Some of the most valuable things you do in your business won’t produce an obvious result this week—or even this month. That makes it dangerously easy to decide they aren’t working and move on too soon.
In this episode of The Business You Really Want, Gwen Bortner and Tonya Kubo explore how to tell the difference between something that genuinely isn’t working and something that simply hasn’t had enough time to produce useful data.
They dig into real examples from marketing, hiring, financial analysis, and business operations to show why a single data point rarely tells the whole story. You’ll hear how to determine a reasonable evaluation period, why changing too many variables can make your data meaningless, and how inaccurate expectations can make perfectly good results look like failure.
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When Smart Business Practices Feel Pointless
The Myth Of Instant Business Success And Why We Stop Too Soon
Some of the most valuable things you do in your business are not going to produce anything useful. I know it hurts but it’s important to acknowledge that because that is exactly why they are so easy to stop doing. I am here, hand in hand to heaven to tell you I might be one of the top three culprits in the world because you review your numbers once and nothing happens. You document what you’re noticing and nothing happens. You take time to reflect on your decision and nothing happens. If you do not tap out at that point, eventually something will. Am I right, Gwen?
It is so easy to get caught in this world of immediacy. You and I are both old enough to remember when the idea of spending the amount of money that we had to spend to send something FedEx was crazy. Why would you need something that fast? It was like, “I could see maybe in this situation you might need it.” Now, if we order it and it is not going to be here within less than 24 hours, we are sorely disappointed.
Heaven forbids, we have to pay for shipping.
We can add that to it but that’s not what we’re talking about. This talk is about the immediacy piece. Quite honestly, I was getting ready to order a couple of books that I know are being printed on demand, which means that it takes a few days. It was like, “I can’t order them on Friday and still have them arrive at my house on Sunday before I leave. I’ve got to plan ahead and order them on Monday or Tuesday so that they arrive at the house on Saturday or Sunday.”
In my world, it was like, “I’ve got to think.” We’ve been so conditioned for now. Between that and our phones being literally attached to our bodies almost all the time. Instant this and instant that. All of that means we have gotten so focused on, “Did it happen? What’s the result?” That we’ve lost track of being able to say, “Did it happen? What’s the result? Let’s do it again.” At some point, saying, “Now we have enough data to look at that and say, so what do all of these pieces of data mean? Not just, what did this one little microscopic bit of time mean? Occasionally, that microscopic bit of time has value, but so often it doesn’t. It only has value when it’s looked as part of the bigger piece.
You’re right, we are constantly looking for immediate cause and effect. It makes sense. You would be the first person to tell a business owner when they do something to take a moment and reflect and ask, “What did it produce? What did you get for whatever the investment was?” You got to track your investment first. Second, what did you get for that? Ultimately, deciding if it worked and that is appropriate in so many instances.
We are constantly looking for immediate cause and effect. You've got to track your investment first, see what you got for that, then ultimately decide if it worked. Share on XIn other instances, it’s not. I’ll bring two quick examples, polar opposites. One being when you had a speaking engagement a few years ago. We’re looking at things like the cost of travel, the cost of a hotel, and the cost that they’re paying. They were going to pay per registrant that came in the door. You had no way of controlling that number.
Thinking about things like, “What would make this a win?” It’s like, if I got one client out of the deal who stayed with us for this amount of time, it would break even. If I got two clients, then it would be a good deal. I don’t see that necessarily happening, but we’ll see. What ends up happening is six clients came in, but those six clients did not come in the next day. You had to pay for your travel, your hotel, and all of those things before those clients came in.
They came in over a period of, I want to say about four months. Some stayed half a minute, which in our world is like 3 to 4 months. Some are still with us, but if you had gone to the 90-day mark and said, “Let’s evaluate it. Am I going to do this again?” It would have been like, “I don’t know if it’s worthwhile. I just don’t know if that makes sense.” It was a matter of months. Now, a slightly shorter experience, but very relevant to almost every reader.
