The Most Human Metric in Operations: Layla Pomper’s Death List KPI

If you don't have a good death list, you probably don't have a good life. That's what my guest Layla Pomper realized when she sat down to create an emergency plan for her business and discovered something unsettling. There weren't enough people she could trust to help her partner navigate the chaos if something happened to her. What started as bid planning exercise became a complete shift in how she thinks about community resilience and what actually makes a business sustainable. Welcome to Calm is the New KPI where we solve for calm one KPI, one bottleneck, one business at a time.

Leila runs ProcessDriven where she helps businesses systematize their operations. She is a frequent friend of the show because we are business ops nerd friends. And she has built her career on documentation, processes, and making sure everything runs smoothly when the owner of a business steps away. But when life forced her to think about what would happen if she couldn't step back in, she realized all those internal systems meant nothing without the external relationships to support them. Her death list KPI, it's not just a calmer KPI about emergency planning.

It's about measuring something most of us never think to track: the strength of our village. And as you'll hear, building that village changed everything about how she runs her business, spends her time, and thinks about what real resilience looks like. One of your current KPIs that you're paying attention to is something that you have called the death list, which sounds scary and creepy. And I actually think it's super cool. But at a high level, how are you thinking about what a death list is?

And how did you come up with the idea as a whole?

Yeah. I don't think it was very intentional. Many years ago, I think I had stumbled upon social media post being like, do you have an emergency binder for your business? And I was like, oh, no, I should probably make one of those. And I kind of promptly ignored it until life events forced me to really think seriously about what would happen I disappeared.

And when I sat down and I started writing, all right, if I were to die tomorrow, here's what my husband needs to know and who he needs to get in touch with to get help through whatever would happen next. I realized, well, damn, like there's not enough people on this list that I would feel comfortable leaving him as a support system. It kind of came to be based on just scary life events. And ever since then, I've used that as a North Star, particularly for this year to help me decide what should I be spending my time on.

So how do you think about the individual elements of then what turns into your death list?

Well, I guess I'm reverse engineering. So I guess I should define this because this is a totally made up term. So if people are like death list, what? The death list is essentially list of emergency contacts. Like if you have a kid and you leave them with a babysitter, you give that babysitter numbers to call if shit goes wrong.

This is kind of the same thing. But for my business, specifically for my partner to know what to deal with. So when I'm thinking about the names on the list and what I'm really looking for, the number that is the right number. The way I've been looking at it is here are all the things that I need to manage in my business. Here are all the different avenues where things could be crazy.

There's legal stuff, there's financial stuff, there's software stuff, there's operational and team stuff. And I view those kind of as categories. And so when I'm trying to think of names on the list, if you will, I'm trying to it sounds a little like Min Maxi, but I'm trying to figure out how can I find people in my life and build real relationships with people who could help in each of those areas should something terrible happen? And the beautiful thing is, even if nothing terrible happens, it's great to have like a board of advisors in all these areas of your life or your work life.

So did this come along with creating an emergency binder for your business? Or is this something that is completely separate in your mind? It all started from that honestly, because I I needed to

create some kind of plan. And it wasn't until I sat down to write that section of this chat GPT generated template I was filling in that I realized this is really where I've got nothing. The inspiration was from that emergency binder. The reality day to day is that this is something that's front of mind for me when I'm doing my annual planning, When I'm doing my budget planning, it has ramifications for how my money is being spent. Like, I'm spending more time going to events, building relationships with people rather than hunkering down in my office.

It's just a total 180 in some ways shift of how I'm spending my time because of this metric.

When you are thinking about the transition from you as a leader of the business to whatever happens after that, you have a team, you have a partner, and you're primarily setting this up for him to be able to handle things if you were to be incapacitated. How are you thinking about him coming into the business? Is the intention, like, he comes in and runs things? Or it's he comes in and shuts things down? Like, how are you thinking about the longevity of the business?

And I guess, how does your existing team, because you do have a team, how does that play into that kind of calculus?

Yeah. What I love about the challenge of the death list is it requires you to kind of zoom out even further. So my business day to day, we spend a lot of time talking about how to systemize operations so that the owner can leave and things still work. So I've never really been worried about the team being able to continue to operate. Maybe I should care more about that.

