Have you ever thought about how many numbers you keep track of on a regular basis? And why? I have worn a FitBit with fervor since 2012. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve forgotten it (most of those were due to my daughter hiding it so that she could “give” it to me for my birthday). It helps me make sure that I’m moving enough, provides a little friendly competition with some other FitBit connected friends and acts as a reminder that exercise is important to me. I now also wear a heartrate monitor at the gym. While I know I’m moving, am I moving correctly? Without that monitor showing what zone I’m in, I am apt to slack off and walk a little slower, at less of an incline, and my dedicated exercise time will have less of an impact.

As one of my clients who embraced knowing his numbers for his business says, “What gets measured, gets done.” If you’re not tracking anything, how do you know if you’re making progress? Or getting worse? It’s not all about the result but also about creating awareness. What can you learn from your numbers?

You can’t measure everything; some things like happiness are intangible. We had a long discussion about whether, or not, you could measure happiness at a recent Shoreline Business Forum. Our conclusion? It would be nice if you could, but the best we could do was measure some other indicators, like time with friends, or sending notes to a partner.

In business there are ALL kinds of things you can measure! The thing is to pick 5 or 6 that are important to what you want to accomplish. You don’t want to measure everything; you’d spend all your time on metrics! And you want to make it as easy as possible to have a good picture of how things are going, so don’t over-complicate it. These things we measure are called Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). They are not the end-result, (although realistically we’re all going to look at revenue and profit first anyway) but are activities that occur on the way. If you are not where you want to be for a given week or month the next step is to take action to change that. Who wants to get to the end of the year and say “Oh well, I didn’t hit my goal. Better luck next year.” Selecting the right things to track will depend on your business, but some things everyone should look at are: return on investment for your marketing; expenses (and the resulting gross and net profit margins); customers- i.e. average purchase, number through the door, average length of retention, buying cycle; percent repeat.  Think about what you want to work on in your business this year and what actions you are going to take to have an impact. Measure those things!