Running a business means you always have fifty different things demanding your attention at once. Tonya Kubo and Gwen Bortner share how smart leaders set their Business Focus Priorities to stop reacting to every minor distraction. You’ll learn how to separate temporary noise from real trends that impact your bottom line. They break down a clear framework to help you decide when to act immediately, when to watch closely, and when to ignore problems entirely. Discover why tracking your own company data matters far more than obsessing over generic economic headlines. It’s time to protect your daily focus and build an operation that serves your long-term vision.

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What’s Worth Your Attention Right Now?

If you’re like the rest of us, there are probably 50 things you could improve in your business. Luckily, just because there are 50 things you could improve upon does not mean you should work on all 50 all at the same time. It doesn’t mean that you should even work on five things. Not even if the five things are making the most noise. The question becomes how do you decide what deserves your attention at any given time?

I have Gwen here to help us answer this question because Gwen, for me, has been amazing at helping me to determine what things I have to drop everything and act on now, what things I can afford to watch and wait, and what things I don’t need to worry about at all until something changes. Gwen, I’m wondering from you. First of all, did you just fall off the turnip truck knowing instantly how to do this? Is this the thing that you learned over time?

I’m going to say yes. There was a bit of both. Only because as I look back, the only way you can evaluate these things is backwards. As I look back, one of the things that became evident to me in my career as I got further along was, I’ve always had a pretty good instinct on these things. There was something in my makeup, in my life, from a very young age that I’ve always been able to see things, prioritize, evaluate, and do that relatively well. I’ve had people ask me to look back, and I could do a pretty good job of it even at a pretty young age of being able to do this.

Developing Pattern Recognition For Leadership Decisions

There’s a bit of that, but where it’s been refined in a serious way has been through experience. Watching people make choices and watching what the outcome was and saying, “Where do these things line up,” and doing that pattern recognition piece. The pattern recognition piece is the piece that is the instinctual piece. I’ve been good at pattern recognition for a long time. Seeing what those things are and saying, “Take A, take B.” Take this set of scenarios and it’s like, “The outcome almost always is such and so.”

That, to me, is probably a lot of it. The answer, as I said, is yes. There is some amount that had some instinct from a very young age that was part of it. I think because of that, the amount of experience and knowledge that I’ve had adds a ton to it. There are other people I know that are my age who’ve had lots and lots of experience as well who won’t necessarily do this.

I know that when I observe you working through some of these situations with clients. A lot of what I see may be derailing a client or stealing their time, their focus is noisy situations. For our retailers especially, it’s the angry customer, the problematic employee. For all of our clients, a sudden dip in sales or if sales have been soft like all year, all quarter. That noise gets louder as the quarter goes on for them. Cash crunch. The feeling that marketing isn’t producing or their inventory isn’t moving. How do you determine which of those things deserves attention or doesn’t deserve attention? Do noisy things always deserve attention?

Filtering Business Noise From Real Operational Trends

The first thing is to filter what noisy things deserve attention because some things do and some things don’t. One of the things that I look for is trends as opposed to individual data points.

Say more about that.

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Data points are important. You’ve got to have the data to be able to determine a trend. I’m going to pick angry customer because that’s a great example. Everyone has dealt with an angry customer if they’ve been in business for very long. That includes humans. Whether it’s retail, service, online, or in person, there have been those situations. The angry customer is a data point. That’s a data point. The trend is, are we seeing more angry customers? Is there less angry customers? Are angry customers angry about the same thing? Is it when certain people are on who they’re interacting with?

There’s all sorts of things that allow us to start creating trends. Angry customers are a data point and may be useful. Someone could walk in, have a bad day, and have completely unrealistic expectations. At that point, you gave me three categories of act, watch, and ignore. That fundamentally becomes an ignore. There’s some people you’re just not going to make happy and you’re going to do what you can. No need to be rude or any of the rest of it, but just let it go. There’s not anything.

If you’re getting complaints when a particular person is on staff and they’re relatively new. There’s correlation that you’re able to start doing so that you’re seeing some trends. That may be something that needs to at least be watched if not acted on. Where I’m always looking at is how impactful is the thing to the success, longevity, and profitability to the business overall. An angry customer, one, probably not that impactful to the business overall. It feels like it at the moment, but probably not.

It could be if they’re 90% of your sales, which I would never recommend, by the way. That’s a completely different topic, so we’re not going to go there. It could, but likely not. For me, act is always thinking about how impactful is it to the success, viability, longevity, goals of the business. Is it highly impactful? We need to do something about it. Is it a little impactful? That may be a watch. Back to, is this trending in the wrong way or the right way? Sometimes we have a hiccup, and that’s what’s happening. If it’s almost not impactful at all, then it could be an ignore or minimally manage it and move on.

