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Emily Hirsh:

Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you guys are doing fabulous, having an amazing week and that you got to tune in last week to some of the optimized business series episodes that I released. So I did a five day series and it was so much in five days. I do feel like every episode could have been a series in and of itself, but I also learned about myself throughout creating that content, how much I enjoy having an opportunity to talk about the bigger picture business lessons or strategies or things I’ve tried that haven’t worked or are working, or like best practices that I have. And I read a lot of books like last year at 65 books and a big percentage of those books are business books. And you have to be careful when you’re taking in information, because there’s so much information out there.

Books, podcast, courses, coaches, you have to balance the fact that everybody’s gonna try and tell you what to do, and everybody’s gonna try and tell you their way is the only way. And it’s the best way. And then you have your unique business and your unique experience and what you’re good at, which might be and is probably different than somebody else’s. And so you have to like filter that information and then only take out of it. What’s going to impact your business or customize it or shift it. And that’s true for business. That’s true for marketing. Like if somebody tells you an amazing strategy, they tried, it’s highly unlikely that if you do that exact strategy without changing or adjusting it at all, that it’s gonna work, you’re going to have to make it your own. And you’re going to have to cater it to your own skillset, your brand, your audience, your offer.

I talk about this all the time. Well, it’s the same thing with business. And so I think that I do a good job at taking information. And you start to read a lot of business books. You realize like there’s themes that everybody, you know, the good authors and leaders in this space are talking about, and that’s great because then it’s driven home multiple times. And so I love being able to take that and then actually share real world, you know, strategies and examples of how I’m implementing it in my, so if you didn’t catch some of those episodes, definitely go back and tune into those from last week, I’m really enjoying doing these like series. I hope you guys are enjoying them too. If you love them, send me a message that you want more of them and what you would like a series on, because it allows me to have some targeted content all around solving a specific problem or providing value around a specific area.

And just going above and beyond for you guys, before I dive into today’s topic, which I am very excited about, and I think is going to maybe blow some of your minds. I’m coming off of a CEO week where I spent the entire week, no meetings just getting, I got so much done. I told my husband, I’m like, I’m pretty sure what I got done this week would take most people on the month, like to get all this done because I was crazy focused and getting a ton done. And one of the things I did was focus on company metrics and KPIs. So I’m gonna share that with you guys today. But before I dive into that, I want to mention the upcoming free challenge that we have happening. I am so excited for this called The Ultimate Facebook Ads Challenge. So you can register for it at hirshmarketing.com/challenge.

And my promise to you is in this challenge in five days or less, I’m gonna help you guys attract a thousand plus ideal clients with your messaging and content. So we’re actually going to take a version of your content. You’re either gonna use something existing or create strategic content with my blueprint, with my strategies and launch an ad. And you will have that ad live within the challenge and understand how to launch it, targeting, set it up and you know, then bring it into the big picture of your strategy. And my promise is that in five days or less, you’ll attract a thousand plus more ideal clients with this piece of content. So it’s following the Hersh marketing process. And when I was kind of mapping out this content and what I wanted to teach next, I realized how many people would benefit from understanding and actually making progress like implementing a strategy around getting content ads life, because what this does, and this is what I will go into in the challenge.

But the reason why this is so important is so many of you are exhausted trying to grow your business, posting content, being on all these platforms, being everywhere and making little to none progress every day. And so this blueprint, this strategy is going to massively like amplify and speed up your results. So I’m, I had to put it in challenge format because I am all about implementing. Like, I don’t wanna just give information. I want you to have ads live something executed your target, getting figured out and you moving on to the next thing. So it starts February 28th, which is Monday of next. Week’s make sure you are signed up. There’s gonna be a private Facebook group for everybody in the challenge. I’m super excited. We just continue to, you know, level up that bar whenever I do some free experience or free event. And I cannot wait for the results that are gonna come from this challenge. So hirshmarketing.com/challenge to get in on that. And let’s dive in to today’s content. 

So today I wanna talk all about your company metrics and KPIs, key performance indicators. And I think this is going to be really impactful for a lot of you guys. So like I said, I just came off of a CEO week and I went through this kind of process throughout this week that I realized I was massively missing in my company. And I don’t know if any of you guys have experienced this, you probably have, but I sometimes find myself have been doing this now for, you know, six years growing my team for almost five years. I find that I, I sometimes am repeating like, oh, we used to do this. And for some reason we stopped doing this and this is like so key. And so it’s like this cycle where now I’m going back to like a best practice that for some reason, like dropped off and we weren’t doing, and one of those is having reporting on your entire company really clear.