I’m doing a thing where I’m running some ads on social media and I’m doing this with someone else. Five days in, we were getting a ton of conversions on our ad at about 1475 each. My counterpart was like, “That’s expensive. Turn off everything that’s not converting.” I’m like, “It’s only five days. There’s a couple of variables. We need to sit on them.” Ten days into the ad campaign, our conversions dropped below $3 each.
Now, if I had turned off the ads that weren’t working at the beginning, I never would have gotten that because the ads that ended up converting at a lower rate were ads that did not pick up until like day eight. That’s a ten-day period of reflection. She told me, “If I was running these ads, if I wasn’t you, I would have turned them off at 48 hours because if at 48 hours they’re not working, they’re not going to work after.”
She also could be right for certain kinds of ads.
Exactly. That was the thing that we had talked about. I was like, “If they were lead ads, that would be true, but they’re conversion ads.” She was like, “I’ve never run conversion ads.” I was like, “Trust me to be the expert here.”
Setting Realistic Evaluation Windows And Gathering Actionable Data
That’s part of the thing. What is a reasonable evaluation time for it? How much data do you want to collect between the beginning of that evaluation time and the end of that evaluation time? Do you need to collect it daily? Do you need to be collecting it hourly? Do you need to collect it weekly? Do you need to only collect it monthly because the evaluation time is going to be a year? There’s lots of things, but part of it is how many points of data is the balance of reasonable to collect and to give us enough that we can see what this data is trying to tell us.
Let’s step back for a moment and talk about because this is an area where I’ve seen you be amazing in this and advising clients on the areas where the value takes time, especially with financials. What are some examples of practices where the value compounds over time the more data you get?
Financials is one of them because generally, a dollar here doesn’t immediately produce $3 there. There are places that will happen, but usually that’s only after you’ve been gathering data for a long time to figure out. We call it the vending machine, where you put in a dollar and a $2 product comes out. In this case, people call it a slot machine, but a slot machine is like, “I don’t know if it’s going to work.” If it was a slot machine and if you put in a quarter, every time you got a dollar out. Why would you not be doing that? Every time, dollar in, a dollar out, quarter in, dollar out. Why would you not do that?
Generally a dollar here doesn't immediately produce $3 there. That's a situation where you need to figure out what needs to be tracked. Then we do need to track it over time to keep an eye on it. Share on XIn that ridiculous example, you have to probably try quite a few slot machines before you find the one that’s broken and do that. That’s a situation where you need to figure out what needs to be tracked, then we do need to track it over time and keep an eye on it. That’s the other thing with this. Don’t assume just because it was that way then, it’s going to continue to be that way forever. Now, over time, you can say, “For the most part, it looks like it’s doing this. I’m going to stop looking at it every day. I’m going to look at it every week or I’m going to look at it every month.”
All of a sudden, a month, it’s weird then that should be a big flag. It’s like, “I need to dig into this more to figure out why that happened.” Financials is one of those things because it’s usually not instantaneous. Another version that is financial that everyone’s had to deal with at some point, and you and I were just talking about it to some degree, is people. You’re going to hire a person to start doing some work with you, whether you’re hiring them as a contractor, an employee. Whatever.
Even if they’re coming in as the expert on the tool, the process, the activity, there’s still things that they can’t know if they haven’t been in your business in that role before. You want to start doing the evaluation early to watch and see, is it trending in the way it wants to go? Are they starting to be able to do things faster? Are they asking less questions? There’s all sorts of metrics that you could put on that.
Thinking that they’re going to be highly productive, which happens in a lot of VA situations. I went to an agency and I hired a VA. They should be doing everything. It’s like, “How would they know that?” It’s another one that may take a little bit of time. It will compound over time. There will be a point where it’s like, “I know the things that I want to measure with this role and with this job.” Since I know what those things are and because of that, now I don’t have to measure them daily or weekly. I only need to measure them monthly. I’m making up timeframes, but you can make some adjustment on that about where it’s going.
