IT’S DATE NIGHT: The 5 Business Metrics to Pay Attention to Every Month
As we know, all healthy relationships DEPEND entirely on maintaining a regular date night* and your business bae is absolutely no different
It’s time to light the candles, put on our finest outfit (seriously I actually recommend doing these - life’s a party) and taking our business out for a hot date to run the numbers and take stock of where we are at.
We’re about to embark on the classic first date game of capture the flag. 🚩🚩🚩
I'm going to break down some key topics to pay attention to so that we can make sure that no red flags have popped up over the month, and we can walk away with all the action points and peace of mind we need to keep slaying this business relo.
*Yes I got this intel from HuffPost - somebody please confirm 😂 🤷🏼♀️
DISCLAIMER:
Okay I’m not going to lie to you. This was a hard blog to push publish on.
Tegan, my inner accountant, is RAGING about all the spreadsheets we could make for this & analytics are a data-lovers rabbit hole - but we’re going to keep it simple, because simple get’s done & done is always better than not done.
So with that said let’s dive into the world of ANALYTICS 📊
FIRST UP, What makes a business?
Great question. Lot’s of things make up a business but for the purpose of going full yang (to the yin ☯️) we’re going to breakdown our business into 5 main components.
Marketing - how you connect with your audience & how people learn more about you.
Sales - how we convert people from lurkers to customers/clients
Delivery - how we deliver on our promises in our unique way - efficiently & effectively
Financials - how much moola we’re making off what we’re delivering
Impact - how we’re contributing to our clients, our community & ourselves
How often should I review my business plan
Aka: How often do we do date night 😘
We want Date Night with business bae to be something we do regularly enough that we stay in touch but not too often that it becomes onerous. Once a month is enough & that combined with some form of weekly planner/tracker and a quarterly planning session will mean you’ve nailed ALL the business rituals to keep your business on track with your goals.
Do I need to be a data scientist to be able to do this?
No! We’re keeping it simple here - there are HEAPS of quick wins available to us in the data department and you don’t need to be a data scientist to be able to spot a #redflag 🚩in your business.
When it comes to analytics & data I have three principles to follow;
Effort to impact - anything you’re putting effort into creating, you should be measuring
Personalise for your goals - you don’t need to measure everything just what’s relevant to your goals
Track the changes - it’s not so much about the numbers themselves but how much they are changing for YOUR business. This is what makes it relevant to you and your progress rather than comparing against different industries and stages of business.
What is Benchmarking and Continuous Improvement?
Benchmarking is the process of measuring key business metrics and practices and comparing them—within business areas or against a competitor, industry peers, or other companies around the world—to understand how and where the organization needs to change in order to improve performance.
For your purposes we’re going to focus on performance benchmarking - comparing yourself with your own growth rather than looking at other companies who have completely different environments & goals to us.
We’re not here to be Janet:
“OH BUT TONY ROBBINS GETS 100,000 LIKES.”
“Ya but you an online business manager in Raglan NZ Janet - have some chill”
Alright - with all that said, Tegan, is ITCHING to get into the breakdown.
Get your margie ready and let’s dig into some data with the following conversation prompts
Tegan being fizzed 👉
What are the most important Business Metrics?
01. MARKETING
What we often think of as the first step in your customer cycle is MARKETING - how the heck do (the right) people know about you and what they do? This is a BIG category and there are hundreds of things you could be tracking here, and while I do encourage you to dig into the numbers on a post by post, email by email basis - at a high level, here is what you want to be paying the most attention to.
Audience Growth & Visibility - How many people are seeing the content you’re creating and how many of those are your ideal client. You could be creating the most amazing content in the world but if only 10 people are seeing it that’s going to limit your impact significantly.
Engagement - How much are people interacting with the content you are creating - I’m talking likes, comments, shares, saves & replies. Again, benchmarking bb, it’s not about getting X likes - it’s about noticing WHAT is resonating with people and what gets them to take action. What happens when you use different calls to actions, what happens when you prime your audience with a poll before dropping content. Take notice of the trends for YOUR content.
Actions taken - What is the customer journey that your clients go on - what content drives people to check out your link in bio, once they reach your website where do they go? There is a really cool tree diagram in Google Analytics that shows you the user flow for your website, but even simpler than that simply look at the traffic you are getting on different posts/website pages/button clicks - it gives you a great idea of what is driving people to TAKE ACTION so you can do more of that.
Marketing analytics in particular can feel very overwhelming and it can be difficult to connect the dots between things. Take a deep breath and zoom out - more than anything this exercise is simply about PAYING attention, not letting the likes and comments get in the way of truly getting in our audience’s shoes and seeing where they are coming from.
Once you get in the mindset of paying attention you’ll start to notice what is landing more and more and you’ll surprise yourself with how easy it is to draw insights about what content to create and what direction to take when you’re in the habit of paying attention to your audience.
02. SALES
Once we’ve got the marketing covered our next step in the customer journey is everyone's favourite pal, SALES.
Calls Booked - How many discovery/sales calls you’ve booked this month
Call Conversion Rate - How many of those calls became clients - (#clients/#calls x 100 = conversion rate %)
Sales Cycle Length - How long it takes between your first conversation and a signed contract or sale
These numbers are great for highlighting not only where you get to play more but also for forecasting. If you know your sales cycle is on average 60 days then you can use that to forecast your income and to set realistic targets. If you know that your call conversion rate is about 50% then you know how many calls you need to book to get X clients.
