Keep Getting Better.
Ever feel like you're working harder but not necessarily smarter? Or maybe you're not quite sure if all those late nights are actually moving your business forward?
When you're running a business, it’s easy to rely on gut feel to gauge how things are going. While intuition is valuable, having real data to back up your decisions can be a game-changer. The good news? You don't need complex spreadsheets or a degree in data science to make this happen.
In this article, I'll walk you through a simple, practical approach to tracking what matters in your business. No overwhelming systems or complicated processes - just five straightforward steps that will help you understand where you're at, spot opportunities for improvement, and actually see the impact of the changes you make.
Whether you're a solo operator or managing a growing team, these steps will help you move from feeling like you're constantly putting out fires to having a clear picture of your business's health and growth. Let's dive in!
1. Identify your business goals.
First and foremost, identify what you want to achieve in your business. No need to over engineer this, it can be as literal or abstract as you like. Write it down and move to step two.
2. Identify then track your metrics (even when they are bad)
You’ll never know how you’re going if you don’t measure it!
Even if you stop at this step, just tracking your metrics will give you visibility into how your business is going. Your metrics should align with your broader business goals.
Pick a cadence you can stick to. Every month is a good minimum (or every 4 weeks1).
If you’re not sure what to track, here are some suggestions:
Number of enquiries
Sales
Revenue & Costs (not just profit/loss2)
Project efficiency
Team happiness 3
Client satisfaction
Retention rate
Time on platform
Referrals
Engagement
Don’t change metrics often, maybe once a year, only if your businesses direction has shifted significantly. You want to see consistency and growth over time. If you keep switching and changing, the data will not be comparable.
Don’t have too many metrics. Three or four tops unless you have a whole reporting team. It should take you less than an hour to pull together your monthly recaps. If you have a larger team, you can assign a metric to that business area and they can then track the leading indicators that drive the main metric. For example; you might break down your revenue target and assign individual targets to the different types of projects you do.
Be creative - these suggestions are just regular business metrics, you might want to track something more unique to your studio- as long as it’s aligned with your business goals, go for it! The most important thing is to have an objective measure of your progress and to reflect on it regularly.
3. Review and reflect
At the end of each month, look at how you performed across each of your metrics.
As a team, review your metrics and discuss:
what worked well
what didn’t
what would be good to adjust for future projects
This shouldn’t take more than an hour. Make sure you record the session and take notes so you’re capturing these insights.
Looking at the data will show you how you performed, but getting that discussion going will be the key to improving. Make sure people feel comfortable to be honest and open in these sessions. Include everybody if you can. If you have a large team, you may need to break this into departments or smaller groups - 10 is a good max as it’s important that everyone gets a chance to contribute.
Out of this session you will get some quick wins but you might identify some themes that will come up frequently. This is where you need to dive a little deeper.
4. Deep dive into systemic or persistent blockers
If you do this process every month but nothing ever changes, your team will lose interest and become unmotivated to contribute, so it’s important that there is follow through.
This is also the point of having a continuous improvement mindset in your business - so you can realise the improvements!
For small ‘quick wins’ that come up, identify the opportunity for them to be used next - for example “it was great that the client came to the meeting fully prepared for our workshop, sharing the questions in advance really helped” then you would identify, when is the next client workshop, who is the person managing that project and sharing any email templates that they can use to get the same result.
So simple, but now you’ve made a small change to your standard process that will improve the process flow and the end result for the client.
Sometimes the same things are mentioned every month, and these become persistent blockers. For these, you need to engage a problem solving methodology to get to the heart of the problem and come up with an effective solution.
There are plenty of these out there - Lean 6 Sigma is very in depth but PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) is a lighter version. For a methodology specifically targeted to creative studios, we designed Problem Solving 101. Our open group classes will launch March 2025 but you can reach out anytime if you’d like to understand more.
5. Observe the impact on your metrics
As you make these changes, you should be able to see the impact on your key metrics over time.