Any observational data takes time because we have to have enough data points to pull out as much of our, I’ll say, opinion and/or perception and/or preconceived ideas. Any of those elements, our emotions on that day, this person’s doing a horrible job. It’s like, “Are they doing a horrible job? Are you still just mad at Fred over there who was doing a horrible job and now you think everyone’s doing a horrible job?” Some of these things take time.
Measuring The Right Metrics To Drive Real Business Outcomes
As I’m saying, one of the big things here is that you need enough pieces to get trends, to see where things are moving. Are they moving up? Are they moving down? Not that up is better and down is bad, because sometimes it’s the other way around. Are they improving? Is it getting easier? There’s all sorts of pieces that go into that. Things that are usually valuable to the business are usually not instantly discernible ROI. It’s one of those, “We need to measure it, but we need to measure it again and again.” We need to know why we’re measuring it, which a lot of people are missing.
What is the actual outcome or result that we need to be able to evaluate so that we can check? Fairly early on, it’s like, is this information or this data going to get us to tell us if this outcome is the outcome that we want? That’s the other piece of the equation. I’ll use one out of your world and you can talk about it. People will talk about, “I’m not getting more followers.” It’s like, what do you want the followers to be doing? I’ve been having this conversation with another client about, “Our YouTube channel isn’t growing.”
The folks that come from the strategy side of it are asking and I’ve learned enough from you. It’s like, “They’re asking the right questions. I’m not sure if I would necessarily know to ask the right question, but I can identify it’s the right question.” The question was, are we doing it for volume? In this case, their YouTube channels are big enough that it could be about dollars on YouTube. Are we doing it for conversions to their product?
Don't assume just because it was that way then, it's going to continue to be that way forever. Share on XIf we’re doing it for volume, you’re right, we need to grow the viewership. We need to grow the followers. We need to grow all of those things. If we’re doing it for conversion, we may have all the followers that we need. We may not be messaging them correctly. Part of it is not just, are we gathering data, but are we gathering data that applies to the thing that we’re trying to solve, watch, improve? Whatever that outcome is that we’re going for. Back to, most of the time, that’s not an instant peace.
That makes me want to ask the question that I want to ask our readers. Although, our reader, honestly, this may be the first time they’re encountering this conversation to begin with. The question that should be a follow-up to what you said is, how do you, as a founder or as even a team leader, distinguish between, this is a thing that takes time versus this is a thing that is not working?
It’s important from the beginning to define where and when we’re going to measure it. We don’t just pick a random date unless we have no flipping clue because sometimes we have no flipping clue. It’s like, “I don’t know. Check it in a month.” Most of the time, we have an idea of what’s going to be reasonable. Part of it is, how often can we gather data and relatively easily, and how often will that data be changing. Using your ads example that you talked about earlier. Ads information, you’ve got probably minute by minute, but definitely hour by hour.
How Business Owners Distinguish Patience From Strategic Failure
You can have a lot of data points within a few days. Her evaluating and her experience was a great example. Her experience was lead advertising, and it’s like, “If it’s not working in two days, we have enough data.” You’re like, “No, this is conversion and we need two weeks.” I can’t remember exactly what your timeframe was, but we’ll say two weeks of data. Part of that is saying, what is the reasonable minimum evaluation period? Where do we find that minimum amount?
At that point, truly asking the question for yourself to say, “Given I’ve gotten there, do I feel like this data isn’t in fact enough data or do I need to extend it a bit longer?” Back to making those choices and saying, “When do we call it?” Sometimes it’s leveraging an expert that has more experience. Quite honestly, I have not done anything in the ads arena for lots and lots of reasons. I would assume, because I’ve got enough general knowledge to say, “In most cases, you can probably decide in a week.”
In fact, I was helping a client find a physical person for their physical office. I used Indeed, which was my first time using Indeed and upping the thing. It’s like, “How long should I be running ads?” “I don’t know how many people we’re going to get.” I don’t know how many qualified people we’re going to get. I’ll just use this as a real-life example. I said it for two weeks. This was not a super high, qualified, uniformity position. It was an office assistant.
