For founders and corporate executives, having a firm grasp of finance is fundamental to be able to successful run a company. From budgeting to forecasting to cashflow analysis, data has become the backbone of most strategic decisions. But something curious happens which is that these same founders and executives often fail at adopting the same rigor when it comes to their personal finances. More importantly, they fail at getting to grips with their own body. Why is that and how is it linked?
The majority are visionary and relentless achievers, achieving remarkable success in their careers. Yet, a personal challenge has remained unresolved for years: shedding excess weight and achieving a defined, appealing physique. The demands of leadership, frequent travel, and countless business engagements have taken a toll on their well-being.
Despite their accomplishments, their love for indulgent food and alcohol, coupled with their fast-paced lifestyle, has led them to weight gain. Previous attempts at weight loss have left them hungry and unsatisfied, ultimately leading to regained weight.
They have grown weary of discomfort in their attire, avoiding situations that expose their physique, and feeling overlooked in physical settings. This erosion of confidence has impacted their personal life.
There’s a perception to the outside world, that they aren’t really that overweight. In fact, the world has assumed them as chubby from the start yet very confident professionally.
But internally, they have been a silent sufferer, becoming an expert at hiding the fat, but secretly wishing with a physique that others much younger seem to accomplish with greater ease.
They possess a limiting belief that having been chubby all their lives, they can lose weight but will then gain it again never getting to the point where they can look in the mirror and love what they see. Worse, they aren’t aware of how deeply impacting this truly is.
Their journey has been one of triumphs, yet their demanding lifestyle has taken a toll on their well-being. The demands of the role have led to unwanted weight gain and a physique that doesn’t reflect their potential. Amidst their achievements, they have missed out on meaningful moments and vitality.
Navigating a deluge of conflicting fitness information online, they face barriers of limited time and knowledge. They crave an evidence-based, structured plan enriched with daily data points for analysis and gamification.
Amid the plethora of diets and exercise plans propagated by self-professed experts, they have become skeptical. And with reason. For those that feel this resonates with them, and seek to regain control, exude confidence, and restore the energy they once possessed, there is a path of success and sustainability.
But the first step is to understand that they actually possess the tools and mindset for such a transformation. They’ve done it countless times in business, and this transformation, or project, is no different.
You see, your body is no different from your business. Feed it and it flourishes, starve it and it dies. But somewhere in the middle is where all the magic happens – when you analyse all the data available to you, create a data driven strategy and consistently measure your results against benchmarks, data points and objectives/goals – whether KPIs and/or OKRs.
Don’t Set Yourself up For Failure
In the dynamic world of business, success hinges on strategic decision-making, meticulous planning, and unwavering determination. Surprisingly, these same principles apply to achieving optimal health and fitness. I want to take you on a journey of exploring how weight loss parallels to running a successful company, where every calorie is akin to money, and data-driven approaches reign supreme.
Anything else, will ensure you set yourself up for failure. Yes, all those diets, recipes and made for your plans by the “nutritionist” that take you on a fruitless (no pun intended) quest to buy 50 different raw materials you’ve probably never heard of before. To then have you navigate your already complex day intermittently consuming strange handfuls of nuts, beans, and dried fruits.
Understanding your Balance Sheet
Just as a company’s balance sheet must reflect equilibrium between revenue and expenses, maintaining a healthy weight requires balance between calorie intake and expenditure. But this won’t show you the whole picture. It’s one data point.
How many companies have you heard of that were in profit only to find that suddenly they fail to meet payroll? How is this possible? Turning a profit consistently?
Someone, somewhere along the line forgot the principal of positive cashflow. Yes, you can be making a profit only to find yourself bankrupt in the process. A profitable company can face insolvency for a number of reasons, including cash flow issues, debt obligations, and any number of other financial factors.
Understanding the concept of energy balance is fundamental to effective weight management. Just like a balance sheet, your personal score card needs to take other factors into consideration.
You go on a diet and find that the weight starts dropping. In fact, it keeps dropping and one day you decide to take your foot off the accelerator and relax somewhat. You have been starving yourself of something, you’ve just been oblivious to it. Much akin to streamlining your costs, take a company to the bone and you are in deep trouble.
Most people that go on diets end up losing water but more importantly losing muscle. It seems counter intuitive for the body to go for muscles and not fat first. This happens when someone trying to lose weight does not eat enough protein, over trains, doesn’t sleep well or does not give themselves time to recover.
Having a Solid Budget that You Keep To
You need to create your budget and ensure that it is realistic. I learnt the hard way that comparing my budgeted to actual results 4 times a year gave me very little room to keep me on track. In fact, by the time I received the numbers back from the accountants it was already too late.
