Defining Success Through KPI Dashboards

Here at Array Digital, we have what’s called a KPI dashboard. KPI stands for key performance indicators, and this dashboard is a collection of those KPIs. In episode 180 of Journey to $100 Million, Erik shares with you all the benefits that come along with measuring and tracking your performance through KPIs. Every Wednesday morning we look at and review our company’s KPIs after spending Tuesday afternoon gathering the data. We have a spreadsheet that is shown for the whole company at once, and it has about a dozen KPIs on there. These KPIs vary from things like how much new revenue we’ve collected over the last week, how much we’ve lost, NPS (net promoter score), the number of times we have posted on social media, and a whole bunch of other stats. This started about a year and a half ago. Back then, we did not understand what KPIs were important, and what were not, but over time we continually refined our KPIs, and every quarter we updated our goals. We also have these KPIs color coded to where if we are below our goal, the KPI is automatically turns red, and if we have reached/exceeded our goal, the KPI turns green. What we noticed is that our KPIs always start off red at the beginning of each quarter, due to our goals being stretch goals. We are constantly stretching our goals in order to get better, stronger, and faster. Over the course of the quarter, those red KPIs start to turn green and stay green if we do everything right, but sometimes they go back to red and toggle for a while before stabilizing as green. Recently, for the first time ever, our board was 100% green! This was very exciting and surprising for Erik because these goals were stretch goals, but also because the team was excited about achieving these goals as well. He was overjoyed to know that these KPI goals meant something to the entire team. If we did not have a KPI dashboard, Erik is not sure how we would be able to measure success. We have defined success on a recurring operational basis based on this KPI dashboard. If something is important, and we want it done right, it must go on the KPI dashboard - because if it does not, we tend to ignore it. Not everything will go up there, but the things that we want to improve upon and are important to us, will! If it’s important, we put it on the dashboard! If you do not have a KPI dashboard, start thinking about some of these numbers you can measure, and measure easily. You do not want to have KPIs that take a week to calculate every time you collect data. Think about numbers you can easily grasp like how much you billed last week, how many complaints you got, the amount of phone calls you receive - the opportunities are endless! Start collecting this data, and show your team what is going on! Your team and business will greatly benefit from this. — Erik J. Olson is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. The Founder & CEO of Array Digital, he is also the host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups. — Kevin Daisey is an award-winning digital marketer & entrepreneur. He started his first company when he was just 23, and is the Founder & CMO of Array Digital. Kevin is the also the co-host of the Journey to $100 Million Flash Briefing and daily podcast, and the co-organizer of the Marketers Anonymous monthly meetups.