It makes me think of a few other situations in that act category. If we’re basing it on impact, I want to run some scenarios through me and tell me if any of them wouldn’t be effective. I’m assuming these would all be like, you need to act now. Maybe not right this second, but maybe by the end of the day or the end of the week. One would be finding out that you have an employee who is affecting everybody else’s desire to still work for you and/or affecting the customer experience.

That’s definitely an act. There’s multiple steps usually in that act and it depends on your employment rules and everything else within your state. You need to be having that conversation right away about what this is and what this means. The conversation may be, “Your services are no longer required here.” That may be the conversation. Sometimes it’s like, “You may not be aware, but this is what’s happening. If it doesn’t change, there will be action taken.” That would be an example that’s going to be act because there’s no one person.

I was talking with another business owner. It was quite some time ago now, but several of the employees were close family members. It was one of those situations, and they had now taken over the business from their parents. They realized that their first cousin, someone they were raised with, spent lots of time with, was one of those employees. It was like, “What’s going to happen to Thanksgiving by dealing with this?” It was also potentially, hugely detrimental to the business.

What he figured out when he did this was he went ahead and got rid of that person along with several others that were detrimental. In his particular scenario, because I was curious. I’m always curious. I ask weird questions that most people wouldn’t ask. I said, “How long was it until you had to start rehiring people again?” He cut his staff, mostly these people, by almost half. It was 40%, maybe. It was close to half. A huge cut in staff. It was like, “It was eighteen months before I hired my next person.”

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Taking Immediate Action On Toxic Team Dynamics

This was a huge amount of energy that was being taken away from the productive staff dealing with the unproductive staff, the negative staff. When they were gone, the remaining good staff had so much more capacity, so much more energy, and were able to do the work. They were able to grow their business significantly without adding more people. That had a huge impact.

It had a huge impact on attitude, energy, but also a huge financial impact on the business as well. Since staffing costs are usually one of your largest costs in your business. Imagine cutting your largest cost by 40% and not having to replace it for eighteen months and at the same time, increasing your gross margin. Think about what all those numbers mean. That’s a giant impact to the business.

I would say, because you brought up payroll being the biggest expense. I would also add employee performance problems because this is something that I’ve seen. We’re not happy, but they’re not stealing. They’re not rude. They’re not this. They’re not egregious. Not only do we keep them on staff, but we also don’t address the underperformance because we think it will get better. I find that it doesn’t get better if you don’t say something and act now.

This is one of those things that I would put into more of what I would call the watch category. You need to take some action on it, but it’s not like, “We have to deal with something right away.” Usually, this is also your action that you need to take, which is to manage what the expectations are. What do we expect from people to be doing in this role at this level? Now, these people may not be employees that are like hitting that all the time and doing better. That’s an employee.

Managing Underperformance By Setting Clear Expectations

A B employee in this situation, because is someone who’s hitting expectations 90% of the time. Part of it is, do they know what that is? That’s an act, but you act as an owner. You need to make sure that they’re clear on what that is. Now, if they’re not hitting it very often, this is where we start getting into the C employees. D’s and F’s are where they’re starting to do things egregious. That becomes a bigger issue. We don’t need C employees. B employees are fine. The employees are lovely.

Sometimes the C employee can easily become a B employee because you need to be clear on what the expectation is. Only because we think it’s obvious, do not assume it’s obvious. It’s our number one failing as an owner because everything is obvious to us. Of course, it is. Since it’s our business, we think about it all the time.

What about a bad sales period? Our retailers often hear from them, “It was our lowest sales day ever, our first zero sales day, our lowest weekend sales day or our lowest Black Friday.” For our service providers, it’s a failed launch or a perception of a failed launch.

Responding To Sales Dips With Data Analysis

I’ve lost several customers all at the same time. Sales dip for me is always a watch. Part of it is back to, “I want a trend. I want data and watch it and see if this is a trend.” It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do anything about it, but it also doesn’t mean that we need to completely rebuild our offer because this thing happened. Look at it and do some analysis on this. Look and see if it is a trend. See where it falls in. I’m going to pick a service-based business where several customers roll off at the same time.

 

  

Look at the trends and say, “How long were they with me? Is this fairly typical? Should I have been able to see this coming because our customers stay with us on an average eighteen months? Two of these were 24 months and one of these was at 16 months. That’s on trend. We shouldn’t have been surprised by this. This isn’t necessarily a big deal.”

