Are you doing an After Action Review? You should!

Are you doing an after-action review, or do you even know what that is? 

Well, back when I was an engineer, we called them 'post-mortems', but I way prefer 'after-action reviews'. What it is is you go through whatever you've tested before, whether it be a launch when you're doing budgets, whatever the thing is that you've set a hypothesis and took action on, you want to go back through and decide: Did that work? Did it not work? What pieces are we moving forward? And what didn't work at all and we're never going to try that piece again? One of the things that I see with entrepreneurs is that they're running so fast every single day that this small stuff that really makes a huge difference, gets swept aside. So instead of going, "Oh, wait, that worked, and that didn't work," they have no idea, and they'll repeat the same thing over and over again. 

So I highly recommend, and it does not have to be a huge amount of time, setting aside some time after you've tried something in a test form, whether it be on a weekly call that you do with your team or a monthly call, just put it in your agenda where you can really do a quick after-action review. Our memories are maybe 50% accurate, so when I ask entrepreneurs about a launch, "Do you remember what your metrics were?" Because they might not have them pulled up in front or they maybe even didn't really track metrics, a lot of the times, they're wrong. "Oh, I think the sales page did about this much." And then we look and I'm like, "We don't have to touch that sales page. That is amazing. Why were you going to touch it?" So knowing the actual hard-core data, and what worked and what didn't work is huge. And taking that extra 30 minutes or an hour will save you time going forward. 

So what I highly recommend, put it on your calendar right now, in one of your weekly meetings or on one of your agendas if you have that, and ask the questions: What worked? Was our hypothesis correct? What didn't seem to work? what seemed like it was way more time and not enough results? Start going through and figuring out what chunks worked best. Because sometimes when you do a launch, it's not all bad; there are pieces that really worked. Or maybe it's not all good; there were pieces that didn't work or that you hated to do that you really don't want to do again, but you forgot, and then you do another launch, and you do it again and go, "I hated that part. I hated doing 20 webinars in a row," or whatever those issues are that you're popping up. That way, we're recalibrating with correct data as you move forward. 

So if you haven't done one already, especially in the day and age right now, where businesses are pivoting, that's where we're really going to figure out if you need to change the way, the direction that you're actually going in. Or if not, it helps you move forward faster. I hope you try it today. Have an amazing day! Bye.

Summary

Title

Do you AAR?? You should!

Description

Do you know what an AAR is? Listen in and learn the importance of doing it in your business!!! Comment Section: Here's a free downloadable AAR guide! -> https://www.cebma.org/wp-content/uploads/Guide-to-the-after_action_review.pdf

Tags: Business Review, metrics, Reviews

Categories: Action Plans, Business Growth/Scaling, Goal Setting, Productivity, Systems/Processes, Testing

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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