Making Calm Your New KPI: How to Set Goals That Truly Matter

Are you measuring what matters to you, or are you measuring some BS metric because that's what you're supposed to do? I'm Susan Bowles, and this is Beyond Margins, the show where we deconstruct how to engineer a commerce business. Now it's that time of year again when we are all setting goals around what we want to accomplish this year. We're making a list of all the things and projects that we wanna do, but so often we set goals arbitrarily without actually paying attention to whether or not it's something that's really important to us, without thinking about what actions we need to take to accomplish that goal, or what resources and support we might need. I mean, do you actually care if you hit a certain revenue target or grow by 10%, or is your goal actually to make enough to be comfortable, to provide good lives for your team and your family, Or do you actually not care at all about revenue and you just care about doing good work?

Or your business is fine and you wanna focus on your hobbies. No matter what your focus is, your goals need to be informed by your values and your priorities. And, also, just throwing this out there, you can run a business just fine without setting goals at all. I know. Kind of blasphemy coming from someone who's pretty much made their career on data.

But setting goals, it only works if they work for you. And if you're demand avoidant or a perfectionist or overcapacity, setting specific goals might not work for you. Maybe you pick a word or a theme of the year, or you just decide on some specific metrics that you'll pay attention to. That's often my approach. Now I'm always saying to make calm your new KPI.

But what does that mean? What does that look like when we're talking about setting goals or setting priorities? That's what we'll be talking about in this next series. How do you go about making calm your new KPI? Well, if we're setting goals, we should also be deciding how we're actually going to evaluate the performance of that goal later on.

How do you decide if you met a goal? How do you decide if an investment is a success? One way to do this is to create metrics, sometimes called KPIs or key performance metrics, or maybe you've heard them called OKRs, which are objectives and key results. Either way, these metrics help us measure our performance against our goals and our priorities. So some common KPIs are things like customer lifetime value, net promoter score, ARR, MRR, or just general financial benchmarks, like net profit, overall revenue, etcetera.

But those are the default. We measure those things because some middle aged white dude in a blue suit or a gray hoodie decided that that's what we were supposed to measure to have a successful business. So we all did. But they might or might not matter to your business and to your accomplishment of the goals you actually care about. There's this common saying in business, what gets measured gets managed.

And I do somewhat agree with that. When you track a specific metric, you have a lot more visibility of whatever that metric is. So the data is in your brain when you're making a decision about that. Also, the metrics we decide to measure, they do say something about what we value. At least, theoretically, they're supposed to.

But that quote is actually a misquote. It's shortened, and the guy that's credited for it, Peter Drucker, never actually said that or thought that. I actually prefer the interpretation from Simon Culkin, and I think it's way more accurate. He said what gets measured gets managed, even when it's pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organization to do so. But I think that's true for most business owners.

We're either measuring all of the things or measuring absolutely nothing. Measuring too many things means you're not really paying attention to any of them, and measuring nothing leaves you without any good data to make decisions from. Or to evaluate whether or not you're actually making progress towards the objectives you care about. So the real key is just to set a few metrics that help you track your progress towards the goals that really matter to you and that make a difference to your business. We're gonna take a quick break to hear from our sponsors but when we come back, I'll walk you through what this looks like in my own business.

So in my business, to absolutely no one's surprise, my biggest priority is having a calm business. That's my number one objective. And I'm constantly working on making my business calmer, whether that means building new systems to support my work and make it easier to deliver or prioritizing rest. But having calm as my main goal means that it also needs to be a major consideration when I'm setting my goals and when I decide what to measure to track my progress towards things feeling calmer. When it comes to setting goals, I actually don't set many in my business.

I tend to think and work more in projects and sprints than in arbitrary time targets like years or months. Regardless of what goals I do or don't set, though, I always have some metrics or KPIs that I'm measuring. They're just not always the same. My approach tends to be that I have a few standard KPIs that I always track, things like net profit, my cash balance, and the revenue in my sales pipeline. They're mostly financial because I am a CFO after all.

And then I have a few focus KPIs that do change pretty regularly. These are more specific to the goals or priorities I have at the moment or certain experiments that I'm running. So this is my approach to what gets measured and managed. By only tracking 1 or 2 of these things at a time, they do get my focus and they do get managed and they don't get lost in a sea of metrics. So what does this look like in practice for me?

Well, let's look at my 2024 goal. So in 2024, I wanted to focus on resting. I'm still recovering from burnout and I knew that in order to do my best work, I also had to do my best rest. So the way I wanted to move towards a calmer business in 2024 was to prioritize resting. So I set an annual goal to take 12 weeks off from work.

And that was actually the only specific goal that I set for 2024. So once I decided on that as the goal, I took a few actions. 1st, I wanted to make sure that I had the resources to meet this goal. And for this, the most important resource was time. In order to rest for 12 weeks, I had to create that 12 weeks of space.

So I went through my calendar at the beginning of the year, and I blocked off all 12 weeks. I planned out when they would actually happen to make sure that I had that time resource set aside for this goal. Then I created a goal tracker inside my project management system because I'm a huge geek and everything has to live there. I absolutely could have done this with a piece of paper and making a tick mark, but either way, I needed to have a way to track my progress towards that goal. And then every time I took a week off, I updated that progress tracker.

And I also touched base on my progress every time I did a monthly review throughout the year. Having that tracker and consistently touching base with how I was progressing towards that goal meant that it reminded me that it was a priority, which made it easier for me to actually protect that time. And if I did have to bail on a break week because some circumstance came up, you know, you can't predict what's gonna happen at the beginning of the year completely, I made sure that I added a new week to the schedule later on in the year to maintain having at least 12 weeks blocked off. Setting a goal that mattered to me, even if it was a goal that didn't matter to anybody else, and then making sure that I had a way to evaluate my progress towards that goal, that's what kept me on track. Ultimately, I ended up taking 13 weeks off in 2024, and I set a new goal for 16 weeks in 2025 even though that goal in 2025 will look a little bit different.

That's just one example from my business, though. When you set out to make Calm your new KPI, that will probably look different in every business that you look at. Even though calm is a priority for pretty much all the businesses I work with, what they choose to measure to get them there varies because their priorities are different than mine. The season of business and of life they're in are different than mine. So their goals and the metrics they use to get there will be different.

But over the next few episodes in this series, my goal is to give you a bunch of examples and ideas from other business owners like you. We'll talk about what and how they measure, and we'll give you some ideas about how you might think about measuring things in your own business, even if it's something you think can't possibly be measured. Every business owner I'll talk to has calm KPIs that they measure, that relate to their specific business, their priorities, their goals. And they're measuring some stuff that's pretty unconventional and helps them build calmer businesses. I'm even going to live workshop with 1 business owner to help her develop her Calm KPI.

So if you set some goals already this year, go have a look at them. Make sure that they reflect your actual priorities and not some arbitrary default metric. And make sure you know how you'll measure and evaluate your success. And if you need some ideas on how to do that, stay tuned. In our next episode, I'll be geeking out with Kendall Cherry, who is a ghostwriter, about her fresh content inked Calm KPI and her system to help her publish content hands free.

And, no, she's not using AI to do it. Until next time, stay calm. Big thanks to everyone who supports Beyond Margins. If you are a listener, a sponsor, or a partner of any kind, I really couldn't do this show without you. You can support this show by leaving a rating and a review.

It really does help new listeners hit play with more confidence. You can support our sponsors by using the link in your show notes, and all of this helps me keep this independent podcast going and growing. So thank you so much for that, and thank you for listening.