We should be paying attention to that so that we know when we need to make sure we’ve got people in our pipeline. It is likely we’re going to have some people roll off. Though, it can be a watch. There could be some action on it. When you’re talking in my mind, I’m talking about things like, “We need to do something now.” It’s a watch and takes thoughtful action. No reaction.

What about a cash crunch?

Cash crunch is both act and watch. Back to, I want to understand why it happened. If you’re running your business well and looking at your data all the time, cash crunches shouldn’t happen very often. You should be forecasting and saying, “This is what is going to be happening.” You and I had a conversation about this about my own business. I ran a forecast. I know what things are, staying the way they are, how much money we should have in 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, 4 months, or 6 months.

I shouldn’t be surprised. Now, if it truly is a surprise, then there may be an act. The act may be, if I all of a sudden lost all of my customers at the same minute, that would be a surprise to me and would put me in a cash crunch. This is not what’s happening for people. What I would do is I would let my contractors go. That’s an act. I don’t need to keep paying them unless it was a hiccup and keeping them on is going to recover really quickly.

Cash crunch usually is an act, but you need to also look to say, “Why did this happen?” An example of cash crunch that most people still remember when we’re recording this is COVID. A lot of people are like, “I lost all of my customers.” A restaurant owner lost all of their customers, not on any fault of their own. That is an act. What do we do now to fix that? Do we lay everybody off? Do we figure out how to do delivery? There are different actions that you can take and different restaurants take different choices. That’s an act. We’ve got to deal with this now.

I would say, if you can’t make payroll. I know you would say, “That shouldn’t be a surprise. You shouldn’t find out that you can’t make payroll this week.” If you did, that would be an immediate act. You either have to figure out how you’re going to make payroll or what you’re going to do about the fact that you can’t make it.

For me, it’s a double act. You’re going to figure out how to make payroll because you have made that commitment and immediately figure out why that’s happening and what you’re going to do in the future. Which may mean, “I’m making payroll and laying everybody off. This is the last payroll.” I hate that answer, by the way, but sometimes it’s the answer.

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Sometimes it’s the kindest answer for everybody involved because nobody likes getting a paycheck that bounces.

Yes, as someone that happened to a couple of times in their life way early on. They were shocked when I left the business. I don’t know about you. I don’t know if that happened to you, but they were like, “Stay on.” It’s probably the same thing for you. You were probably early in your career, and it’s like, “I can’t not have a paycheck.”

I had three paychecks bounce in the same year. When I tried to leave, they wanted to keep me because I was so valuable.

Let’s keep going. We don’t need to go through our history.

We don’t need to go through the ghosts of jobs past. What about marketing not producing results? When is that an act versus a watch?

To me, it depends on how much you’re investing in it and how that affects your cash flow. You can be doing fairly low-cost marketing that’s not producing results, like completely organic kinds of things that maybe you’re doing all yourself. It may be something to watch. If you’re dropping $15,000 a month in ads and it’s getting close to not making payroll, that’s an act.

Drop your ads, because if it’s not producing the money to cover it, you need to cover payroll. That money needs to go someplace else. It depends on a lot of things. It could be an ignore, because you may have unrealistic expectations for what it’s supposed to be doing. It’s like, “I’m panicking about it.” I know you’ve said this to me more than once. It’s like, “You shouldn’t be seeing results from this yet.” I want to see results, Tonya.

Same, Gwen. I want to see results immediately, too.

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There’s times that you’ve politely said, “We just need to ignore this for a bit.” Depending on, back to context matters. Context always matters. It could fall into any of the categories.

What about inventory? Inventory is not moving.

I will say that’s an interesting one. Do you have good data on that, or is that a gut feeling? If you have data, you probably need to act on it depending on how long that’s been true. It’s not moving this month, that may be a watch. I feel like it’s not moving. It might be an ignore because that could just be you seeing one particular thing that’s not moving, but everything else is selling well. Sometimes we get fixated on our favorite thing or the thing we think should be selling fast, and it’s not, or it used to sell fast, and it isn’t.

It could be ignored. As I said, depending on the trend. If you typically see inventory moving in this way and all of a sudden, it’s not. Following a trend and having good data for that. Not just because it feels like this is true. That could be an act. It’s another one that could fall into any of the categories, depending upon lots of other factors and how much it’s affecting your business.

