Whatever You Focus On, Increases

How One Number on a Whiteboard Turned Into $1.3 Million

In 2015, my restaurant had one goal on the wall: $1,225,000 in sales for the year. Not a mission statement. Not a vibe. A number.

We didn't just hit it — we blew past it, closing the year at $1.3 million. The year before, the goal had been different: an 80% customer experience score, up from a target of 70. We hit that one too. Two different goals, two different years, same positive result.

It wasn't that we worked harder those years. It was that we stopped chasing everything and started running every decision through one filter. At the time, my leadership team was reading The 4 Disciplines of Execution together, and we took exactly one idea from that book and used it hard: whatever you focus on increases. Choose a Wildly Important Goal, write it down, and let it decide things for you.

So that's what we did. Do we come in at 3 a.m. to work a catering order? Here's how it moves the number. What's this week's play on sales? Same filter, every time. That single question (how does this affect the goal?) was behind the decision to build an Additional Distribution Point off campus for catering. That one move alone pushed us more than 13 points past target, with an estimated profit margin over 20%. It also built our reputation for catering across campus, which grew sales and lowered labor cost at the same time.

None of that happened because we were smarter than the year before. It happened because we'd stopped trying to make progress on everything and started making every decision answer to one thing.

Most leaders I coach aren't missing effort. They're missing a filter. When everything matters equally, nothing actually moves. You're just busy in a lot of directions at once. A single, written, specific goal does something a to-do list never will: it tells you what to say no to.

What's the one goal you could write down this week and run every decision through for the next 90 days?