It's sort of an unfair question to ask you. So like, I know that everything has a process and a documentation because that's what you do. But I still think it's interesting to see how you're thinking.

Oh, for sure. So I've never really challenged the question of like, could the business keep running? I know it could. I think growth would slow because there's certain activities where because of the funds of the business, the size of the business, I cannot afford to replace myself on all of the things to make it a truly separate entity that could grow beyond me. But what's interesting about the Death List is it kind of takes the challenge level up a notch.

Not that the business owner is exiting by choice. It's that the business owner is stripped away, removed, and you cannot access them in any way, shape or form. It's like an extra challenge level. And when I'm thinking about this death list, I'm in the assumption that there is a choice. So actually, in my emergency binder, if you will, I lay out two paths of what I would encourage.

There's a disclaimer at the top. It says something like, honey, if you're reading this and I'm dead, I really don't care what you do. I'm dead. Start off with that, keeping it nice and romantic there. And then I kind of outline if you want to keep running it, everything's in place.

But here's the stuff you'd need to hire for, and here's who you can ask to help going through that route. I list out my team members there who can help specify what do we need to hire out for. I list out people who could help him find people to do that. I honestly don't expect that to be the for him. And so the other route is to how to shut it down.

And here's who you can talk to about these different pieces. But I should probably call out that the number one people on the quote death list is actually my employees. So my staff are the number one people on those lists for their respective areas. They know 80% of the business, thanks to what we've documented. But it's that tricky 20 where there's strategy or vision or stuff that would never have been shared with the team member where the death list really fills the gap.

Yeah. I love the idea of thinking about it as kind of like a decision tree. Like, hey, there are these choices. Here's what happens in this scenario. Here's what happens in this scenario.

And all the resources to support that. So outside of your employees, how do you think about who should be a re a resource? And how do you go about finding those resources?

Yeah. I only realized recently my younger sister had her first kid and she was talking about Godparents and all this stuff. And I realized, that's kind of the same thing. I'm not a parent. But for those of you who are, how did you pick the Godparents for your kid?

I kind of view this death list to be the same thing, except that you need a lot of them. So I would say the majority of folks are folks I've been in masterminds with for years. I've known for the majority of ProcessDriven's existence. And that's how it's come to be. For me, my threshold is I would trust this person to give my husband in the event of a crisis.

I know that they would get on a call with Alex and say, hey, if Leila was here's what I tell her to do. And they would be honest. They wouldn't make a big deal out about it. I know that they would have his best interest in heart. They would care enough to just be helpful.

They're good humans with a good compass. And they know whatever the subject matter is. So it's a lot like finding godparents from what I hear.

I love that. So you mentioned that the idea of the death list is prompting you being more intentional about building relationships with people in your network. Is that the end result of you having gone through tried to put people in a in a spot and go, I don't I don't really have a spot. Like, I don't have a person for this spot that I need a resource for. Or did it kind of just naturally evolve because now you're thinking more, I guess, like community minded in terms of like, what does my community actually look like?

And the idea of like being a good villager for the other people in the village?

It's definitely the latter in the sense that this brought me to a new sense of awareness and it was less like, oh, have a gap to fill. Like, I'm not that thoughtful about it. But having the number and kind of making a game out of it of like, here's how many people I have on the emergency contact list gave me a good reason to take this seriously in a way that community building in this day and age is like a nice to have. It's a fluffy skill. It's an if I have time, sure, I'll attend.

And especially for me, my personality type, I'm an INTJ relationship building is not a natural skill that I possess. And so it takes conscious effort to prioritize and make it important. And throughout this entire year, I have made a conscious effort in the events I attend, how I focus my time. We talked earlier before we started recording about LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn not because I love being on LinkedIn or because I love social media.

