[00:23] Data vs. Action: When over-reliance creates stagnation

[02:06] Trusting your gut in the absence (or conflict) of data

[06:15] Errors in data measurement and definitions

[11:12] Why focusing too much on data could get you lapped by competition

Dan Uyemura: [00:00:00] If you can't move without data, you're dead, right? So I understand a lot of people want to have data to make better decisions, but if the lack of data or the lack of trust in data creates no decisions, you're, you're dead as a company. Welcome to the PushPress Podcast, where gym owners learn to dodge bad advice, crush the competition and actually make money doing what they love.

Dan Uyemura: Let's get after it. 

Nick Reyes: So we had a core value at PushPress and it was be data driven. Uh, one of the things that I actually saw manifesting, uh, within our team during this time period, uh, it was a good window, probably still happens from time to time, but it was like this friction between, you know, some people who would act the minute they got data, they were often sprinting and the, the, the opposite was true as well, which is like, I can't act without any data.

Nick Reyes: And it's just like this paralysis between two teams and it was like this friction that was forming. And so what's interesting is I, I kind of see the [00:01:00] same path forming in the fitness space. 

Dan Uyemura: Yeah, yeah, exactly. The, the keynote that I've done in the last couple of years, the last two keynotes have been pretty data driven.

Dan Uyemura: And I will say, if I would have given that keynote eight years ago or, or so, I don't think anyone would have really, it would have been too much. Uh, but now what I see is people leaning in, eyes open, pencils out. Uh, you can see very clearly people are lean, like, hungry for the data. And I think this episode is more of a cause for pause.

Dan Uyemura: Ooh, that rhymed. Cause for pause. Uh, in, in saying that, like, I mean, I'll be honest. When we established the dbDataDriven as a core value here, we didn't really know. It, it sounded cool. It felt cool. We didn't really know the implications of that. And I'm actually seeing this same type of thing manifesting in the gym ownership space.

Dan Uyemura: So I think this episode is really important to talk about because data is not the Holy Grail. Having, you know, access to data or acting only on data can be [00:02:00] actually bad if you don't understand what you're doing. And so we need to dive right into that right now. Let's do it. Okay, cool. So the first thing, and this is the first thing that tipped my brain off to this.

Dan Uyemura: I read a Bezos quote once that basically said like when data and antidote conflict, antidote usually wins. And Bezos is like the king of running the business by KPIs. So I was like, what? That made no sense, right? Like, humans gut wins. Why? Why is that the case? If you really think about it, especially in the age of AI, I've thought about this a lot recently.

Dan Uyemura: We as human beings are wired to measure everything around us at all times. I know there's three people outside potentially about to start working on a lawnmower. You know what I mean? Like, the computer don't. Nothing else does. Yeah, they're out there right now. So anyway, but I'm, I'm just saying like we are aware of our surroundings innately, and we are measuring things whether we know it or not.

Dan Uyemura: And I was actually having a conversation with someone recently and I'm like, Hey, I never realized like good leaders have really good [00:03:00] gut decision or instinct. Like that's a thing. And really it's because they have a lot of experience. And what experience translates is data. Yeah. It's just data over periods of time.

Dan Uyemura: It's all data. Unstructured stacking. Yeah, it's unstructured data that creates feelings and feelings. Create gut decisions, right. And so this is where Bezos is saying, like, if your gut is telling you strongly that something that is, the data is not. Usually like you have, you actually have millions, probably more data points than the data does, and you can't quantify that, but you just know it's wrong.

Dan Uyemura: And so I think there's one thing, the first thing we're off the bat, again, why I've, I've slightly pivoted away from leaning so hard into the data piece is because Um, it's easy for data to be wrong, manipulated, miscalculated, misdefined, which we'll go over these things later. And you just have a sense that like some, the sniff test doesn't pass here.

Nick Reyes: Right. Right. I mean, you kind of hit the nail on the head. Like data can always be wrong. And again, I know we'll talk about like definition. Wrong is a subjective term too. [00:04:00] Correct. I step on a scale every morning. I don't know if you know this, like every single morning I step on a scale, I log my weight. Uh.

Nick Reyes: Big scale guy now. It wasn't always this way. I hated scale. Anyways, even my home scale, they say that Home scales can be off by, you know, five percent at any given time because of changes in Earth's gravity Right, but and that's even stepping on the exact same scale at the exact same time every morning and they're still It's like seasonality.

Nick Reyes: There's so many different. There's still a margin for error in there, right? Now You know, again, the benefit is I'm using the same one, the same consistency. And again, we'll get into definitions cause that would kind of be the equivalent here, but like even doing that, there's still a ring for error. So if you are only going on what the data says.

