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\u2019ve forgotten it (most of those were due to my daughter hiding it so that she could \u201cgive\u201d it to me for my birthday). It helps me make sure that I\u2019m 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\u2019m moving, am I moving correctly? Without that monitor showing what zone I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n
As one of my clients who embraced knowing his numbers for his business says, \u201cWhat gets measured, gets done.\u201d If you\u2019re not tracking anything, how do you know if you\u2019re making progress? Or getting worse? It\u2019s not all about the result but also about creating awareness. What can you learn from your numbers?<\/p>\n
You can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t want to measure everything; you\u2019d 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\u2019t over-complicate it. These things we measure are called Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). They are not the end-result, (although realistically we\u2019re 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 \u201cOh well, I didn\u2019t hit my goal. Better luck next year.\u201d 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.\u00a0 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!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019ve forgotten it (most of those were due to my daughter hiding it so that she could \u201cgive\u201d…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":854,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-growth"],"aioseo_notices":[],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/advicoach.com\/slewis\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/16\/2020\/02\/Numbers.png","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/advicoach.com\/slewis\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/16\/2020\/02\/Numbers.png","author_info":{"display_name":"sklewis","author_link":"https:\/\/advicoach.com\/slewis\/author\/slewis\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/advicoach.com\/slewis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/advicoach.com\/slewis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/advicoach.com\/slewis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/advicoach.com\/slewis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/advicoach.com\/slewis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=851"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/advicoach.com\/slewis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/advicoach.com\/slewis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/advicoach.com\/slewis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/advicoach.com\/slewis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/advicoach.com\/slewis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}