No, I'm on LinkedIn and I continue to engage there because it's a great way for me to actually stay in touch with people and make that a habit. I would say this KPI, yes, is measurable and actionable, but really it's more about reorienting my whole priority system away from arbitrary KPIs like revenue or months of saving in the bank. Like, these are all important and I track them. But as a human being on the outside of my business, which is really what the death list is about, it's about my human existence. Tracking something there and treating that just as important has really forced me to behave differently, which

is the goal. I think that's an excellent point. And I'm curious, since this is something that sort of sits not necessarily in the business and not necessarily out of the business, like, it kind of does cross that threshold in a way that I think very few metrics that we're thinking about, like, in our businesses, most of them don't cross outside of the business. Is this something that you are now specifically measuring or managing towards? So as I do with everything, I built a routine to check back in

on this. So I revisit this kind of emergency document every six months. And so I see the list of names and I compare that to, well, who do I need to add? Who do I need to remove from this list? And so I am revisiting it and I revisit it at the same interval that I do, like major planning.

So I plan my budget for travel. I plan what projects we're working on. Those two things coincide. So it's not like a weekly metric that I'm going through, but it's certainly something I'm revisiting. And I think what you said about how it's not inside and not outside is a pretty key point here.

It's more like something that would be on the balance sheet, right? Like, it's an owner draw of some kind where it's this exchange from the outside world to the inside world. And there's not too many things we create in our business that's built for our families. But I really view this to be that kind of thing where it's really building this passageway in the event of someone else needing to step over. And I like to think it has ramifications for even now.

Resiliency in the business. Like, talk about sustainability. We talk about being resilient. But actually being able to really measure, is that something that we are accomplishing or just something we're talking about, I think is really challenging. And I think something like how many people, how many resources, you know, what does your community of support really look like is such an interesting aspect of that because we do I think as business owners, a lot of us intellectually know that the community we have that supports us is useful, but I don't think we really invest as deeply in trying to, like you like you said, like, look for godparents for our business.

We think about it as that person can get me sales or that person would be a great referral partner or, you know, I use this community for this particular resource. We don't actually think about what does our real village look like? And what is my place in that? It is a core component of how resilient we can be both as business owners and as businesses themselves. And I think this is a really good placeholder for that.

Like, maybe you're not actually counting the numbers of people on your death list. Maybe you are. But the fact that you have a death list and the fact that there are people from your community there inherently builds resiliency in a way that we don't really think about I think.

Yeah, I think what makes this so attractive to me is my work is very much on the inside of businesses. It's the opposite. It's what are the things that allow our business from the inside to continue to function? All the cogs and gears. How do we the question, how do we systemize our business?

I've been working on that, working on that for all these years. And to your point, it's the external connections that my work doesn't touch. And one would argue almost no work in the business space touches that external connection. But it takes a village to raise a business quip is there for a reason because at the end of the day, if you were to disappear and someone else steps in, they need that network. And sometimes if we're thinking about an exit, like maybe the parents are stepping down, the kids taking over the business.

There's a little bit more of that that can be kind of fudged. Or maybe you're hiring a CEO and they bring a network. That's kind of interesting and that could get you through that transition. But the death list forces you to have higher standards by saying, no, no, no. This is your spouse.

This is your cousin. This is your employee. People who do not have any built up network. How can they piggyback on what you have started to build to make the transition easier in this crisis time, which is a

little bit of a different scenario. Nobody wants to be in that scenario. And I think a lot of the times we avoid thinking about that scenario because if we don't think about it, then it won't happen. But I'm curious as you have kind of established your death list, established this plan, and then had the opportunity to maybe come back and revisit it, improve it. What has the impact of having that in your head, in your business?

What's the impact of that for either you or the business as a whole?

I think there's one behavior that I've noticed really change because of it. Well, first of all, I've gotten even more morbid in my format of jokes, but that was a pretty low bar already. But the other one is I realized when I went back because I think I've only reviewed it two or three times since I've created it just because of the timeline that it's been. This all really came up about one year ago when the crazy life stuff happened. And in each of those visits, what I realized is the people I feel comfortable putting on that list are people where I've asked for help, for lack of a better word.

Some self awareness came of this list and I realized, man, I offer help a lot. I try to write if I'm in a mastermind group or whatever. I try to give a suggestion at every time. But I noticed myself really being reluctant to ask people for help or for opinion or to pick their brains because it is rude unless you've established this rapport. Please, no one message me asking to pick my brain.

