Most of the time I try to keep things simple and stay away from acronyms and playing business jargon bingo. However, I’ve found that MSP is one acronym worth knowing and practicing.
MSP stands for minimum standard of performance. Once you have your goal set and your milestones figured out you can work backwards until you’re able to calculate your minimum standard of performance or MSP. Your MSP are the things you need to do on a regular basis, typically daily or weekly, to hit your milestones and reach your destination. It’s not the busy work, or the service work, or the extra stuff, MSP is the activity which actually moves the needle.
If your goal is to lose weight your MSP might be to track your calories every day and stay under a certain amount, to exercise 3 times per week for at least 30 minutes, or maybe both.
If your goal is to write a book your MSP might be to write for two hours a day at least four days a week. For most entrepreneurs who have a business building goal their MSP is some sort of relationship building activity.
That could mean phone calls, invitations, one-to-one connect meetings, social media posts, networking events, or anything else which helps increase influence and sort the prospects from the suspects.
Whenever you want to achieve a goal you’ll need to do some work. If you can figure out what activity actually generates the desired result, you can make sure you’re doing the right work instead of random busy work. When you know what activity creates the results you can set your minimum standard of performance to match the results you want to create.
For example, back when I wanted to earn a promotion within my insurance agency, I figured out that if I had 6 one-to-one connect meetings each week I would generate the desired amount of sales. It didn’t matter if the people I was talking to became clients or not.
My averages showed that 6 conversations would lead to the desired amount of sales because some would buy, some would make an introduction, some would buy in the future, etc. Those who weren't interested would get out of the way and free up my time for those who were. All I had to focus on was having those 6 get-to-know-you conversations each week and the results would take care of themselves.
I tracked this on a whiteboard in my office and every Thursday if I didn’t see at least 6-8 connect meetings booked for the following week, I started making calls to people I’d recently met until I had my 6 or more connect meetings lined up for the next week. If someone cancelled, I filled their spot. It got serious about my MSP in August and hit my goal by the following January.
What is your minimum standard of performance and what are you doing to make sure you hit it on schedule? Feeling overwhelmed just thinking about it? Contact me and we’ll figure it out together.
Enjoy the journey.