Hey Reader!

If your business went for an annual physical, or even the emergency room - what "vitals" would the doctor check to get a baseline?

What's the "heartbeat" of your company?

Is your apple watch, oura ring, or whoop band tracking how much "sleep" your business gets each night?

Your phone can tell you within a day or two accuracy when your next period will start (if you get one...), but does anything in your business tell you when it needs to slow down a bit to repair (fix, update, iterate) itself on a consistent cadence?

"What gets measured is what gets done"

A few years ago I read an example in a book (couldn't tell you which one) where someone was working with a physical therapist to recover from an injury, and they sat them down at a machine in the gym and told them to count how long each set took them. The person asked them "what's the goal", and the therapist responded "there isn't one, the point is you're focused on a number you can keep improving, not that you're trying to rush to a certain point and then quit."

At some level we're all competitive, and it's human nature that as soon as you're consistently tracking something you'll improve it.

This month we reworked our weekly metric tracker for both us and our weekly check-in at the beginning of coaching calls, here's a breakdown of what we're tracking now and why:

If you'd like a copy of this google sheets metric tracker, just reply "tracker" and I'll send you a copy.

Part 1: The hard numbers

New Signed Income:

We've structured our business to where the largest percentage of our income comes from recurring income (ongoing coaching & membership), so just looking at the total income each month isn't a granular enough measure of sales for us.

This for us is a measure of how much we've actually signed each week, for recurring income we're tracking just for that month because we don't always know an end date for something like a new membership signup.

Depending on how your brain & business model works, for some of our coaching clients we're using a cash deposited measure rather than income on the books because it makes more sense for their situation.

Income on books for this month:

This gives a great blend of existing recurring + new signed, we just get a running tally check-in each week. We don't spend a lot of time on it, but without a dedicated place to put it, we found ourselves doing napkin math or estimating rather than taking the 30 seconds to pull actual numbers from our to honeybook, circle, and Stan Store about how much income we have on the books.

We've considered also tracking the next month out as well as a separate metric, but as of right now we're not doing that.

Invoices sent:

While "new signed income" is a measure of dollars - invoices sent is a metric that's way more in our control. Because we can't control if someone ghosts an invoice, takes 3 weeks to sign & pay, or asks for a ton of revisions... but we can measure if our sales process is consistently developing leads (next metric) and getting them to a point where we send an invoice. So this is effectively the mid point metric of our sales funnel.

Leads in sales funnel:

This for us is technically people we're actively talking to about our offers, they've started the sales process not just getting nurtured. And based on our trailing history of knowing that a sales process takes a couple weeks, and a certain percentage converts, we can have a rough rule of thumb of how many people we should be in an active sales conversations with in any given week.

Part 2: Lead Generating Actions

We've found that once people have inquired, we're actually pretty good at walking them through the sales process, largely tracked by the metrics in part one. But we've found more intentionally tracking the actions we're trying & experimenting with is more valuable for lead generation, so rather than numbers, this section is made up of a list of things for each:

Lead Gen Actions Taken:

This is purely accounting for the things we did intentionally to generate leads, that prompts us to reflect on how they did and if they're worth doing again. For example this week will include - "follow up with people Jo met at Create & Cultivate to schedule coffee chats".

Lead Gen ToDo:

What few things are we committing to do the next week that have the highest chance of getting people into our sales funnel - specific people to follow up with, one collab we think will get us in front of the right audience, reaching out to past clients about a new offer, etc

This focused approach of consistently having lead gen priorities rather than just including them in all the priorities for the week means we'll keep doing them rather than letting them get forgotten when we get in a busy client season leading to the dreaded 'feast and famine' cycle since it's easy to forget generating new leads when we get busy.

Part 3: Document the wins & intentions

3+ Wins this week:

In psychology 'negativity bias' says we're (much) more likely to notice & remember negative things than positive things. And if we look at our own businesses this often looks like if you get a message from a client that's positive we say "cool thanks" and move on to the next thing. If we get a negative message this now has our attention and we want to fix it.

So we just gloss over the wins. As part of the weekly metrics, we baked in keeping track of at least 3 wins from the week. And we've found that once you really start thinking about it we can come up with more than three, and many of them we wouldn't have given a second thought without a check-in on them.

3+ Client wins this week:

This is one of the ones that takes the most thought for us, because clients forget to report back when they have a win, they usually just reach out when they have a question or problem. But there's a good chance we directly helped with the wins they're seeing. So taking a couple mins to glance over our clients socials/emails or even just remembering what we saw them share through the week and break it down, what were we personally responsible for in those wins - it's generally more than we think.

Oh also, this is social proof gold that we were almost always missing...

3 Max Priorities for next week:

Now we've checked all the "vitals" of our business that week, and we can create a few short priorities or "definitions of success" for the next week that would make the week a success if we got them done.

How we've been using this:

As part of refreshing our metrics we've moved our weekly check-ins from Monday mornings to Fridays, because then we can directly hit the ground running on Monday with each of us able to work on our own things. It also allows us to be more excited for the new week over the weekend because we have a lot more clarity for our subconscious in our "off" time.

You'll notice that content doesn't have it's own metric in our weekly tracker.. because views & likes don't pay our bills, clients do. Often times content & offers show up in 'lead gen todo' and 'priorities' because it is important for our business, but it's not the goal or a core metric... it's just so easy to default to content being the goal since Instagram give us so many cool analytics and insights that tell us that it's important.

We're 87 people into our marketing survey, and the majority of people agree that networking & building partnership is their highest ROI activity of the year, not content.

If you haven't taken the survey and have 5 mins to help us get to 100 submissions, I'll personally send you results from any of the charts you want to see after you submit, take the survey here.

We've been enjoying this new weekly tracking exercise, it's been keeping us a lot more focused on the things that actually matter to our business.

If you'd like a copy of this google sheets metric tracker, just reply "tracker" and I'll send you a copy.

See you next week,

Lyndon