When you shovel snow from your driveway, you have an easy metric to measure your progress. Where you’ve shoveled is clean, where you haven’t shoveled is not. Most people will not spend time shoveling the clean spots, as it will not get the job done any better or faster.
Metrics in your business can guide you the same way. In addition to measuring financial goals, they can be used to measure the success of various efforts you make to grow your business. Advertising campaigns, direct mail, networking events, Adwords, SEO, all can have a positive effect on your top line sales. If you control your associated expenses toward those efforts, you can measure the dollars spent vs the return for each of those dollars. In essence, it will help you to shovel only the parts of the driveway with snow on it. [Read more…]