4 Key Metrics to Scale Your Business

What are the most important metrics if you want your business to be scalable? 📈

I get this question a lot.

I guess people think I'm a data nerd (and they're not wrong. 🤓)

While of course there's not a one-size-fits-all answer, the key metrics you want to pay attention to very much depend on what stage of growth your company is in and what you’re focusing on.

Here are the 4 key metrics that I focus on with my clients as they scale their business:

🎉 Sales Conversion

There's probably no better metric to measure whether your customers actually care about the things you sell. If you want more traction - a consistent way to acquire new customers - this metric should be your north star.

💲 Growth Engine Score

A metric of my own making, the Growth Engine Score is a ratio between your gross profit and your customer acquisition cost, and it measures how scalable your business model is. Said another way, it's the return (profits) on the investments you make in sales and marketing. Businesses that want to accelerate their growth organically should focus on optimizing this metric.

⚙️ Throughput

This is a measure of production or service volume. It's how much stuff you can make or customers you can serve within a given timeframe. Businesses that are taking on more volume should be keenly aware of this metric and its mortal enemy - bottlenecks - to make sure that things don't start piling up or breaking down as the business grows in size.

💡 Innovation Batting Average

You know all those new ideas and strategies you have to grow your business? This is a measure of how many of those initiatives actually pan out the way you planned. Innovation is risky (but necessary) business. Some ideas are going to be winners, others will be duds. And let's not forget about all those half-baked projects you never actually finish. If you want to end up ahead, you need a focused and experimentation-driven process for implementing new ideas so that your hits cover for your misses.

Each of these metrics tie into one of the four foundational pillars of scaling a business: Traction, Profit, Throughput, and Innovation.

Curious about which pillar (and metric) your business should be focusing on? Take the BE Lean Assessment and find out.

And if you'd rather just wave a magic wand and see how your business is doing in each of these areas, that's cool too. I'm here to help give you more visibility into your business and to help implement improvements that will actually move the needle. Please reach out whenever you're ready.