That's not what I'm saying here. But I realized that. And the people I did put on the list are people through some string of events I had that encounter with where I was like, Susan, I am absolutely stuck on this process. I'm trying to figure out like, what do you think I could do? And that experience gave me the confidence to know, oh, they could be a godparent to this business for lack of a better word.

And it actually forced me to start making a practice of actually asking for help, which sounds so simple now that I'm saying it out loud.

It's so hard, hard, especially I think in the business community where there are so many spaces where you go in hoping for vulnerability, right? Like you'll join a mastermind hoping that everybody will be vulnerable so that you can be vulnerable. But I think the ratio isn't always there. Right? And sometimes we get into these groups where we're hoping for support.

We're hoping to create a village. And what you end up getting is sitting in a room with everybody talking about how fantastic things are. And then you are sitting there in your own head being fantastic for me. And I have been in those rooms where things aren't going that spectacular for me right now. But if nobody else is gonna be vulnerable, I don't feel comfortable being vulnerable.

And I think being willing to be the person who takes the first step of like asking for help can sometimes open the floodgates of now everybody's okay asking for help because we've now realized it's a place of this could be my village and not a place of we're just all talking about all the good things that are happening. Anybody who's been in business for any length of time knows you've got peaks, you've got valleys. There's real value in being willing to put yourself out there and ask for help. And something that I was really focused on at the beginning of the year was really deepening relationships with people I already knew. Like, people that I was like, I would really like for this person to be a genuine friend instead of an acquaintance.

And actually went down the rabbit hole of like, how do you make friends? Right? Essentially, the question is, how do I go about figuring out how to make friends with somebody, particularly we're all online. Most of us have never met each other in person. People I've been friends with for a decade, never met them in person.

Right? How do you build that relationship when you can't just be like, let's go for a coffee? There's the overcoming, like, how do I actually contact this person? Email fears feels weird, booking a Zoom call, like you're you're asking for their time. Like, what are the methodologies?

And it's really interesting because like you, the thing that I have found that almost has universal success is asking that person for help or for their opinion or or just to be the one that's like, hey, how are things going with you? Which it feels weird to be like, this is an intentional thing, but I think it's true.

Yeah. And I think what's nice about the Death List framing for that is it's not like it's transactional. And I think there's that risk, right? If someone's like, I want start being more intentional about my relationships. It's very easy to be like, oh, you're a social ladder climber and you're like, you should be on The Real Housewife.

We're not trying to be a Bravo show here. It's just choosing to be more intentional with how our time is spent. As a side effect of this, because I am a total nerd and like five years ago I committed to tracking my time like militantly. I know that because of this practice, my time on social media in its broadest form more than quadrupled this year versus previous years. And I'm not on any social media for the record, but I do post on LinkedIn now.

And like, I'm in Marco Polo's and WhatsApp's. And that's kind of like my social media experience. And I probably spend like an hour and a half a week now, which I'm sure is still low by Instagram or standards. But that's a lot for me across all of these different channels. And that's an intentional choice.

It's investing in these kinds of relationships. And I think it's something I would have viewed as a waste of time, honestly, in the earlier years. Would be like social media, what? No, I should be marketing.

My behavior of where I'm communicating with people has changed. I'm still on LinkedIn. And a lot of what I'm doing on LinkedIn these days is less content and more DM discussions with other people that are on LinkedIn or in WhatsApp chats or having Voxers with people. Yes. And so I'm being more social, I think, than I had been before, but it's not happening publicly.

It's all happening in essentially like tiny private rooms that happened because of an event I went to or because of somebody I met in person that all of a sudden we were able to transition from where email people who kind of talk maybe like six every six to twelve months ish will like circle back and be like, hey, how are things? And then you have like a thirty minute Zoom chat to catch up and you go away for another year. There is an element that I have found about like meeting somebody in person that allows the shift from like, this is a digital relationship to now this is like a real relationship, even though the communication is still digital.

Yeah.

I love the idea of this one piece in your business that has kind of cascaded across you as a business owner, your approach to business, your approach to marketing, your approach to support, really all cascaded from this one place of realizing that your village wasn't strong enough.

Yeah. And we didn't talk about this, but just for like the nerdy operations folks out there, it did have an impact on the business itself. Based on this deathless KPI, we started doing interviews. Like, I know you obviously have some interview stuff going on. I've never done interview stuff.

