Remember that time I recorded a mentoring call with my coach, and he told me to get serious about tracking stats in my business? (If you missed that episode of The Goal Digger Podcast, here’s a link to the audio and show notes.)

Well, I listened. And I decided to share a peek with you guys into how we roll these days, metric-wise: what we track, how to keep up with it, and even the new team member I brought on to help oversee all the moving parts within my business. I’ve implemented a ton of new processes since that conversation with my coach, and I can’t wait to give you a view of how we keep up with all the things.

The impact of creating an “Integrator” position for your business

Have you read the book Traction? (It’s a GOOD one for business owners, so be sure to add it to your Amazon cart if you haven’t snagged it yet!) It talks about this idea of having a team “Integrator,” whose role primarily revolves around connecting the major functions in the business, managing the day-to-day operations, and pulling the visionary (ahem, you and me) down from the clouds.

This person essentially keeps everything, and everyone, on track with turning our big, lofty dreams into pragmatic goals and initiatives. I love the way the author Gino Wickman puts it, because it is TOTALLY something I realized I needed on my team after reading this: “The Integrator is the glue that holds the people, processes, systems, priorities, and strategy of the company together.” Um, yes please? I craved THAT, and bad.

You can think of this person as the sous chef at a fancy restaurant: they oversee every plate that goes out, keep communication and morale in the kitchen solid, and take the chef’s innovative dish ideas and turn them into something feasible for the kitchen staff to whip up and churn out.

They are the wrangler and manager of the processes that the whole team is collaborating on, and I actually just recently hired an Integrator for my own team. She helps keep the rest of my team in the loop and track progress across all fronts, and her on boarding has been a game changer, y’all. So, let’s get into all the things she helps me oversee…

What I track in my business & where you can get started, too

Keeping up with our top-performing content, audience engagement, and where we’re spending our time has allowed us to majorly hone in on our strengths and really capitalize on them when the time is right. Here are some of the most valuable things we track in the JK biz currently:

How your current content is performing:

We’re going through a process of outlining our 30 best-performing blog posts, and instead of solely creating all-new content week by week, we’ll begin to repurpose and refresh the old because we know it resonated with our audience. This means auditing it to make sure it meets our brand standards — because sometimes, posts are 3-plus years old and way out of date, but still generate traffic!

We’re also working through my digital content and checking to make sure the links within my website are all current, content is still relevant (nothing worse than a post talking about something that happened 5 years ago), and SEO is on point. As we do this, we create fresh Pins for the content and a fresh Facebook post, as well as get it all in-linked. We want ALL content on my website to be fresh, relevant, and evergreen as much as possible.

Where + when your audience is engaging with you:

Can you confidently tell me where your audience is? What content is performing? What is knocking it out of the park for you? A lot of times we’re spending so much time executing that we can’t actually speak to the real results or needle-movers in our business are — especially when it comes to social media. To measure engagement on social media, we track not only our follower count on platforms, but which platforms are actually generating most of our traffic, which ones are converting followers to email list subscribers, and what times our audience is online so we can meet them there and engage.

Where you’re spending your time + how it lines up with profits:

When is the last time you tracked your time? Can you confidently tell me that the hours you’re spending on your business are the ones driving the ship forward? This one is SO important, because if you’re spending time in the weeds of social media but getting way more conversions from Pinterest or your email list, then that should really be your top focus. My free guide to outsourcing will help you determine what can ONLY be done by you, and what you could stand to bring in some support on.

Think about what you’re really good at doing, and what you actually LOVE to do in your business — that’s your sweet spot. That’s what moves the needle the most when you can focus in on it. Everything else can ideally be handed off to someone else.

Setting goals or benchmarks to continue growing and improving

So, what’s next? Now that you know what to keep track of, how do you curate consistent forward motion and progress? My team and I set weekly goals and benchmarks that we strive to hit. Sometimes we miss the mark; other times we blow the numbers out of the water. But the key is to set ambitious, but realistic, goals that you can achieve more weeks than not. If we aren’t aiming towards any goal, we are kind of aimlessly moving forward and we’re not able to know how we are doing or where our focus needs to be.

Here are a few things we do to track our goals:

• Outline who owns what metric — this person is responsible for keeping track of that number and striving to reach it.
• Update the goal every week — so that you can adjust and pivot when needed, or push for big goals when there’s bandwidth and momentum.
• Ensure it’s measurable — if you just put “more Instagram followers,” you won’t have something tangible to focus on. Get specific.
• Evaluate patterns and trends — maybe your audience is mostly offline on weekends, or they only open emails late at night. Pay attention to what is working well, and what isn’t, and adjust your processes.
• Create a strategy around the patterns and trends — don’t be afraid to add a sprinkle of innovation or creativity to test what works.

Create a scorecard to track your metrics and goals

When we really started getting intentional about tracking the numbers and trends in my business, we created a “scorecard” to keep up with my team’s goals for their responsibilities in the business, and to track those weekly. It allows us to dig into where we can nurture or eliminate brand partnerships. It helps us find role gaps and whether we have the right person in the right seat.

Using the scorecard is truly one of the best team tools I’ve seen because it encourages accountability and ownership. It’s almost like everyone gets to run their own mini-business, which fuels resourcefulness, autonomy, and self-directed initiatives. We can be more data-driven as a team, and know our numbers so we can holistically move the needle forward together.

We update it every week to be able to see weekly, monthly, and annual results. It also helps us with team and individual quarterly planning and goal setting. AND, it helps us celebrate the micro and macro wins, on top of building a clear, focused, and fun company culture. Like, these are such major wins across the board (or should I say scorecard?), yes?

That Integrator position I talked about earlier? Marisa is ours, and she is a rockstar. The scorecard is how she can keep a pulse on every aspect of my business, and she owns the over-arching management of the scorecard. If you don’t have an Integrator yet, that’s okay. But do be sure to designate one person on your team to own your scorecard so that it can be successful.

With a well-managed scorecard that everyone keeps up with, you can actively course correct when you come across issues, backslide, or fail to meet benchmarks… And that means you actually have the power to change the future right in this very moment.

 

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Want to learn more about this topic?

I highly recommend the books, Rocket Fuel and Traction.