Why Money Metrics Are Just Not Enough in 2020

First, don't get me wrong.

Money metrics are essential.

Increasing market share is good.

Without a healthy bottom line, you're sucking in oxygen.

Customer life time value or cost per acquisition or return on ad spend ... businesses that know and value those numbers are generally healthier businesses.

But money metrics are not all that make up a business.

Ebitda is only important to a handful of people, and money is all that's important to them.

Market cap valuation is ... heck, I don't really know what market cap valuation means. If it means anything at all, it's to the people on the trading floor, and they may be lovely people, but they're not representative of the real world.

So money metrics are essential for business. No doubt.

But there are a couple of things that are often overlooked.

They're seen as vague or fluffy.

Meaning and mission.

Money can be boiled down to numbers on a spreadsheet.

But how do you measure the meaning your business creates (for your people and the people you serve)?

How do you measure progress of your organisation towards the mission it's trying to achieve?

These are harder.

It's easier to run sales reports and call metrics and analytics dashboards.

But in a world where people everywhere are searching for meaning in every decision they make, it's important to think about how you might do it.

How you might measure meaning

The first step is to know what is meaningful.

What do you do that's meaningful for your team?

What do you do that's meaningful for your customers?

Hearing the answers to those two questions might be informative.

It's risky.

You might hear that things you didn't know about have more meaning than things that you thought were the bedrock of your business.

You might hear that a lot of the things you are not meaningful at all, either for your teams or your customers.

Risky is good. Ask the questions.

Only then, when you have a clear idea of what your people find meaningful, can you start to chart a course towards bringing meaning to the centre of everything you do.

And then you start to measure how you're doing.

How you might measure mission

Again, awareness if the first step.

It's not unknown for businesses to have mission statements buried in the footer of their website, last updated in 2017 by someone no longer with the company.

Your organisation's mission should live and breathe inside the business every day.

A mission statement is a good start, but it's only the start.

How does the mission statement translate to the day to day challenges of your sales team?

Does your book-keeper know and understand it?

Mission metrics will be different for every business.

And again, it's risky.

A mission, almost by definition, is difficult. It might seem impossible. It will take grand vision or courageous leadership or both. You might never get there.

Not all businesses want to go there.

And that's okay. Because not all businesses are driven by a sense of mission and purpose.

But for those businesses that are, then there's no choice.

Being clear on what the mission is.

Bringing it alive every day.

And map out that impossible path to a day in the distant future where the mission might somehow be achieved.

I'll say it again. I think it's worth repeating.

In a world where people everywhere are searching for meaning in every decision they make, thinking about how you might get clearer on what is meaningful, and what your mission is, could make all the difference.