The inventory one, I’ll just use it as an example because I’ve seen people do it. It’s like, “It’s not moving. I’m going to put everything on sale.” That action often will be more damaging to your business than taking a more measured approach to the problem, which could still be an action, but it’s not a fast, aggressive action. It’s a slow, measured action. An act isn’t just an act. It’s like, are we acting in a reactive mode? Are we acting in a proactive mode?

That makes sense. As we’re going through these, I realized that the watch category is probably the hardest for a business owner. It’s like, “I see a problem and now you’re telling me that I’m just supposed to sit here?” Taking a somewhat recent example of where I saw it affect our clients, and I thought you gave some good answers. It was in 2025 with the talk of tariffs. We do have a lot of independent retailers who get products outside of the US or they have US vendors, but those US vendors get their products outside of the US. We had clients that were losing a boatload of sleep over it.

I love that you brought that up as an example because, quite honestly, it’s far enough past. I’ve lost track of it. It’s a great example because they were all like, “What am I going to do?” The first thing I would say is I’m good at numbers and I’ve worked with some businesses that truly have had to deal with tariffs forever. Tariffs are the most complicated business math equation to figure out what tariffs are going to be in the first place.

People were like, “It’s going to be this.” It’s like, “There is no way you know this,” because the people who are excellent at it can’t tell you that number. They don’t know. You’re projecting your own anxiety into a number that there’s no way for you to know. The other is it’s not hitting you yet. Now, be prepared. This would be a watch with a proactive plan in place. You don’t need to act on it until your product that used to cost $10 now costs $12.

 

  

It could happen and it probably will. When that happens to you, it’s also going to happen to everybody else. The fact that you now have to raise your product, and I’m using just a simple 50% cost of goods calculation. From $20 to $24, pretty much everyone else is going to have to do that. You may say, “So-and-so didn’t.” Maybe they’re not paying attention.

You need to make your own plan for your own business based on what you want to be true for your business. As simple as that. You don’t need to worry about it because you don’t know. At the time people were worried about it, it was the talk of what was happening. If you’ve paid attention to the government very much, very often, which quite honestly, I don’t for exactly this reason. They will go back and forth and change their minds sixteen different ways till Sunday before we land on something.

Ignoring External Factors Beyond Your Direct Control

I advised one of my clients. They’re like, “What do I need to do?” I said, “You need to stop watching the news.” She laughed and then she looked at me and said, “You’re serious.” I said, “I am deadly serious.” It is creating anxiety and taking energy from you on something that you have zero control over. There is absolutely nothing on the planet that you can do about tariffs.

You don’t have any control of any of the people that are having any influence at all. You don’t need to respond to it until there’s something that you can respond to. If you happen to be in whatever department in the government that is helping make this thing happen, then maybe that’s a different answer. That is not who my clients are.

Fair. How can you decide when a watch becomes act or watch becomes ignore?

Part of it is the question that I was commenting on, which is, is there anything that you can do about it? Tariffs was an example. There’s nothing you can do about it. Absolutely nothing. Nothing that you do will change the outcome of it either. That becomes ignore. Now, when it becomes act is when the product shows up at $2 a piece more. We get to make an action and we decide, do we do the full markup the first time or do we start incrementally raising it?

That becomes a choice. I’m not saying one’s right or wrong or whatever. That becomes a choice and that becomes an action at that point. My first is, if you do something about it, first off, can you? Second off, if you do, does that produce a different result in the relatively near future? You could, in that example. The tariff example. You could say, “I’m thinking it’s going to be $2. I’m going to go ahead and raise the prices now.”

I’m not saying it’s a good decision or a bad decision. It would be one that I would want to discuss with you. Some people would say, “Bad decision because everyone else’s prices are still lower.” Some would say, “Good decision because you’re making the margin for the time being.” Back to, you could argue both sides. It’s also back to, you don’t know it’s going to be $2. You raise it and it ends up being $0.50 and no one’s price is as high as yours.

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Everyone’s like, “I’m not buying from them because they’re “gouging me.” That’s not the way this stuff works, but sometimes the consumer feels like that or it’s the opposite side. It goes up $3 or $4, and it’s like, “Now I have to raise my prices again.” I don’t know. Back to, can I act on the information now and how valid is it to do that based on the information I have and trends and saying, is this a trend or is this a news cycle?

Any other advice on being able to tell whether you take your attention from watching to acting?

The trend piece is an important piece. Are you seeing things different? Based on that, what do we want to do? Always asking, is the trend your trend or are you acting on someone else’s trend? We talked about this just an episode ago. What is your data, not what everyone else’s data is. An example that’s happening with our customers is there’s some people who’s like, “All sales on retail is down because of this, that, and the other thing.”