I did here or there some unintentional collab things over the years. But after this year, we had started doing one on one interviews with people. And sometimes it was people I knew. Sometimes it was people I didn't know. But we worked in intentional one on one connection time for the sole purpose of building relationships.

Like we've spoken, you and I before about how podcasts, it's not always the best way to get in front of more people, but it's a fantastic way to get in front of one wonderful person and talk with the person that you are speaking to. And I look forward to our chats here, Susan, because of that. And that was one way that our business model shifted because of this KPI. It was almost like a core value was installed by just tracking this metric. And the other thing is on our fulfillment side, we've been adapting like a membership model, and we're looking at an operators event coming up here in the next six months.

These are all things that are all directly sourced from realizing the power of in person events, the power of community. And it's just figuring out this way that how do you infuse this kind of priority into the entire business? So it's not just something you're doing in your free time, but it's a flywheel that you have to do as part of the core business. And yes, a

side effect is it helps this extraneous factor, but it also strengthens the business and puts community and village building into the fiber of what the business is. When you are in operations and when you are in process, it is so easy to start to view the business as just a series of cogs. Right? Like, it's just this system that goes with this system and this other one over here, and they're all connected, and we're documenting them. And like, when you're on the operations side of businesses, businesses all start to look the same.

It's all the same functionality, which is why operators can so easily move between one next business because the checklists and the SOPs and all of those pieces can be pretty much the same across any business, regardless of industry, regardless of like, you know, there's a little tweaks, like, do you have an inventory based business or not? Like, there's little tweaks, but I think it's so easy to start viewing it all as just checklists and cogs and automations and systems. And inherently, it sort of takes you away from the humanity that businesses are actually extremely human. And it's so easy to forget about that in the sea of the cogs moving. And Yeah.

I love that you are seeing that impact in your business. And it's kind of like pulling you back out. You mentioned earlier about how you're inside the business versus like the outside the business. And I love that this enables you to cross out of the business, cross out of the cogs, and reconnect with what I think is the best part about having a business, which is the community around you and around your business.

But what I think is interesting about this key metric or however we want to think about it, this metric that's become a value. It is forcing me to make this into a business because I'm not content with it just being initiative. When I get obsessed with something, want like the whole team behind it. Let's make it a thing. And then I get even more obsessed where I'm like, I want my clients to care about this thing, too, because it's so impactful for me.

I think they would also value it. What has been really fascinating about this particular one is when I'm working with operators, they didn't go through the shit I went through to scare me awake in this. You need your village thing. I'm talking to a lot of people who are in the shoes I was in five, seven more years ago. And so it's interesting to try to persuade other people to view their death list or to view their village as something that's important to them, to view community as something that's an operator skill set.

Candidly, it's been an uphill battle. Speaking of stuff you're trying to figure out, getting people to recognize it's not just about knowing how to automate or to streamline your customer service thing. So it happens in two days instead of three. That's not as knowing who you can call on the phone, who operates a business that does that every day and have them on speed dial. Because most operators like I'm extremely social by operator standards.

And let me just tell you, that is an extremely sad bar to set. Most operators don't know one person who does what they do, period. And so it's been interesting to take this KPI and prescribe it for lack of a better word, or at least evangelize for it to a broader skill set. And maybe I shouldn't be pushing this so hard on clients, but I just feel like it adds so much value that I want others to see the value of it, too.

I was talking to my partner Josh about this the other day and trying to describe how different operations is from other areas of the business. Right? So I hang out with a lot of marketers. Marketers have to be some of the most social collaborative people in business I've ever met. Right?

Like, I haven't done a lot of, like, formal marketing training, but I would consider myself a pretty good marketer because I just sit in the room with marketers and listen to them talk, listen to them collaborate, listen to them be social. And similarly, even finance people are social. They're supportive. In multiple finance groups where, like, we're all collaborating and checking on different processes and who's using which software and what have people found to be really effective. And operators are so weird because they don't do any of that.

They don't they do not, like, come out of their silo. I do think it's a limitation. And I think part of it then expands operator industry wide. And I think part of the problem is when you're a really good operator, it looks really easy, and people think you're not doing anything. Right?

