I just wrote a $22K check

Last week I wrote a $22,000 check for a personal health concierge. For my wife, my daughter, and me.

From day one you get: blood work, a full screening MRI, DEXA body composition scan, exercise treadmill test, audiometry, tonometry, peak flow testing, a dietary assessment, a functional movement assessment, and an introduction to their pharmacy team. All in a single day.

Then your doctor becomes your health quarterback. All of the data - from your personal trainer, your dietitian, your chiropractor, your physiotherapist, your massage therapist, even your workout devices - flows into one person who reviews it and coordinates everything. The tests repeat every year. If you need a specialist, they have an internal team that calls daily looking for cancellations, so appointments that normally take three to nine months take two to three weeks instead.

The whole program is built on a simple idea: preventative medicine. Everyone has something wrong with them, or at least something that's suboptimal. But most people don't find out until it hurts. Until something goes wrong. Until they're in a doctor's office dealing with a problem that would've been easy to fix two years ago if anyone had been looking for it.

I'd rather know the bad and fix it than wait for the bad to find me and make me pay for ignoring it.

And honestly, when I looked at the cost - $10K each for my wife and me, $2K for my daughter who's too young for most of the tests, plus probably another $3-4K over the course of the year - I couldn't come up with a single reason not to do it.

I've spent more on a single course. I've spent more on a single month from a consultant. I've spent a lot more, over the years, on things that matter a lot less than the health of my family.

But the real reason I did it - the thing that made me pull the trigger that day instead of putting it off like most people do - is that the model spoke to me on a level that went way beyond health.

It's a dashboard. That's what it is. Regular, in-depth tests that create comprehensive visibility into what's happening, so you can find the root causes of problems before they become emergencies, prioritize them, and start fixing them one by one. Not guessing or going off how you feel. Not waiting until something breaks. Measuring, diagnosing, then systematically addressing what the data tells you matters most.

Sound familiar? ;)

Because that is exactly what most agency owners are not doing with their business.

And what they don't know is costing them significantly more than the stuff that's already on their to-do list.

That never-ending, always-growing to-do list you carry around? The one that makes you feel busy and overwhelmed every single day? That's not what's costing you the most. Not even close. What's costing you the most is the stuff you don't even know to put on the list.

Like the agency owner I worked with who didn't know that one of their biggest clients - one of the accounts they considered a cornerstone of the business - was their least profitable. By a lot. They didn't know because they'd never looked at per-client profitability in a way that accounted for actual hours consumed versus hours scoped.

Or the owner whose team swore they were at capacity, and the owner knew intuitively that something didn't add up but couldn't prove it because there was no capacity forecast, no utilization tracking, no way to distinguish "I feel busy" from "I am measurably full." Turned out the team was at 55% utilization.

Or the one who hired managers to remove themselves from the day-to-day but couldn't figure out how to get those managers to produce the same output without constantly being in the weeds. The managers didn't have objectives, didn't have metrics, and didn't have a management methodology. Nobody had ever built the scoreboard that would tell them - and the owner -whether they were winning or losing.

Every one of these people thought they knew what was wrong. More clients, more people, maybe try this AI thing, maybe a new CRM. They were fixing the wrong things because they didn't know what the right things were. They couldn't diagnose problems they couldn't see.

Since doing this work, there's a whole world of metrics I pay attention to now that I didn't even know existed before. LTV to CAC ratio. CAC payback period. Billable to non-billable ratio. Revenue under management per pod. Delivery labor efficiency ratio. Unburdened comp versus SG&A versus net profit. The 9-gate management methodology.

And I stopped looking at the things I used to think mattered - the project management software, the bank account balance, the CRM dashboard, the Looker Studio reports. They were showing me activity, not health. They were telling me what happened, not why, and not what was about to happen next.

There's this phrase everyone loves: you can't manage what you can't measure. And it's true. But I think there's a better version of it.

You don't even know what should be measured.

That's the actual problem. It's not that you're failing to measure things. It's that you're measuring the wrong things, so you're managing the wrong things, so you're fixing the wrong things. And you're putting in exhausting, well-intentioned, effort on problems that aren't the ones holding you back.

Once you figure out what to measure and you build the scoreboard, suddenly there's a game your team can play. There are numbers they can see, targets they can hit, wins they can feel. The work gets gamified in the best possible way. People start competing with themselves to improve. Managers have something concrete to coach against. Accountability becomes natural instead of forced.

I mean, nobody plays a game they can't win.

This is why people give up on "accountability" and "dashboards" and "KPIs." They build scorecards that are confusing, or punitive, or disconnected from what people can control. The team looks at it, feels defeated, and checks out. The initiative dies.

The scoreboard has to be built right. It has to measure what matters. And the people looking at it have to feel like winning is possible.

My $22K investment in my health is to know what I don't know. To get ahead of problems before they find me. To build a dashboard for my body that shows me the truth so I can act on it instead of guessing and hoping everything's fine.

If you're running an agency and you don't have the equivalent for your business, the question isn't whether there are problems hiding from you. There are. The question is how expensive they're going to get before you find them.

I'm walking through all of this live in the workshop on March 12th (11:30am PST / 12:30pm MST / 1:30pm CST).

What I measure at my own agency, how I build the dashboards, how I find where the profit is hiding, how I increase team capacity without hiring, which clients I double down on and which I fire.

$99, full recording, live Q&A at the end.

Register here →

Nick