And I cannot tell you how many business owners even successful seven figure business owners do not understand their company metrics. And this goes beyond just marketing. Like I talk all day long about need to know your marketing numbers and your data. And one of our core company values is data drives every action and decision, but this goes beyond just marketing. You, you don’t wanna just know your marketing numbers. You also need to know all of the performance indicators, all of the numbers across your company. So let’s dive into what I mean here. So what I did is I followed this exercise that you guys can kind of copy is I wrote down every department of my company. And it really actually doesn’t matter if you have a team or not. You may not have a team, or you might have a really small team. You still have departments in your company.

So for example, you have your marketing, then you probably have your sales, right? The actual conversion that happens, then you have some form of delivery and that might have multiple departments within it. And so for me, for example, like our delivery departments are, we have the ads team. We have the actual like ads managers and people who manage client accounts. Then we have our creative team that manages all creative, both for market like a pro and our agency clients. They do the copy, they do the creative, they come up with the ideas, the content. Then we have our funnel team that builds funnels. And this mixes in with the creative team a little bit, but builds funnels, integrates fixes Facebook, pixels, and whatnot. And then that’s my delivery. But then I also have the market, like a pro team, the delivery of like the coaching side product side over there.

And then I also have my HR and, and operations internally. And so HR would be, you know, recruiting, hiring. So what I did was list out every department, basically that I have. And again, like if you don’t have a team, you still have marketing, you still have sales and then you have your delivery that might be unique. You know, you have to think through like, what are the different components to what I’m delivering? And so therefore are there different departments or, or sections that I should break it out in? So I broke out all of my company, me, uh, departments. And then I took that and I said, what are the metrics that would define success in every department? And I, I looked at, for example, marketing and you’re trying to pull like, there’s a lot of metrics. So, so I could pull probably 15 marketing metrics and I do wanna get really deep in some cases.

But I also wanted to say like, what are the metrics that are driven in by many other small metrics that kind of give me a pulse on how things are going? So for example, for me in marketing, an easy metric that could tie into a lot of other things is number of new leads that we generated that month. Like that metric is driven by social media is driven by ad cost is driven by landing page conversion. It’s driven by a lot of things, but if I just look at, from a high level, the number of new leads generated in a month, I’m able to see kind of like the health of my marketing, right? The next one that that is marketing and sales combine would be the number of qualified applications to both of our offers market like a pro and agency. And so that, you know, is driven again by leads, by conversions on the back end of a webinar.

It’s driven by our email, our organic, but it gives me a, a high level pulse of what are all of those metrics and how is my marketing department doing? And so the goal of this is ultimately what, what you’re doing with this is creating a big picture snapshot of your company through metrics. So that’s what I looked at for, um, marketing. The couple of other big metrics I had was total ad spend and cost per acquisition, and then total sales on both of our offers. So that gives me a big snapshot of like the health of my marketing and my sales. And that’s only like what six or seven metrics, right. And, and they’re driven by a lot of smaller metrics that I actually will have tracking for, um, you know, in a, in a targeted meeting. But what I ultimately am creating is this like big dashboard, right?

If I look at it and let’s say I haven’t been in my company for a couple of weeks, I could come in and instantly spot where the problems what’s going well, what’s not going well. And you always wanna have that driven by numbers. So then I moved over, let a two delivery. So a big metric that we could look at is number of clients that we lost right. Every month, how many clients are we losing? And what is our retention rate? Those are the big numbers that are obviously driven by other numbers and other, you know, components. But it gives me a quick snapshot of how things are going with our delivery. The other could be, uh, the churn on market, like a pro how many member, what’s our churn rate over there. And then on the team side of things, I could look at, you know, capacity, what’s the capacity for an ads manager or for a copywriter.