What I found effective was to create a yearly budget based on monthly inputs and outputs and then take each month and divide it into weeks. Finding where you fall short in a week is very easy to recover from during the following week. Incremental change is by far more effective than sudden abrupt changes.
Your first data point is calories (money). You want to ensure you are earning more than you are spending. This is called the calorie deficit. You want to be spending (consuming) less than you are making (eating). Very simple, yet it then comprises of multiple levers that you get to adjust weekly as you find your path to success.
Benchmark Yourself
The same way you benchmark your company, where you should be, based on your industry, location and other important aspects, you’ll want to do the same with yourself:
- First step is to use a BMI calculator to find out, based on your stats, where you should be – your end point. Choose whether you want to work on the imperial or metric scale. Input your height and weight. In. my case, I am 169cms and weigh 63 kilos. The result BMI is 22.06 – smack in the middle of healthy. If your BMI is above 25, then you will want to lose weight.
- Your next step is to use the BMR calculator to work out what your daily calorie level should be to stay at the point you are at. This is the point of equilibrium. Your break-even point (BEP). Below that point you lose money (-weight), go above it and you make money (+weight).
- The third step is to use the calorie calculator tocalculate how many calories you need to consume to gain or lose weight. You will input in the first section, your gender, activity level (be honest), height, current weight, and age. In the second part, you will input your overall goal, target weight and timeline. Sounds like a project right? It is. Your life project.
Setting Goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
KPIs provide a focus for strategic and operational improvement, create an analytical basis for decision making and help focus attention on what matters most. In business, setting clear objectives is paramount.
Similarly, defining SMART goals – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound goals – is essential for weight loss success. You will be looking at specific levers that are fundamental in your journey to sustainable weight loss.
Whilst weight is probably the most important KPI, without some further KPIs and analysis, it can lead you down the diet traps which most of us have unfortunately experienced – you start to lose weight, get excited, only to then put it all back some time later. It leaves you with the limiting belief that somehow you were always meant to be overweight. That it’s probably genetics, hormones, or just because that’s the way that it’s meant to be.
If you are like I was, chubby since I can remember (going back 40 years!), then the journey seems so much more likely to end badly than well.
After all, it’s not through lack of trying or the amount of personal sacrifice. But you aren’t meant to suffer. You are supposed to unlearn bad habits substituting them for better quality information and more importantly, actual data points.
You will be measuring weight but also fat%, muscle% and visceral fat%. Most “smart” scales will give you those and many more metrics such as lean mass, BMI, water, etc… I say “smart” because they are anything but. My recommendation is to always use one scale and never jump onto another one. Also, do not compare yourself to others. Your data is your data. Their data is theirs.
You are looking for a downward tendency in weight but also in fat as opposed to most crash diets that may temporarily deflate you and happily eat away at your muscle leaving most of your fat nicely unaffected. Some people even manage to lose a lot of weight, muscle, yet little fat – they become what is referred to as skinny fat. This is normally a sign of a lack of protein in the diet.
The achievable side of the smart goal is the hardest for me to explain to people. Most of my clients don’t really believe that they will end up where they really desire to be. Their limiting beliefs, previous experiences and fear of failing has left them in a state of disbelief. Left to their own accord, they will have a very safe and unrewarding goal. That’s where you need to have a process and coach that will guide you to where you desire to be.
Typically, my clients will aim for hitting 75kgs in 3 months whereby once in the program, they will hit that between month 1 and 2 depending on their starting weight. In reality they should be weighing 65Kg yet they can’t remember the last time they had that weight. So surely they are setting themselves up for failure having such an “impossible” and “unachievable” goal? Not really. They just don’t have the skills and tools to look that far. To envisage themselves in a way they have never really known.
Timeline is important as you need a structured plan with a start and finish date so that you can dissect your budget into weekly munchable pieces – easy to analyze and even easier to recover from small lapses. We collect data every single day yet analyze progress weekly. Spent (ate) too much money (calories) yesterday? No problem, spend less today. Yes, it’s that simple.
The most important driver though is the relevant aspect to this – why is this relevant? Why is this so important to you? Not why do you want this but instead why you desire it. What does this look like to you and ultimately how will it make you feel? The visualization should automatically bring a smile to your face and cause all sorts of warmth inside. Tap into that. Much like brainstorming, this isn’t the time to reflect on everything and anything standing in your way. It’s about choosing a proven plan and trusting the numbers.
Strategic Planning
Successful businesses thrive on strategic planning, and the same applies to nutrition and meal planning. By conducting nutritional research and remaining adaptable, individuals can develop sustainable strategies for long-term weight management. Having a 90-day plan that is broken down into weekly and daily tasks and checkpoints ensures you stay on track, correct any deviation, and learn from the data, where necessary, adapting and tweaking your strategy.