Side note: I also like to take this time to review my CRM Sales Pipeline (mines in a slick click up template) and see if there are any sales conversations I need to revisit - any outstanding proposals I haven’t heard back from - any opportunities to revisit past clients with new offers.
Hot Tip: Keep yourself a call insights document that you use to jot down any insights from your discovery calls after EACH CALL. Any questions that they asked, any objections that came up, any thing you can use in future marketing.
03. Delivery
Now we’ve LOCKED IN the clients it’s time to look at HOW we are doing what we do. This one is quite dependent on what YOUR business is and what you sell so I encourage you to set specific targets and measures here based on what you do. I’ve included the broad categories these may fit into;
Time to deliver against time budgeted - how well are you estimating time to delivery, is there anything that throws your time allocations out that we can change or adjust our pricing for?
Quality assurance - how many mistakes are we making - and how many of them are avoidable by tweaking our process to ensure that we are creating great results every time
Advanced: % of Business mapped to SOP’s - How much of what you do follows a set process that ensures quality and creates the possibility of OUTSOURCING - anything we can do to reduce the THINKING time and put as much of our business on autopilot as possible
It can be so easy to ignore our mate delivery in favour of the “getting more clients/money” conversation. BUT, it’s actually one of the most crucial pillars of our business - ultimately your business won’t succeed if you haven’t nailed getting results AND if you haven’t taken the time to create efficiencies then it’s only a matter of time before you burn out #redflag 🚩. And we don’t want that.
04. Financials
At this point in date night we are staring lovingly into the eyes of our business bae and hoping, no prayin’ 🙏🏼, they are going to seal the deal with a kiss. And that kiss tastes like: the MONEY HONEY.
In super simple turns - here’s what we are paying attention to:
Revenue Generated: How much money we’ve got coming in from sales - ideally broken down by the individual services you sell.
Gross Profit Margin: This gives us an indication of how much money we make off each thing we sell - (sales revenue - cost of sales)/sales revenue
Net Profit Margin: What we’ve got left over at the end of the day - net profit /sales revenue or (total revenue - total expenses)/sales revenue - this gives us an idea of our total profitability.
Ideally all of these numbers are POSITIVE to indicate that we are making money and ideally you have included your own salary in there under operating expenses. Again remember that there is no magic number, we don’t become a million dollar business overnight but we do want to make sure that these numbers are trending upwards and that our profitability is on track to meet any business goals, personal goals and investments that we have coming up.
Bonus Points: For an extra gold star ⭐️ make sure to check in on the CASH BALANCE in your bank account to make sure you’ve got enough in there to pay all your upcoming bills (and yourself).
Hot Tip: While it’s ideal to keep your costs lean - don’t let yourself get stuck thinking only about how to cut operating costs, instead focus on how you can create more VALUE - can you repackage, reprice or increase the MARGIN so that your bank account goes up when your sales go up?
05. Impact
Alright, we’re heading towards the “do you want to come in for a night cap” portion of the date here and my personal FAVOURITE part of this exercise.. The IMPACT we are creating.
How you measure this will vary business to business so make sure to set objectives and measures that make sense to you and your business.
Client satisfaction - Send client surveys and check in on how satisfied they are with your services
Team satisfaction - How happy is the team, are they feeling empowered - yes you still have to do this as a one human band - YOU are your most valuable team member - how you doing boo?
Lives impacted - HOW MANY LIVES HAVE WE CHANGED - this is so much bigger than your clients (though this is a great starting place) it’s also their friends and family, the team/contractors you’ve worked with, the suppliers you’ve supported. Get present to the opportunities created by you doing your thang. That’s pretty fcking sweet isn’t it.
Bonus Points: this is an awesome opportunity to also capture client testimonials (testys as I lovingly call them) for use in your “feel good folder” and your marketing.
Hot Tip: I highly recommend creating an impact wall VISUALLY by your desk to give yourself a visual reminder of your WHY and the possibilities created by your business. Whenever you get a new client put them on the wall along with THEIR WHY and any wins.
Life changing. 🤯🤯🤯
Do I need an analytics dashboard?
Now that you’re across WHAT to be paying attention to - where the heck do you store it. The answer is wherever makes sense to you - just come back to the same place.
In our Business Accelerator: Business Energetics ⚡️, and with my clients I have a trusty Business Dashboard spreadsheet which is where I put all the key metrics for that business and keep a track of the score every time we sit down to review the numbers.
It doesn’t need to be fancy, and it’s okay if it’s quite manual to start with - the whole point is to do it consistently, and to start (you guessed it) PAYING ATTENTION to both the #redflags 🚩 and the #greenflags 💚 in your business.
AND THAT’S A WRAP ON OUR HOT DATE
You made it my friend. That’s the end of our hot date and I am beyond proud of you for getting in the game.
And just like in the real dating game…
Did you even go on a date if you didn’t come home and spill the tea to all your friends?!
Keep a sister posted - I’m over here cheering you on so drop into my DM’s over at @cocollaborate & let me know how you got on. 🚩💚 🤔
Want more?
Introducing... Business Energetics ⚡️
The for-purpose business accelerator that I wish I had when I was starting out. Everything I learnt the hard way in my first year of business distilled into just 8, simple, fun, weeks.
Nail the financials - from pricing to P&L's we've got you covered.
Master your marketing - our Marketing strategist will have you showing up, where it matters & creating content that converts.
Tick off the tech - your very own systems strategist in your pocket with step by step tutorials & live chat support so you too, can become a tech king/queen
Plus a whole heap more.
Places are limited so that we can take the 1:1 time with you & make sure you hit all of all those goals.