We also have a client in the same category in retail who has been having the best months and best quarters in her fifteen years of business. It’s not necessarily a trend. Now, your data may be true and maybe it’s a local trend. She’s in a part of the country that it’s not responding to. Back to, are you doing something? Is the trend a trend and is it your trend? Back to, watch your own data. It’s important to look at the other data that’s going around, but watch your own data. This didn’t happen to our customers, but I could imagine it happening to some retail customers as well like, “Tariffs. Tariffs. Tariffs.” What ended up happening is they didn’t have any of the tariffs hit them.

It was like, “This thing is going to happen here and here.” In some of those countries, the tariffs didn’t move very much. They didn’t see a difference. What’s happening with your data? Some of our customers only work with US-based suppliers that are coming from US-based suppliers that are coming from US-based suppliers. They may not have had the same impact that others have. Watching it and seeing are your consequences changing? That’s the other. It’s not a problem now.

I’m going to pick on COVID again, just because it’s a great example. It’s hit so many people in the recent past. When you thought COVID lockdown was a week, that may not be a time to act. It may be a time to watch. On week 3 or 4, where it’s like, “This is going to last.” All of a sudden, you’ve got different data. Now, we need to take a different approach.

This is helpful. As we bring our episode to a close, I’m curious, what is something you think business owners are probably paying too much attention to now? What is something that you wish they would pay more attention to?

Tracking Your Own Business Data For True Insights

It’s what I was talking about. I think businesses pay too much attention to what the world says is happening data-wise as opposed to looking at your individual, personal, real-life data. Many times, I hear people talking about, “The economy’s bad.” Anytime the economy is bad for one area, it’s good for another area. That has been true for as long as anyone’s been tracking it. Only because the economy is bad, doesn’t mean that’s bad for you. It might. I’m not saying that it doesn’t. What is your data saying?

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Not that you should just completely ignore that, but don’t take it with more weight than your data. What does your data say? As opposed to what everyone says you should be thinking about based on what’s going on. I was listening to something. I can’t remember where, but they were talking about how the economic variables, for example, are calculated from a nation because we talked about the economy going up, the economy going down, the economy is doing this. It doesn’t include, I think, and you can’t quote me on this. It’s something like any business that’s under a hundred million dollars.

That may not be the right number, but it’s something in that order of magnitude. The person who was talking said that 85% or 90% of the businesses that are businesses are under $100 million. $100 million is different from a solopreneur who’s making $30,000 a year. They’re having an impact on what’s going on in the universe. If you’ve got $100 million, you probably have a few employees. You’re probably affecting the economy. There’s sales and things happening. They’re not looked into or considered in the economic picture, even though they’re the majority of the economic picture.

What it was is publicly traded versus privately traded and size. How many businesses are like you and mine that are just us? We are not on the stock market. I don’t ever want to be on the stock market, to be quite honest. That’s a choice, but most of the businesses aren’t. Most of the people employed by businesses are not on this. There’s a huge impact there. The data that we’re working from may not be data that applies to us at all when we’re working on broad data.

Back to what I wish people would pay more attention to is your data. What are you seeing? Our client that’s doing really well in 2026, if she was paying attention to retail data, even retail data in her broader category, she would believe that her business is not doing well. She’s also someone who pays attention to data and watches it closely and has for a long time. She knows her particular business is doing amazing.

With that, it brings to mind that the only way that you can pay attention to your data is if you’re tracking it in some way.

Reviewing it and reflecting on it. Not just going, “There’s the numbers,” and moving on, but analyzing it. Thinking about what that means, back to trends. It’s seeing are there trends. Are things starting to shift, good or bad? What’s going on? It’s not just the data, but it is a reflection on the data.

Which, if you’re not used to doing, a good first step could be our one good question email. You can label those emails to all go in a folder and review them back over time. Now, what may be even more helpful is if you respond, then you get insight from Gwen or me. That can add some additional context or some additional insight. It’s a great opportunity every Friday to sit down, spend 5 to 15 minutes in that CEO mindset. Writing some things down so that you can start to get familiar with what is true for you, versus what everybody else is saying is happening to everybody all at the same time, which we know is almost never true. Go to www.tonyakubo.com/Question, and you can get signed up.

  

Mentioned in This Episode

• Gwen Bortner on LinkedIn
• Tonya Kubo
• Tonya Kubo on LinkedIn
• Gwen’s Really One Good Question

 

About Your Hosts

Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.

Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.