What are KPI’s and which do I need?

How do you know you’re successful? Increasing traffic to your website, more discovery calls, increasing subscribers; all those numbers that the experts talk about. But how do you know you’re moving towards your goals?

Key Performance Indicators, or KPI’s for short, give you an objective way to measure your success in a project and your business as a whole. They can also give you a heads up if something is going wrong, or if there’s another opportunity that you could take on.

A good KPI is objective and measurable. It should be able to show a trend over time, to show your business’s path toward progress and overall success.

And because “business is good” might mean different things to a risk-averse introvert and a thrill-seeking extrovert, good KPIs give you a common, objective language to communicate your progress with your team.

How do you choose the right KPI’s?

If you’re feeling pressure to choose the right KPI, remember that there are hundreds of KPI’s that can measure your progress in each area of your business.

So choosing the right KPI totally depends on your business, the projects inside your business, and what you want to achieve.

There is no one metric that will magically indicate your business’s success.

I recommend my clients consistently track a few KPIs to give them a bird’s-eye view of their business at any given moment and then tailor other KPIs for different departments or projects.

Bird’s Eye View KPIs will help you assess the overall health of your business at any given moment, and are things like:

• Cash Flow
• Profit Margin
• Lead Generation
• Key Scaling Metric (that one number that most accurately reflects success in your efforts)*

Other departments to consider tracking KPIs:

• Sales
• Marketing
• PR
• Launch-specific
• One-off projects
• Customer Support
• Project Management

Here are some questions to ask as you determine which KPIs are right for each department in your business:

1. What do I want to accomplish?
   Figure out your objective and why it’s important to your business. For example, you might want to increase your profit margin with the client work you’ve already got.
2. What metrics will tell me when I’ve reached my goal?
   Some objectives may have more than one way to track progress. Get specific. For example, you could track your revenue per client, the average # of hours per client, or the average dollar/hour rate for each client to determine profitability, but which one is the most important?
3. Are there any milestones on the way to reaching this goal?
   This could be a solid number, or a percentage change. Which works best for you?
4. What steps do I need to take to meet this goal?
   Your work should directly influence the KPIs you’re tracking. If you can’t do that, it might not be the right KPI to track.

Once you determine what your KPIs are, share them with your entire team. Because they’re now your common language, make sure everyone involved knows what they are, why they’re important, and what the end goal is.

And finally, schedule a regular review of your KPIs to make sure they’re still useful to track. Projects, offers, and goals shift and evolve as your business grows; having to adjust your KPIs is a good sign.

*To learn more about finding the right KPIs for your soul-centered business (including your Key Scaling Metric), check out Scale Society, my six-month, small group program that will help you create the unique foundation your business needs to scale from 5 to 6 to 7 figures.

Get on the waitlist for Scale Society here.