Shipping, moving stuff, and setting up things. This is not complicated. I said, “Two weeks should be plenty.” Indeed allows you to turn it off earlier. It ran for about five days and we had a reasonable number of semi-qualified. Let’s see if they will do the next step properly. I turned it off because I think we had 17 or 20 that were good enough.
Twenty promising.
To take them to the next step. Now, the next step was a much harder step. It was one of those that you have to do all the things exactly the way that you’re supposed to do them. In the meantime, some of the others read and jumped to that step first. I had like 2 or 3 that paid attention. You’re automatically making it to the next step. I ended up with maybe four when we did that, and then looked at them closely. It was like, “I think these people are qualified.”
We had the next, next step. Of the four, only two made it through the next step. They’ll be interviewed next, so I can’t tell you. I made a guess. Now, was that a completely random guess? No, because years ago, I ended up having to fill a department. Over time, I hired a lot of people. I know that you need about 10 to 15 reasonable candidates to get to 4 or 5 good candidates that will probably get you to 2 or 3 interviewable candidates. I was using my experience on that. It wasn’t just completely random. That’s also part of it. I also knew I didn’t need to keep running that ad for another week to, hopefully, get one or two better candidates.
This is a good example because as you said, you had enough experience in the past to know how many face-value potential candidates you needed to make it through to be able to have two top contenders and extend an offer within a certain period of time. What you didn’t know going into this is, how many overall applications you would need to get in order to get to that short list of 17 to 20 decent pool.
You didn’t know because you hadn’t used Indeed before how long it would take you to get that through Indeed. Whether you could have done that in a different way organically or what. Those were the only variables you had to test. Once you got numbers that you knew, recognized, and understood, then it was easy from there. Now, you get to take all that information into the next time you’re in a similar situation.
I also understand this is a level issue. This is one where lots of candidates were going to be qualified, because we weren’t asking for lots and lots of pre-reqs. If I wanted to use Indeed for another hiring situation, but a more complex role.
More of an executive role.
Maybe a more experienced role or whatnot. It’d be like, “I probably do need at least two weeks or three weeks.” What I’ve learned over time is, generally, you need about 10 to 20 candidates that are making it past the first glance to get to 2 or 3 good ones. That’s been pretty consistent in most cases until we get truly to the high-level executive roles because at that point, you’re not using a thing like Indeed. You’re talking to recruiters. You’re using your network. It’s a different process then.
The Pitfall Of Shifting Variables And Managing Profit Expectations
Back to, because when you’re hiring for an executive. You don’t need a high volume of overall applicants. You need twenty solid applicants. Though, search firms cost more money than an Indeed ad and reaching out to your personal network takes more time than running an Indeed ad. The ROI on those investments tends to be much higher in terms of getting you to that list of twenty.
That’s such a good example. Over the years that we have worked together, we’ve had to have this conversation several times about, is this a thing that takes time or is this the thing that’s not working? I would say a couple of things to bring up before we move on. I’m curious if you have anything you want to add. There’s the consistency piece. Are you doing it consistently enough to evaluate it? The context thing.
This is where people muck things up both in operations and in marketing. They want to change multiple variables because they’re frustrated with things not working fast enough. They’ve changed the overall context. You think you’ve been testing this for a year, but you’ve made significant changes to the context every other month. We don’t have more than 60 days of consistent data in the last twelve months for any one idea.
People want to change multiple variables because they're frustrated with things not working fast enough. Then they've changed the overall context. Share on XThere is my favorite, which is the wrong practice. Are you applying the wrong tactics? Is this the wrong decision or the wrong method? Do you have inaccurate expectations? There is a conversation I know you had with a client not too long ago that made me think of this, which was a relatively new client who had a boatload of data that they had been evaluating and reviewing. They were like, “I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong. I’m a smart person. I understand these numbers, but I must be missing something because the business should be much more profitable than it is.”
You were like, “I’m going to have to look at that because given what I know about the industry, the market and this, I’m not sure that’s the case.” You were able to go in and find a couple of things to tweak, but it just came down to inaccurate expectations. They didn’t know what the profit margin should be in that type of business. You did.