Nick Reyes: As opposed to the gut. So, like, I step on that scale and my, my gut reaction is, Eh, that's right. That seems about right. Based upon, I worked out yesterday. I didn't eat like a trash can yesterday. You know, like, I [00:05:00] followed my macros. But that's the gut reaction from the previous day and all the data points that we're talking about.

Nick Reyes: I remember I had broccoli with lunch and I remember I did these things. 

Dan Uyemura: If you stepped on a scale and all of a sudden it's like, Oh, you're 240 pounds, you'd be, your instinct would be like, absolutely not. Yeah. 

Nick Reyes: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. 

Dan Uyemura: Yeah. And, and then the interesting topic to that is, so you're, you're talking about stepping on the same scale.

Dan Uyemura: You know, you go to the doctors, you step on a scale, you know, variable scales, variable weights. Like I even went to my coffee shop and they're like, Oh, we're using a new scale now. So we have to, we have to re tear everything because the coffee grinds aren't measuring out the same. The flavor is not the same.

Dan Uyemura: So this happens, we just assume scales are scales. The other interesting thing is, like, I, once in a while, used to step on a scale at the gym, and it was only this medical grade, like, it didn't just freeze on a number. So it was just constantly, like, trying to find my weight, and what I realized is it never stopped.

Dan Uyemura: It would just be, like, You know, 200. 1, 200. 2, 199. 8. And no matter how, yeah, how, how the wind blew, whatever, my weight never [00:06:00] just stopped, which was infuriating because at home you're used to it being hits a number, this one just never stopped. And I'm like, wow, I must weigh something. What do I weigh? It just never came to a number, which is so weird.

Dan Uyemura: Yeah. So the other thing I want to, I want to point to in terms of data is like, okay, we, we operate small businesses. You know, like, Oh, the data is really hard to come to the data is an accurate. Well, I'm a small business. Maybe that's normal. But the reality is like, this goes all the way up to publicly traded companies.

Dan Uyemura: Like nobody really knows their data for sure. And the more accurate you can get, obviously the better, better decision you can make, but again, I think it's more about directionality. So it's like, if you step on the scale every day and it's like generally trending up, you're generally getting heavier, you know, like that's just the case, but whether you're, you know.

Dan Uyemura: 200 pounds or 200. 8 pounds doesn't really matter right at equation. Right. So the thing is, when you're talking about publicly traded companies, it can matter because like a rounding error could be a billion [00:07:00] dollars to them, or it could materially affect shareholders. And there's this crazy study that basically found that publicly traded companies present their numbers to the investor community.

Dan Uyemura: And this is like regulated by the SEC, audited, you've got, you know, tons of pencil pushers, like making sure the numbers are right. The C suite, when, when interviewed on this, they felt 71 percent of the C suite felt very confident that their numbers were accurate. And then they interviewed the accountants and the people that publish numbers and only 38 percent of the accountants and the people actually working on the numbers felt that the numbers were accurate.

Nick Reyes: So it just hit me what one reason why this probably could happen. Uh, so I worked for, um, a publicly traded company. I've worked for a couple of publicly traded companies and in sales, when we have to do forecasting, this is a quick tangent, but, uh, when we have to do forecasting and you're an account executive, it's like.

Nick Reyes: I'm going to do 20 million next year. And it's like, Ooh, I'm going to do 18 million next year. And if you have all of that done across [00:08:00] every person in every role, that's measured on a KPI, that's going to maybe sandbag it a little bit. Cause they're going to be graded on it. Now, next thing you know, you have.

Nick Reyes: The person right above him, it's like, I know Nick Sandbag in that number. And all of a sudden the level of confidence in that number is dropping at the low side. Right. And, but, but as you stack them, I'm sure it's crazy. Like the margin for error at the top. Yeah. Right. 

Dan Uyemura: The other thing you have to, you have to remember too, and this goes, you know, from small company to large company, whenever data is being measured, if data is being measured in a way that someone's accountable for it, you're, if you don't have the proper incentive alignment, or if you don't have the proper checks, Or guardrails against that you're going to get an inflation or a deflation of these numbers because someone's measured against it and maybe their pay is tied to it or their job security is tied to it.

Dan Uyemura: So there's a lot of influences that aren't just. You know, misrecording of data, there's human factors too that are important 

Nick Reyes: to us. Right. Yeah, I mean, I [00:09:00] think, and we, we touched on this a little bit earlier, the next point here is that definitions matter. Had this great conversation last night with, uh, Rob from Allfit Orlando, uh, over dinner and we were talking about churn rate and churn rate in gyms, specifically going back to your keynote, right?

