Measuring Success: Pick Your Metrics
You surely have goals for your life; it could be on a personal, professional or entrepreneurial level. Then, you read somewhere that what can’t be measured can’t be improved on this note, you decide to start measuring your success and improvement.
Now, the important decision to make is what to measure The most common mistakes when choosing metrics are as follows:
– Everything Can Be Measured in Terms of Money: There are many different important non-financial measures that may affect your overall performance as a company or brand. These include loyalty, satisfaction, carbon print and brand awareness.
-Â You Have to Be The Best at Everything: No one and nothing can be the best at everything! It is impossible from the point of view of capacity and resources. Also, creating your brand, you may want to be recognized for being great, even if it is only at a few things; you don’t want to be caught being mediocre at everything. After overcoming those roadblocks, you now have the open mind to answer the question: What should I measure? To answer this, use these questions as a guide:
1.What Matters? The first thing that you have to figure out is: what is important? If you are thinking about your personal life, think about what makes you happy and what helps you to be more useful to the world around you. If you have a brand, you have to research and determine what matters to your clients, employees and you. An investment is not worth the effort if the improvement will be unnoticed by the user of the product/service. It’s all about your ROI (return on investment); Is this investment worth it? Will it make a difference? Will it grow in the future?
2.Do I Have The Resources/Capacity/Abilities? Firstly, your measures have to correspond with your brand promise and personality. When know what matters and what will make a difference, you need to start thinking about how you will get there: the investment (this will impact the ROI mentioned on the point above). Think about time, knowledge, people and materials. Do you have what it takes?
3.Prioritize and Simplify: Remember rule #2: you won’t be the best at everything. Then, remember that you can’t spend all your time measuring and none of it doing the work. Try not to take measuring too far, simplify this process using automation (this sounds fancy, but it can be as simple as an Excel spreadsheet). After this is done, it’s time to determine your goals for each metric and the timelines for them. More on this will come in my next post.