Back to, what does that mean? One of the things that we’ve seen a lot over many years is people are like, “It says I’m profitable, but I’m not making any money.” It’s like, “Is your pay included before you look at that profitability number?” No. I’m like, “You’re doing work in the business, right?” They’re like, “I work in the store.” In my case, I have one-on-one client meetings. There’s all sorts of things and it’s like, are you getting paid an appropriate wage for that work? If you are, and then there’s money left over, that’s real profit.
The question starts becoming of, are we putting the profit in our pocket or are we taking other people’s advice and doing other things with it? Not realizing that’s why the money’s not there. Back to, what do we expect that profit line at the bottom to mean? There’s cash flow profit. What’s left over is in your pocket, then there’s accounting profit. Which has some sneaky little bits in it that can make it look profitable when it’s not.
One of the classic things is, I buy an asset for the business and that doesn’t show up on the P&L, but it does take real cash to do it. I’m not sure exactly which because we’ve had this conversation with several people. That was the situation in this particular business that I’m thinking of. They were a huge business. They were making millions of dollars and their profitability showed millions of dollars.
Demystifying Marketing Open Rates And Customer Intent
What they didn’t get was that building they bought, put a big deposit down and had to do a lot of changes to, is why you don’t see any cash. That didn’t show on the P&L. Now, the value of your business because of the asset went up drastically. That was not money that was going in your pocket because it went into purchasing this bigger asset. This was not a brand-new business owner. They didn’t get that. It is sometimes about understanding what is the expectation and what does that number mean.
One of the things that everyone’s had to make adjustments on over time, you’ve talked about a lot, and I still talk about it and people are like, “My open rate is such and such.” Open rates at this point. Why? Depending on if they’re seeing it on their phone or they’ve got a preview shown, there’s all sorts of things that will say they opened it. It doesn’t necessarily mean that any actual human eyes spent more than a millisecond.
That’s the thing, is understanding that the only thing that can be tracked is behavior. We cannot track intent. Although, you’re right, it’s vastly inaccurate. Conceivably, you can track opens, but that doesn’t mean they read a word. It’s like you can track how many impressions a TV ad it gets, assuming anybody watches TV nowadays. You don’t know who goes to the bathroom during the commercials.
There’s all sorts of pieces there. We haven’t even talked about that, but that becomes, how accurate is the data that you’re looking at in the way that you’re interpreting it? As I said, open rates is something probably everyone that would read is familiar with. Open rates can look good, but it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Now, if your open rates are exceedingly low, that is telling you something. That probably means you’ve got a deliverability problem.
A reasonable open rate doesn’t necessarily mean that eyeballs are spending time on it. That it’s getting into anyone’s brain. There’s other metrics that you may need to look at for that. I’m going to go back to that one because it’s a good one. You and I have been doing this long enough. There was a time when open rates were a good metric. As software changed, which happens all the time, then it became less and less of a good metric.
That’s the other thing we have to take into consideration is, is this thing still giving us the data we think we’re getting or has that changed? It’s another reason that the consistency piece matters because over time, it’s like, is this consistency benefiting us or are we taking it at face value? We’re looking at the back of their head and not their face anymore.
The consistency thing, I’m so glad you brought that up because this is where you are good at consistently tracking your data and the data that matters. Looking at the data can reveal a problem or a win or a loss that you didn’t know was coming. I’ve seen a lot of our retail clients, for instance. As their business grows, their cash flow shrinks. A lot of times, that is because they have hired more staff in the store so that they can be less present in the store.
What they don’t realize until you are looking at the numbers on the P&Ls is that they never paid themselves an hourly wage for the time in the store. They just took their owner’s draw. When they go from being in the store twenty hours a week to paying somebody else to be there twenty hours a week, it looks like, “My business is doing terribly.”
When in reality, they would have been doing themselves a much better favor had they been at the very least paying themselves on paper that hourly wage so that they could account for it. That’s where I see consistency being a benefit. Where have you seen it show up? What things, when you have enough data that’s tracked consistently, gets revealed that otherwise might stay hidden?
