What I measured to grow beyond $10 million

What you measure and how you measure it is critical to growing your business.

One of the most powerful ideas in business:

“What gets measured, gets done”

I never used to track metrics in my company.

But as time went on results were always unpredictable...

We only scaled from $2 million to $10 million in revenue after measuring a few simple KPI’s.

Here’s how it all started:

The reason it took me so long to lean into good metrics was I had no bloody idea what to measure.

I told myself I preferred to just wing it.

But when it came to the major goals I was working on, progress was slow and unpredictable.

Sometimes I'd go weeks without seeing any results.

I'd just report "no progress"

The data was boring.

And it wasn't giving me the dopamine hit I needed to keep pushing especially when the work was hard and things often went backwards.

In that situation, if you’re measuring results like I was, making no progress or going backwards is soul-destroying.

But there's a different way to look at measuring things.

Instead of measuring outcomes - things like progress, results and milestones.

You start to measure inputs - the actions, execution standards and consistency.

To give you an example, think about measuring sales growth. 

The old version of me would have thought about measuring:

- The number of new clients landed.

- How much revenue increased.

- How many new clients I onboarded.

But when you’re not making quick progress or when you lose a client, it’s easy to lose momentum.

The reality is none of those are really in your control.

You can't force a sale to occur once every week like clockwork.

You can only do the ACTION that gives you the best chance of getting one.

For example…

If I wanted to measure progress towards the same sales goal and measure ‘action’ instead of outcomes, I would measure:

Did I send 10 LinkedIn DMs today?

Did I call 20 potential clients today?

Did I have 1 lunch meeting today?

(never eat lunch alone if you're in sales mode)

Did I send 5 hand-written follow-ups to prospects today?

See how these are easier to measure?

They're fully in your control and you can gamify the shit out of it to make it feel like you're crushing your streak.

Then it becomes a quest to do those things better.

By measuring actions, I've found that it's way easier to stay motivated, hold yourself accountable and be consistent.

That's not to say measuring outcomes is bad.

It's great for tangible targets. Ie projects that have physical outcomes.

But measuring action is better for things that are hard to see progress on, or are out of your control.

For example team culture, long-term growth and the little things you know you need to do consistently to get a good long-term outcome.

The key is to measure both for different things (and different people).

But at the end of the day, the key is to measure something...

Because what gets measured, gets done.

I hope this helps!