The Puzzle of Business Success: Solved!

Do you know what is tough?

It is tough to make objective posts about success in business using only data!

All the metrics that measure external success of a business - its net worth, its profitability, its position in some list of Top 100 or Top 500, etc. - are not always unbiased. Therefore, using industry reports that tout who is "successful" or not, seems almost counter-intuitive to my data-led brain.

The curiosity of "where did they get this number from?" has almost always resulted in disappointing core data metrics, models, or sample sizes or a combination of all three.

Now, now, I am not disparaging the use value of these reports and metrics because they do provide a basis of comparison, which would be completely lacking, otherwise.

However, when one tries to define success in an objective manner, things become... challenging!

Thus, this week has been interesting. It started with a Labor Day weekend and the theme that I tried to stick with for the week was: What Drives Success. Through various puzzles, we journeyed through a people-first strategy, targeting customers more effectively, and holding on to our vision as we plod our way to strategic success!

Before jumping into the summary of posts and videos from this week, here are some LinkedIn Observations for the week.

LinkedIn Observations for This Week

First, I want to take a minute to say "THANK YOU" to all the wonderful people who comment on and interact with my content. You keep me going and I am very grateful!

Since Wednesday evening, LinkedIn Analytics have been facing some glitches, it appears. Despite making a post every day and interacting with various people on the platform, I keep seeing this (see image below) when I try to see how my posts are performing in terms of impressions and engagements for the past week, 14 days, etc. The impressions/engagement counts on the actual posts are unaffected, but the analytics dashboard is creating problems.

And yes, I tried this on various browsers and in my phone app. For what it is worth, the same analytics issue is occurring over on Instagram as well, but not on Google/YouTube, so you might want to check out your analytics.

Video posts are still on the rise in LinkedIn, which is not bad when the videos are informative and engaging in the context of business. Yet, many of us LinkedIn users are able to see a future, where serious B2B people on the platform will fade away and stop engaging. In an effort to compete with Instagram and YouTube shorts, LinkedIn has failed to consider how much their highlighted video script disrupts the feed on phones.

Even Instagram has had the foresight to use "Threads" separately from their video feed, so LinkedIn needs to wake up before they start losing their core audience.

(Yes, I tagged LinkedIn... that's how confident I am in my prediction and also because I know they probably don't care about my prediction! LOL)

I have started a hashtag called #PostItStatistics on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, X, and YouTube to share my Post-It Statistics in a variety of formats in case you want to follow along the weekly Post-It videos on these as well.

Synopsis of Main Topics & Videos For This Week

I usually do not include my Sunday Inspiration post in my round-up for the newsletter. However, last week I posted Want to be in the Top 1% which discussed success using the BIRDS (Build, Inspire, Refer, Drive, Share) model inspired by Mathew Schulz

In honor of Labor Day, we discussed how to take a different approach to labor/employees and how to empower them with the right tools and the right support to ensure their and your success in the Ready to Make a Commitment to Your Team? In the current world of AI and related tools/agents on the touch of our fingertips, it is essential to make sure that our employees and teams grow with us, meaningfully!

Dropping email open rates and strategies to deal with them have being showing up in various posts on my feed. A particularly poignant data-led analysis by Beck Nadir inspired me to create this post on segmenting the Ideal Client Profile (ICP) effectively and customizing the messages in Are Your Email Open Rates Dropping? The segmented approach is more successful because it prevents one from believing that there is a lack of interest in their product/service because the email open rates have dropped. It also prevents one from wasting time in sending out impersonal emails and hoping to get results somehow!

The post on A/B Testing was the most curiously performing post of the week. It got almost no traction on LinkedIn even though it had one of the highest engagement rates in the week. In any case, Tried A/B Testing on Email Campaigns discussed how to perform a small sample test using generic vs. targeted email campaigns. This can lead to more successful email campaigns and save the company a variety of resources.

In my opinion (which is of course, highly biased in this case) the post on Ever Solved a Rubik's Cube? Ever Run a Business? was the most fun post for this week. I had fun recording it, I had fun writing about how strategy and vision are critical alongside determination in achieving success in business or Rubik's Cube, alike!

With the jobs report coming out on Friday, I did a little bit of data visualization for the past 20 years on the Labor Force Participation Rate, which almost never gets its due attention in job reports. One surprising finding in the Unpopular Data-Led Opinion: Are Fewer Men Working? was that the male LFPR is dropping at a higher rate as compared to female LFPR.

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