And that tells me the health of, of our team, of our hiring are we meeting those needs? So the first up is you break out all the departments that you have. And then for each one you ask yourself, what are the big, main metrics that would tell me if we’re successful or not? And if you have a team this is also going to really help your team. So then I had like the big metrics, the overarching metrics, and that’s gonna create this dashboard. And now I was able to get specific. So let’s look at, for example, my creative team, I’ll, I’ll pull from that one. So I brainstorm, like what would be all of the metrics that would define success or really highlight if there’s a problem, if there’s a capacity problem, if there’s a personnel problem, if there’s a process issue, like what are the metrics that would tell me that, and this takes some time to think through, but some of the ones that I came up with is how much ad copy each copywriter is producing the number completed audits, because we do copy copy audits for our clients and the percentage of deadlines met per team member.

So for example, let’s say I, I create this reporting, which we’re working on now that I’ve defined all the metrics, but I create this reporting. And then I look at it in one month we have a copywriter who is only meeting 60% or deadlines. That would be an instant red flag for me to say, Hey, why is this happening? Is it a process issue? Is it a capacity issue? Do we need more support? Is it a personnel issue? Like do they have a time management issue? Do they need support from their manager? And, and the reality is I’ve built a team where I don’t work with the copywriters, right? And so I have to create accountability through metrics so that I am able to get a pulse on all of the departments. And this is so key for growing your company. And it also will allow you to step away from the day to day and the implementation and the execution in your company, because you’re gonna have the trust of knowing what’s working and what’s not working.

And it gives your team a scoreboard. It gives, it gives your team the ability for them to say, you know, was I successful this week? Was I successful this month? What are the metrics that I am being measured on for my success? So the, the overarching process is this. You’ve gotta come up with the, the major departments, the major processes, the major sections of your business, which they are going to be unique from mine. You really need to think about like, what are all of the, what are all the areas of my business or of my future business, right? Maybe you haven’t built out your HR department, but you are gonna have that someday. And then what are the metrics at are driving success in each of those departments that if all you could do is just look at numbers to determine if something was successful or not.

What are those numbers like? Imagine that you couldn’t have a conversation with somebody, you couldn’t dig deeper into something you had to figure out is this working or not purely from numbers. And, and that’s gonna give you the answer of what those numbers are. And then from there you can pull out from those numbers, like, what are the key numbers? What are the like top, you know, 10 numbers that a lot of other numbers or, or things like play into their success, but they’re like are critical numbers. Like these are, these are, if I just looked at this, I would know where the biggest gaps are in my company. And so that, you know, I pulled out like those big numbers and then I have individual department numbers. And then the final thing is you have to create process and accountability for actually tracking these things in an ideal world, everything gets tracked automatically, right.

But I have learned and found a lot in business that you can’t automatically track everything. So for example, the number of completed, you know, add, copy versions per copywriter. It would be really hard for me to build the system. I mean, if you know, one let but build an automated system, that’s gonna track that, right? Because there has to be some sort of like the copywriter tallying it up or, or reporting on it because they might have three versions in one task, four versions in another, like I wouldn’t know that, but in, but the next step is I need to set process up for getting that tracked. So we have to create a spreadsheet. We have to create a tracker. We have to set the expectation for the copywriter and we have to create process around tracking this. So essentially what I have being created after I did, this is one single spreadsheet that has a tab for every main component of our business.

So it’s gonna have a tab or our application in sales summary, it’s gonna have a tab for organic marketing. It’s gonna have a tab for email marketing. It’s gonna have a tab for my podcast. It’s gonna have a tab for individual funnels that we wanna look at because we wanna see those as a separate snapshot, the ads team, the creative team, all of those components of the business and departments are going to have its own have. And then within that is going to be metrics tracked that are specific to that department or that area of the business. And then I have a big, you know, master dashboard that has all of the, like the most important company numbers. And so this will be one single spreadsheet that will have all the information that I need to ultimately make decisions. Because let me explain how this plays out and what kind of sparked this was.

We had massive growth in December and January. So we pushed our capacity a lot and it was like, okay, where do we need to go and hire? But the thing is I don’t work direct with ads managers or the creative team. And so when someone’s saying, you know, we’re really busy and we need more help. It’s like, what’s really busy mean right? How many versions of copy? How many audits, how many funnels are we comp completing? So I started having these questions to ask my team before I could make the decision to say, okay, these are the positions we need to prioritize hiring for because we experienced a lot of growth and I realized I don’t have the Intel on this. And as you grow a team, like there are three layers between me and the front lines of our team. And as you grow a team, you’re gonna realize you are so removed.