Marketing and Branding
Perception influences consumer behavior in business, much like it affects food choices. Understanding the psychology behind food marketing empowers you to make informed decisions and resist unhealthy temptations. It’s not about creating your personal brand – I actually find that a ridiculous concept. It’s about redefining who you want to be and that includes what you look like and how you feel. But the reason I have no time for personal branding is that none of this should be about what others think. And business is no different. It’s about being authentic and transparent, kind and loving but most importantly to you for you by you. Don’t fall in love with your company or your product but instead with your collaborators and customers (humans) but you can only do that if you love who you are or who you have become or want to become.
Operations Management
Efficient operations are key to success in business, just as crucial is optimizing the process for weight and fat loss. You also have to be efficient at knowing the importance of macros, especially protein, but also the composition of food. It’s of no use for people to tell you to only eat what comes from the ground though once you get to grips with calories and protein, fat and carbs, everything becomes so much clearer.
I often get clients tell me in the beginning of the process of shredding weight and fat that their “only” problem or habit or comforting action is alcohol. And that their job requires them to sit at a desk for hours on end only to have to go out and entertain clients afterwards.
Understanding the calorie intake associated with only a few drinks, will very quickly lead you to see how inefficient it is. You don’t need to go on a treadmill for an hour to understand the impact of high calorie intake. No more than having to work weeks for a client to understand that spending that revenue on fruitless enterprises, luxury company cars or expensive company retreats is inefficient.
Those same clients end up giving up on alcohol as opposed to giving up alcohol. It’s their choice and at the end of the day, they have a budget allocation issue they are now very aware of.
Human Resources
Yes, some people can do this on their own. Over time they have developed this skill not inherited it. You need to also learn and develop these skills. It is important to have support systems in place which are vital for success, whether in business or weight loss endeavors.
Building a supportive environment and seeking professional guidance can significantly impact outcomes and foster accountability. Get yourself a coach, but just ensure that he/she shares the same exact objective. Look at your why and try and match that to those that are focused on that. You want to have abs and not be reliant on exercise? Find someone who has done that, that understands your why or maybe even shares your why.
Working with a personal trainer that spends his/her life in the gym doesn’t seem like a good fit for someone who hates the gym and/or does not have time for it.
Hiring a nutritionist that is focused solely on health when you want to shed fat and weight quickly and keep it off is also probably not the most effective use of your time and investment $s.
Just like a business, you need to make changes and reinvent yourself in the short term to be able to last in the long term. You’ll get better at innovating and incremental change. With data, you’ll get smarter and more efficient. With the correct human resources, you’ll be more effective and efficient.
Corporate Culture
Social norms and peer support influence behavior in both contexts. The culture in your organization will always determine your path. It’s not about what you say but instead, what you do. One of the first thing I did when working with over 150 startups, indirectly as a mentor and then directly by running and redesigning acceleration programs, was to get them to define to each other what success meant, to define their core personal values (especially the non-negotiable ones) and to check them against their co-founders’ core values. Once they were aligned, their company culture could start to be defined. I know some have had success with involving their collaborators in the process of creating or redefining their internal culture. It is what eventually impacts everything you do, especially when having to make decisions in a crisis, in the absence of data or in these unprecedented times whereby the complexity of the world now outpaces the complexity of our minds.
My Manifesto
For me, it was about capturing and locking down my values and the culture, my internal business (me) was going to use as a central point. I created a personal manifesto that I share with the outside world – it represents what I believe, what I strive for and its public nature, an invitation for others to call me out on when my actions don’t equate to my manifesto of life. What is your manifesto? What internal culture do you want to have and what will ultimately guide you through uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity?
Wrapping it Up
Ultimately, getting the knowledge to lose weight and fat effectively is the easy part. Understanding why you binge eat, the lack of discipline, the lack of resilience and commitment to your cause, is the hardest part.
You will be tested through anniversaries, celebrations, eating out, boredom, stress and for some, the difficulty in staying on track when travelling. I only resolved this once I figured everything else out: Why am I doing this? Why do I desire this? Why is this so more important than anything else that the world throws at me?
I am doing it for me. No one else.
The parallels between weight loss and running a successful company are undeniable. By adopting a data-driven, evidence-based approach, we can achieve our goals with precision and confidence.
If this got you excited and you are ready to lose weight and fat efficiently, and you want to see your abs, then I would be honored to embark on this journey with you. You just better be determined, defined and ready to execute. No, contrary to what others love to declare on stage, business isn’t all about execution. It’s about executing a plan that works because its evidence based, data-driven but most importantly, repeatable.
