks like effort and it feels like effort. It’s paddling in a rip.
Founders do it too. When things go sideways, we go straight back to the jobs we’re good at, the ones we can tick off.
There’s a line that gets credited to Einstein: insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. There’s no proof he ever said it, but it fits.
How I handle failed payments
Fortunately, it’s very rare we have to. We run a simple business on month-to-month subscriptions that bill automatically, and following up failed payments is heavy admin, so I’ve designed my way out of it.
If a payment fails, a follow-up goes out automatically. If there’s no reply, the next one changes channel, a text. Finally, a phone call from me: “Is everything okay?”
Every step is different from the last. We don’t send the same reminder twice. It’s a process, not luck, and it doesn’t depend on how anyone is feeling that day.
One number, one name, reported every week
So how do you stop your team paddling in a rip?
Everyone has a number. One number, with one name on it. Your office manager owns debtor days, the number itself, not the job of sending reminders.
Then, once a week, everyone reports their number rather than their to-do list. Nobody gets to say “look at everything I did this week” if their number is still red. If it’s green, great, move on. If it’s red, there’s one question: what help do you need to turn it green?
Keep the meeting as lean as you can. It’s there for the numbers, and for what help is needed to keep them healthy. If two people need to sort something out, they do it after the meeting. If they need help from the operator, that gets booked separately. The actual work happens outside the meeting.
Back to the beach, and look
After ten minutes in that rip, I gave up and paddled back to the beach. I stood on the sand and actually looked. I could see where the rip was running and where the easy way out was, and it took about a minute.
Then I went back out, and it worked. But I’d lost ten minutes and I was already tired. It was a great workout, and that time could have been spent catching waves.
When the number isn’t moving, stop paddling harder. Go back to the beach and look.
So who in your team owns a number, and what do they do when it goes red?
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