The Groundhog Day Effect

Once steady traffic sets in, despite your best efforts, your charts flatline.

No one wants to walk into a board meeting with a flatline graph.

On the other hand, repeatability in your business model can be highly empowering.

Once you have a stable benchmark of your current customer factory throughput, it gives you permission to aggressively experiment with bold new ideas to effect a spike in the flatline. If you do manage to create a spike, your next course of action is to run more of whatever you did to make the line stick at the higher level.

I call this the Groundhog Day Effect – from the movie: Groundhog Day. In the movie, the protagonist played by Bill Murray, is stuck in a loop where his life repeats itself every single day until he has a breakthrough insight that breaks the loop.

We, entrepreneurs, are similarly stuck in a loop of predictable customer behavior day in and day out. Our job is to uncover the right breakthrough insights to move the curve up and to the right.