Remember not to look at a single data point but observe the trends. Once you have a year of data, you can also start to identify broader trends that can influence your decision making. For example, you might see that despite attempts to adjust the process, a particular project type consistently overruns it’s budgets, so you may need to adjust pricing.
These metrics will become your guiding light, empowering you to understand how your business is going without relying on how your business feels like it’s going. Then you can focus your energy to where it is most valuable with your long term metrics in mind - not just firefighting on the day-to-day.
Some common objections:
“My team have too much to do, they can’t be taking time away from billable work to be doing these kinds of things”
We get on autopilot sometimes and don’t even realise the things we are doing aren’t effective or efficient. I’ve spent my whole career in Continuous Improvement and I still fall into this!
Taking an hour out of each month won’t impact your billable deliverables significantly and I guarantee you the improvements that this delivers will pay for itself.
Remember, lots of work does not equal better work.
“My business is just me, do I really need to be doing all this?”
When you’re a solo operator, it can be lonely out there. You can be in your head a lot and the performance of your business can feel so personal. Having data to track and measure can help you have an objective yardstick.
When you’re on your own, you can lose track of how much you’ve accomplished if you don’t reflect regularly so it’s important to remind yourself of the progress you’re making! Anna Mackenzie shares a good example of how tracking metrics is valuable- even if it’s just you.
The overnight success myth has to stop
Setting aside time to reflect is so valuable - and feel free to rope in a friend to help bounce ideas.
“My data is a dog’s breakfast, it will take me hours to clean it up and be able to analyse it”
Tracking your metrics is a case of garbage in garbage out - if you don’t have good reliable data, you won’t get useful insights. Take some time to investigate systems or tools that will make you more efficient at tracking the data you need. Pay close attention to implementation to make sure your team is using the tool correctly and the data is useful.
If you don’t know where to start, check out Happy Medium’s instagram for breakdowns on tools we love. For a more in-depth look at finding the right system and tools, check out the Automate your Admin course.
It’s better to start than to find perfection, so begin with what you know you can track reliably and build out from there.
In summary
Tracking your metrics and reflecting on your performance regularly is the simplest thing you can do that will deliver tangible results.
Small improvements implemented regularly and consistently will compound over time and before you know it you will be more efficient, more profitable and less stressed.
—-
👋 Want to work together?
Need a hand kickstarting the continuous improvement cycle in your business? That’s what I do!
🎯 Subscribe for more game changers
Build a business that supports the life you want to lead. Get actionable, helpful strategies to streamline your business operations in your inbox each month.
About the author:
Madeleine is the General Manager of GOLDEN, an Interior Design studio based in Melbourne; and the founder of Happy Medium, empowering small and medium businesses with the skills to solve their problems.
Footnotes
A note on months: I’ve used months as an example because it’s the easiest to understand and most people resonate. However, in some businesses the ‘month’s end’ can cause a lot of stress and people cramming deliverables into the last week or days. While a deadline is always good, this can impact the quality of your work. Plus substandard deliverables will inevitably result in tech debt or client revisions, impacting the next month’s flow.
If this happens, consider switching to generic 4 or 5 week periods. This way you’re not letting deliverables run away from you but you’re also not cramming or stressing to get things done by the 31st.
On tracking profit and loss. You’ll end up tracking this anyway but it’s less useful for you as a metric because it’s one step removed from the metrics you can actually impact.
What I mean by this is Profit (or loss) is your Revenue minus your Costs. Revenue is valuable to track regularly because you can directly affect this and it tells you something about how your business is performing. Costs is also valuable because you can adjust this. You will be able to identify more insights and information by looking at these individually than if they are hidden behind profit/loss.
How do you track team happiness? Great question! You can measure this directly - by asking (either in a survey, taking a vibe check in weekly meetings) or indirectly by measuring the things you know contribute to your team’s happiness (like low/no overtime, project satisfaction or something more aligned with their individual goals).
Remember, you are part of your team, make sure you include yourself in this metric - as a leader, your burnout matters most and you set the standard for your team.