Nick Reyes: Right. And he was saying how, uh, in some of his work for the gym doc, uh, That gym owners would come in and say, Oh, my churn is, you know, 3 percent and we both know from your past keynotes that that's usually false. But I said, you know, how do you define churn, Rob? And he's like, someone leaves in the gym after they've had a membership.

Nick Reyes: It's like, okay, but what happens if they come back two days after they cancel and you create a new membership? Is that churn? What about two weeks? What about two months? What about two years? And he's like, Oh my gosh, I hadn't. I hadn't thought about that and how that affects churn. And so now all of a sudden, it's like, well, what about punch cards?

Nick Reyes: Are punch cards, memberships? [00:10:00] Every one. Is that a limited 

Dan Uyemura: plan of membership? What about when someone pauses for a week for three months, what does someone pauses as their way of exiting, but you forget about it? Someone does that for the summer and just for the summer. Are they a member? Yeah. They're a military person.

Dan Uyemura: They say, Hey, I'm going to join for 90 days. Is that churn? Yeah, all, all of this does matter and it, it is not clear at this point. And I, I will say personally, like we've worked with some like data collection industry reports and like one thing that I found was nobody was really asking for a standard set of definitions.

Dan Uyemura: So my initial instinct was there's apples and oranges being published to people who assume that there is a standard and there's not, it would be like, you know, um, saying that the triathlon. And for, for one athlete is a, you know, is a 10 K and for one athlete is a, a marathon. Yeah. Like you can't measure the same up against each other unless it's a standard of what you're measuring [00:11:00] too.

Dan Uyemura: And I think there's just a lack of sophistication in general in this industry to understand what the standards are being set. 

Nick Reyes: Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. 

Dan Uyemura: Uh, last one. So fifth one, there's a quick one. This is good. Um, the, and this, as a CEO of a company, this is one, the one that like kind of irks me, is an over reliance on data.

Dan Uyemura: And this goes back to what you were talking about earlier, like, if you can't move without data, you're dead, right? So I understand a lot of people want to have data to make better decisions. But if the lack of data or the lack of trust in data creates no decisions, you're, you're dead as a company, right?

Nick Reyes: Yeah, it's interesting. Now that we're unpacking this a little bit, it's like when you go back and you think about what Bezos and, and, you know, our first jumping off point here with all the different data points that we collect in our brains. And really it's the experience that allows you to make those better kind of gut decisions.

Nick Reyes: If you can't act without data. Then you [00:12:00] probably don't have enough experience for the decision you're trying to make. That's, that's a money quote right there. And the flip side, I guess, would be if you have, uh, if you only make gut, your ego might outpace, you know, uh, your ability to make those decisions as well, right?

Nick Reyes: So it's a double edged sword and it's like you kind of want to be in the middle and surfing a little bit. I think 

Dan Uyemura: that, that is, that is the epitome of business. If you go too far in any direction, you're probably in trouble. Yeah. So if, if you are like wiring your entire business to run off of data and you will not do things without the data, you will get lapped by someone who's a little bit more intuitive.

Dan Uyemura: And if you were completely intuitive, you will make bad decisions over time. Yep. Um, so, you know, the, the basic point is, is that, and that like, Hey, what happens when data conflicts? Because data conflicts a lot. Like one data signal is telling you one [00:13:00] thing, the other, another data signal selling you something opposite.

Dan Uyemura: And it's really up to you as the leader to make a decision. Um, and so I think it's, it's more important to be able to start to test and hone your ability to make decision in the inclusion or absence of data and be able to stack those experiences to, you know, continue to build your gut. 

Nick Reyes: And a big part of that, like the final loop is just reflect on it.

Nick Reyes: A hundred percent. I nailed that decision. What was the gut instinct? What was the thing that led me to believe that that was correct? Do I know it? Can I, can I feel it? Right. Or like, Oh no, I really messed that one up. Right. Like, well, why? 

Dan Uyemura: Yeah. You're going back to all the memes that you see on social media.

Dan Uyemura: It's like, there is no such thing as failure if you learn, but there is no learning if you don't reflect. So there has to be postmortems done on wins and losses alike, and you've got to really digest like, why did I think that? Why was I right? Why was I wrong? How could it have been better? Yep. Stuff like that.

Dan Uyemura: I mean, this is how you build your own internal data sets that [00:14:00] really, you know, can, you know, it's the difference between the world's best entrepreneurs and people who can't get off the ground. 

Nick Reyes: I love it. Yeah. So. Have you ever ignored data, made a gut decision, and just absolutely nailed it? If you have, we want to hear about it. Hit us up. Podcast@pushpress.com. Thanks guys.

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