The Exponential Power Of Consistent Weekly Reviews
The short answer is everywhere. The consistency of it is where it starts to show. Back to, because then you can start seeing trends. You can see where things move. Within our own business, the thing that we’ve seen most is in our weekly review and action plan process. That one client, up until she stopped working with us within 2026, had been with me for nine years, I want to say. She was my very first client to start using that process long before we called it that. Long before we did.
Long before it had a name.
Long before we were doing quarterly planning. Long before anything. One of the things was, she was consistent right out of the gate of doing this weekly process, which had the same four questions. I bet she did it for seven years. I don’t have the data in front of me but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if she had done it for seven years. She was super consistent the entire time. Very quickly, was able to see what actions and behaviors were making a difference.
The thing is, anything that gets tracked, measured improves greatly. Anything that gets measured and reported to someone else improves exponentially. That’s the thing. She was tracking immediately, but was reporting it to me, which allowed her to be able to make changes in her behavior way faster. We’ve seen the same thing once we got it as part of our whole program. That became a key element. It was probably in 2024 that we had this revelation of like, the most important thing we do is the weekly review and action plan.
That’s the most important thing we do. It’s where we’re helping our clients see consistently where they’re making progress over time. Since we do review it, they know that we’re looking at it. One of the things that we set up years ago now, we call it attendance. It’s not really attendance, but we keep attendance. We see who is doing it consistently. On our side of the data, what we have seen is those who do it consistently over time make more progress faster than those who don’t.
It’s one of those things that I have never seen an exception to. Now, I don’t have 15,000 records. I don’t have statistically valid numbers by any statisticians. It’s so consistent that I can’t believe it’s not true, even though it’s over a relatively small data set. I don’t know how many clients I’ve served over the past number of years. It’s probably not more than 40 or 50 total because I work with my clients for a long time. I’m not adding and letting go clients all the time, but the data just doesn’t vary.
We need to not discount our experience and instinct, because our brains are smarter than we think they are. Share on XLet me just ask one more question and then I will let you go. If somebody is reading and they are doing something in their business that they’re tempted to let go of because they don’t see the payoff. How would you suggest they make that final decision whether to stop or give it more time?
Trusting Data And Gut Instinct To Make Your Final Pivot Decision
There’s two elements to the question. One is, do you think you’ve gotten good data based on the expectation that you have? Are you getting good data? Does your expectation match that data? There’s a whole data piece. It’s like, “Do I have good data? Is that expectation reasonable?” Sometimes that means you need to talk to somebody else to say, “I’m gathering this. I’m helping with finding that. I’m not seeing it.”
I had a friend for a long time. He was like, “Am I crazy or what?” That becomes the question. That can become the question here. The other piece, which matters, and we didn’t talk about it at all. After you’ve got the data, what does your gut tell you? Does your gut tell you that this isn’t working? Does your gut tell you haven’t done what you said you’ve done? You feel like you need more data. That gut piece also matters. It also matters. Don’t discount that. We didn’t talk about it at all. We’ve talked about that on other episodes. I’m not worried that we didn’t hit that.
At some point, that is part of the equation. It’s like, does this feel right? Does it feel like we need to stop or does it feel like maybe we need to keep going? Maybe I don’t quite have it yet. Maybe I need to make a tweak. Maybe I need to do those things. Back to my hiring example that I used earlier in the episode. There’s some amount of experience that we’ve had that will give us an instinct. Even if it doesn’t line up exactly with this experience. We need to not discount that because our brains are smarter than we think they are.
True. I’m going to give our One Really Good Question email a plug because that weekly dose of reflection is what helps you train your intuition. Some questions are valuable simply because we come back to them over time. Our One Really Good Question email gives you a fresh reflection question every single Friday. You can sign up for that totally free at www.tonyakubo.com/Question. You would be amazed at how much your thinking patterns change over the course of a month, just four emails. You can reply to any of those emails and you’ll hear back from us as well. We’ll catch you in the next episode.
Mentioned in This Episode
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.
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