I used to track 30 KPIs. Now I track three. Here's what changed.

Having spent more years than I care to remember in sales, marketing and growth management, and more recently in SaaS, I'm pretty clued up on all the KPI acronyms. From CPC to CPA and EBITDA to ROAS (and many more), I've logged them, tracked them, refined them, and more importantly improved them.

But I don't anymore. It's not that they're not useful. They are, and they can drive real improvement and campaign change. But what I realised is that unless you actually get "in the weeds", it's really easy for management teams to get lost in the noise and distracted from what actually matters.

And what matters is providing a great product or service, at a price point that fits the market, coupled with fantastic service. To me, those are the real KPIs, because if either element is missing you're on the fast track to nowhere. Trust me on this. I've seen it time and time again.

So when I decided to build things for businesses not boardrooms, I sat down and instinctively did what had become normal. I built a great big Excel spreadsheet tracker with every KPI known to man pulled in and lots of clever formulas to show me the gains and losses.

Within three weeks I made a decision to track three key metrics only. I archived the spreadsheet.

Track only what's important. Nothing more, nothing less. Everything else could be worked out on the fly if I needed it.

Here's what I track for my business.

1. Customer Satisfaction

My most important metric, beyond anything else, isn't actually revenue itself (although by its nature it's intrinsically linked). It's simply customer satisfaction. This drives everything I do. Here's why.

Firstly, I love providing really, really great service. No hidden fees, upfront conversations, total removal of all pain points, fast delivery, clear communication. If I were the customer, those are the things I'd want, so it seems perfectly sensible to set this out as the driver behind everything I do.

And here's the rub. Customers that love the service are by far my biggest driver of new business, both through referrals to other business owners and through additional services they buy themselves. Customer satisfaction therefore ensures I strive for excellence at every possible opportunity, and I use it as a benchmark to refine the systems and processes behind product and service delivery.

With 95% of new business sales coming from referrals, I use a single compound score to calculate performance each week. Not monthly. Weekly. Because a month is far too long to be looking back on what could have been improved or changed, in my opinion.

The compound score is a rating out of 10. It takes into account:

• Meeting agreed delivery dates

• Meeting attendance

• Online reviews (quantity and quality)

• Any 1-2-1 direct feedback received

If the score sits at 10/10 for three consecutive weeks, I dig deeper and look at what else can be included in it.

2. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

This is the bread and butter metric of my business performance. It gives a reliable measure of how many service subscriber accounts are live, and a predictable measure of cash flow for budgeting going forward. Again, nothing more and nothing less. Just a clear, simple indicator of how things are going at any point in time.

I track MRR rather than gross revenue because gross revenue can flatter a bad month or hide a good one. MRR tells me what I can count on next month without lifting a finger.

This one is a live KPI, measured directly by combining payments from three sources: Stripe, monthly recurring invoices, and monthly e-commerce revenue share commissions.

3. Monthly One-Time Revenue (MOTR)

Monthly One-Time Revenue is the total of any sales from one-time services. A website build project, ad-hoc fixes, content development, and so on. As with MRR, I set a target each month.

Hitting that target reflects back on customer satisfaction (to hit it, existing customers need to be very, very happy) and drives future MRR (a large percentage of MOTR customers go on to become MRR subscribers).

Combined, MRR and MOTR give me a total sales target and a future cash flow budget.

A quick word on profit

For the eagle-eyed among you, you might be thinking, “well, what about profit?” To me, that’s a given. Profitability is hugely important to any business. It’s what funds growth, investment in better products and services, and the ability to weather a quiet month when one comes along.

My take is this. I already know my profit margins, because they’re built into the pricing of every MRR and MOTR product from the outset. If the pricing is right at the point of sale, the margin looks after itself. So rather than tracking profit as a separate KPI, I track the two revenue numbers and trust the work I’ve already done on pricing to do the rest.

So that's it. Three numbers.

One tells me whether customers love what I'm doing. One tells me what's coming in reliably. One tells me what the month actually delivered on top of that. Together they answer the only questions I really need answers to. Are people happy, is the business healthy, and where is it heading?

The old spreadsheet is still sitting in an archive folder somewhere. I haven't missed it once.

If you're drowning in dashboards, try this. Ask yourself which numbers would actually change what you do tomorrow morning. Track those. Refine. Improve. Archive the rest.

Thanks for reading,
Ollie