You don’t understand like are people productive or like what’s a lot of work. What’s a little bit of work. How long do things take? And I have kind of a tendency to think things like can be way faster than they really are. So I need the data to make the decisions. And so what this does is it creates all this data. So now if somebody says, Hey, we need a new copywriter or we need a new designer or we need another ads manager. We go to the metrics and we see, okay, like on average, a copywriter is maybe doing 15 versions of ad copy a week, three audits, X, Z. And so that means like I can see that both of our copywriters are at capacity and therefore I can make the confident decision that we need another copywriter. But what if I made that decision?

And we had a team member who wasn’t really performing and they were doing half the work that the other team member was. Well, unless I have metrics, I would never know that. And this is where it’s very difficult to grow a team and disconnect yourself from the day to day and from the accountability components of growing a team and that departments are delivering what they should be delivering. If you don’t have metrics because metrics are not our arguable, like having these metrics, it’s like, there’s no arguing, right? If I had a team member, I have two of the same team members and one is producing double what the other is producing. You can’t argue that like maybe there’s a process issue, but probably there’s more a time management issue. And I’m not gonna know that unless I have tracking in place. So creating company metrics, creating KPIs for every single department, for every person, like every person, contractor employee who supports you in your business, they should understand what KPIs they can control.

And how does that play into the bigger picture of the business? One of the other things I’m doing is with this master sheet that we’re creating, it’s going to be available for the entire team to see very transparent with the numbers. I think I’m actually gonna put in place a process where we send out like a, a newsletter with it and say like, Hey, here’s the things we’re working on. Here’s the company numbers. And I want to tee each my team how to think like a business, because the other thing that will happen is you experience massive growth. And then the team automatically goes to like, we need to hire all these positions, which might be true, but you also have to take into consideration margin of a business. And so unless you instill in your team, the fact that they need to consider that and they need to look at capacity because you can’t just say like, oh for fun, we need to hire this position unless it’s backed by actual data, that that person is at capacity.

And what is capacity. They’re not gonna think like business owners and you want your team to understand a business so they can make the decision better, best for the business. And so by showing my team, these are the KPIs you can control. These are the KPIs that I want you to look at every week. And every month side note, there was this study done where two groups of people were trying to lose weight over the Christmas holiday. And one of them, one of the groups like didn’t weigh themselves. And then the other group was required to stand on a scale every single day. And I can’t, I don’t know the exact stats, but the people who stood on the scale and saw the number every day lost way more, a weight over the holiday, purely because they were forced to look at their weight every day.

So when you create process and you force people to look at numbers that they’re responsible for a hundred percent guaranteed, they will take action to improve those numbers if they are having to look at it every day in week. And so by creating this process, it’s true for you as a business too, right? Like if you create tracking where you understand how many new leads are you bringing into your business every month? And you’re like, well, this sucks. I’m bringing in 20 a month. You’re gonna naturally take action to improve that number because it’s in your face that it’s not good. And that you’re responsible for that. And so having the numbers that each team responsible for creating the process, so they’re reporting them, they’re looking at them. They’re aware of them is automatically going to improve results. It’s going to improve the way people look at those numbers, take action around those numbers and make decisions.

And then you can tie those numbers to actual like your income statement, profit and loss. I love showing employees like, look, this is the line item on our profit and loss statement that you can control. You can make a change on this line in the business and teaching them business because you’ll be very surprised. Like 95% of employees just don’t understand it. Right? They think that that your profit, they think your revenue is your profit. And if you don’t explain the way business works, the capital you need, what it costs to, to run your company and all of these things like they’re just gonna make assumptions and they’re probably not great assumptions. And so creating that transparency is also extremely powerful. So leaving this podcast podcast episode, what you guys can do is go through these steps, define the metrics that you should be tracking as a company.

What would give you an immediate pulse on how everything is going in your company and then create a process and accountability around tracking those. And regardless if you have a team or not, this is going to make a world of difference in your results. I write everybody. I hope you found value in this. I definitely love talking about it. I’m super nerded out over the spreadsheet we’re creating that has like all these automations and cool things in it. And I hope you join me next week for the Facebook ads challenge, we are going to have ads live and I’m guaranteeing you’ll reach. I was a new of your ideal client with these ads following our process. So hirshmarketing.com/challenge. And I’ll talk to you guys soon.

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