Like, really good operations tend to almost end up being invisible. And because we're not in more of a community, we're not more verbal about that. We don't talk about that. And I think it does end up limiting and deprioritizing operations as a whole industry. And I think a lot of it ties back to nobody's being social.

Nobody's being collaborative.

Yeah. And I mean, could even go more basic if we're gonna geek out in operations is I don't think there's language to talk about it. The Death List doing it personally, I realized I wasn't asking for help enough. And I started to realize asking for help is a thing that I need to think of as a thing that requires effort. The term operator doesn't even have a definition really.

Like, what does it mean to build a process? Like, what does it mean to automate something? Like, we don't even have the language to start the conversation to know how to start talking about this. So I think it's been fascinating seeing this Ripple effect, and I haven't figured out how to go through it. But I've been trying to replicate the journey I've been on for the last, I don't know, about twelve months focused on this metric inside the business for almost the same period of time.

Literally the month after this traumatic event that triggered the death list, I started the membership in the business again. And it was this call for community, this call for connection. That was definitely not an accident looking back on it. And as I'm saying this right now and now we're here a year later trying to figure out how to evolve it. And like, is it an in person event?

Because like you and I have talked about here, in person events are such a magical way to build those deeper connections that are friendships, not just like, hey, can you fix my broken PC? So it's trying to replicate that through.

I love that. So is there anything you think we should talk about that we haven't touched on yet? I would just

say you don't need to have a near death experience to start doing this. This is something that anyone can sit down right now listening to this and write down if you disappeared tomorrow, who would you want your significant other or your right hand person to call for help getting through the next twenty four hours of chaos? You might find that your list is huge. Congratulations. You don't have to listen to the rest of this.

Oh, wait, we're mentioning this at the end. Maybe too late. You just wasted thirty minutes of your life. But for the rest of you, if you have a result similar to I do, where you have a handful of names and you're like, that's it. That's all I have to show for the last decade of my life.

There are so many actions you can also take. And I think just by writing that list, it will bring attention to this and you'll start to see your behaviors change as well. And maybe like what Susan and I are talking about, you can start then pressing that forward and paying that forward by working it into your business or into what's to come next.

Honestly, my whole philosophy is that the only way we beat AI is that we all band together. Yeah. Because I'm like, the more human we can be, the better off all of us and all of our businesses will be. So thank you so much for coming and talking to me about dying. It's a little bit of a dark topic, but I actually think it's such a good window into hope.

Like, the looking at the dark allows us to then figure out like, how do we build? How do we build a village? And what does that look like?

Yeah, if you don't have a good death list, you probably don't have a good life.

What Leila built with her death list KPI wasn't just an emergency plan. It was a complete redesign of how she approaches relationships, community, and business resilience. She pulled two critical levers from the Calmer framework that transformed her from somebody who avoided networking to somebody who sees village building as core business infrastructure. First, she redesigned her business model around values and people. Instead of treating relationships as a nice to have, she made community connection a measurable priority.

She shifted from viewing her network as transactional to seeing it as foundational. It's the external support system that makes all of her internal systems actually work. Second, she changed how she thought about efficiency and operations. So rather than just optimizing internal processes, she started investing time and relationships that create real business resilience. She began spending an hour and a half a week on what she calls social media.

But what's really relationship building through LinkedIn DMs, WhatsApp groups, and Marco Polo conversations. That's time she would have previously seen as wasted and is now recognized as essential infrastructure. And the result is a business that's not just operationally sound, but relationally resilient. She's a founder who went from offering help, but never asking for it to someone who models vulnerability and builds genuine community. And her deathless KPI is a metric that forced her to confront an uncomfortable truth.

You can have all the systems in the world, but without the right people to support them, you're building on quicksand. So here's your tiny action. Sit down right now and write your own death list. If you disappeared tomorrow, who would you want your partner or your key person to call for help in the next twenty four hours? Don't overthink it.

Just write down the names by category, legal, financial, operational, technical. If your list feels robust, congratulations, you have built a village. If it feels a little thin, you've just identified the most important infrastructure project in your business. Because the truth is community isn't just nice to have, it's the difference between a business that survives and one that truly thrives. Until next time, stay calm.