You can’t do several things at the same time

This is a common, universal lesson that one often hears. But it’s also a wrong statement in entrepreneurship which requires to achieve a lot simultaneously, and at a fast pace.

However, trying to focus on several things at once tends to create a lot of noise and a lack of attention on the things that really matter. Entrepreneurs get lost in their own agenda.

At TheFamily, many of our entrepreneurs have asked themselves that same question: which things should I focus on? We’ve always told them to improve only one metric at a time. By telling them to do so, we’ve seen a great pattern emerge: The best ones were actually those focusing on the one, most downstream metric of their activity.

Let’s take a few well-known, simple and obvious examples of what that would be:

• Airbnb: Number of bookings every week
• Facebook: Active users every week
• Slideshare: Number of presentations uploaded every week

It works incredibly well because what happens is a mix of strategy, intuition and talent. The entire team focuses on improving that data week after week. As a consequence, they establish a whole upstream strategy towards that metric but they also tend to think out of the box, acting unconsciously and pushing that data to grow at all costs. Their productivity highly increases, milestones are reached like never before, the team is united.

So… What is the one, most downstream data that your team should focus on improving week after week?