Looking Beyond Fiscal Metrics

Whether your business is well-established or brand new, it’s always important to be mindful of your position—to look at key indicators of your company’s health, vitality, and potential. Getting a sense of these metrics will help you to move forward in your company, wisely but also confidently.

Actually determining the best metrics to evaluate is a little bit tricky, however. Some entrepreneurs make the mistake of looking only at fiscal statistics. I grant that these numbers are of critical importance. Looking at just these figures, while excluding other key analytics, is a detriment to your business, though. I would liken it to monitoring only your cardiovascular health, while ignoring other aspects of your mind and body. Yes, this is an important area to consider—maybe even the most important—but it’s not the only one.

It’s imperative, then, to spend some of your attention elsewhere—and I’ve found that there are plenty of places that warrant your engagement. Your company is constantly receiving energy from a variety of sources; your job as the entrepreneur is to gauge and understand it, to be aware of how that energy can be harnessed and scrutinized.

I’ll give you an example from my online steak company, Fuego Diablo. Our customers buy steaks, of course, but we also have a lot of blog readers and social media followers who consume our steak-related content, having never actually purchased a product from us. These folks aren’t having any fiscal impact on our brand, at least not yet—but one day they might. The potential is there, and part of my job as the business owner is to be aware of the energy they’re giving us while working to not only maintain it, but convert it into something that can be monetized.

The same is true for your brand. You have plenty of non-bottom-line transactions that you might be aware of—Facebook likes, newsletter subscriptions, and other opportunities for validation and for expansion. Be open to all the different ways in which people are engaging with your brand, and remember: Just because they can’t be monetized right this second doesn’t mean they don’t bode well for the long-term viability and growth of your company. Keep monitoring and nurturing them, and considering ways in which you can harness that energy.

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