What I Track Daily in My Business: 5 Metrics That Improve Every Launch

When you're in business, there are hundreds of numbers you can track, but I wanna share with you the five that I track in my business every day and I use to help me make decisions about the strategies I implement and what I'm gonna do next in my business. And then I'm gonna share with you three that I just watch out of interest rather than making decisions from them.

If we've not met, I'm Teresa Heath-Wareing, and I help course creators, membership owners, and coaches who are stuck trying to grow their online business, who have done the courses, listened to the podcasts, and are feeling frustrated that they're not entirely sure what their next step is meant to be. And in today's episode, I'm gonna be talking about the five numbers that I use to make decisions in my business and the ones that I just track just so I know what they're doing.

I would love to hear that, so please feel free to drop me a comment. Okay, let's talk tracking numbers. One of the things that I am a big, big fan of, and you would've heard me talk about this before if you follow me or if you've seen me speak, I talk about everything's an experiment By viewing everything as an experiment, it kind of lets you off the hook a little bit.

So it kind of stops you from thinking you've either won or you failed, you've either succeeded or you haven't. Because if you're viewing it as an experiment, then it's just something we can learn from. But the key bit of the experiment is the learning, and the learning requires us to track things. We can't just do something and then not look at what we actually did, because we're not gonna learn anything from that, whether it went well or not.

They're not really in-depth, but I thought I would share them with you today just so you know that h- how I'm looking at my business and how I'm using those numbers to help me make decisions about my business going forward. The first one I want you to track, or I track and find particularly helpful, which is not related to launches at all, is cash flow.

So I just want to make that clear because if you're sat there thinking, "I wouldn't have a clue how my cash flow looks in my business," or, "The numbers thing is horrible and I hate it," then I was in exactly the same place. But it's so funny now. I feel like a proper grown-up business because I know what my cash flow's doing, which is hilarious, but it makes all the difference.

So I'm constantly looking at my cash flow for the next few months because in my world, there are various ways people can work with me, and in those various ways, there are various ways that you can pay me. So for instance, someone might work one-to-one with me and pay me upfront for that one-to-one work, which is a big cash injection on one particular month.

So I need to understand what cashflow is coming where. So just because I get a big injection of cash today doesn't mean I can go and spend that tomorrow if I can't see anything coming for the next month or two. So first thing to pay attention to, to make sure you know your numbers on, your cashflow.

What money is coming in, what money is going out, and how do you look two, three months from now? By understanding my cashflow, I'm able to understand what I can spend in ads, what programs I can sign up to, if I can bring someone else on, if I can pay extra for something. It really helps me understand. It also helps me think about when I need to launch next, 'cause if cashflow's about to fall off a cliff in a few months' time, I need to have another way to bring some money in between now and then.

And that is cash in their business which might need to sit in there for the next God knows how many months until they launch again. So people get really swayed by revenue and really swayed by those kind of sexy numbers, but it's the cash that you need to be keeping an eye on. So the next number I look at in my business is email list growth Not social media, not likes, not engagement, is people actually getting onto my email list.

So I wanna be looking at what is actually helping my list grow. What am I doing? Am I at an event? Did I get a spike in numbers then? Did I do a podcast? Did that do anything for my list? So for me, it's a thing that we're looking at constantly, rather than the total number, which could be vanity. We're looking at the number of people getting on, and that's going to affect decisions like whether we're gonna launch again soon, whether we need to do some more list-building for the next thing, whether I need to run ads, whether I need to do some more podcast guesting.

Someone else might work so incredibly hard doing post after post after post, email after email after email, and have 15 people sign up, but it's- It's completely dependent on them, where they are, their size of audience, like how long they've been doing the thing. So don't ever compare your launch experience signups to someone else.

Completely different. Like, you're measuring against something that just can't be measured. So what I pay attention to is my own signups. What did I get last time? What did I get this time? How many people are coming into the top of that funnel? Because it's massively gonna impact what I get the other end.

So some of the decisions that it helps me make are maybe tweaking the launch while I'm in it. Also, whether that launch needs refreshing, whether my list needs refreshing, whether I think I can run it again, whether I run it again soon, or whether I put it off for a bit. So understanding how many people are coming into your launch experience is really, really key for understanding, A, how that launch is going to do, B, whether you need to tweak that launch as you go along and do some course correction, and C, when you next launch or what to do next time you do it.

And the other thing about looking at this number is often we're looking at the reach or we're looking at like how many people we had on our list or how many people saw that post, but what the true measure is is the number of people who are signing up to your experience. And just as another quick side- That the experience you choose will have a big impact on signup.

So once they've signed up to the launch experience, what's my engagement like on the launch? So this is how many people turn up to the webinar, how many people are in the boot camp, how many people join the group, how many people turn up to the calls. I want to maximize that as much as possible, and I can't maximize that if I don't actually know the percentage of people that come in.

Now, again, depending on the launch, depending on the numbers, that can be quite low. I do a paid boot camp. My numbers coming in are much less than if I did something free, but my engagement is much, much higher than if I was to do something free. So it's understanding that. So when you're doing a launch experience, what's the engagement like?

The people who are engaging in your launch experience are going to be the most likely to buy. So we really need to make sure we understand that number and we try and improve that percentage wherever possible. And then the final one I look at, which hopefully should make sense, is the purchases. How many people are actually buying?

Because- Everything in the launch space and in the online space is a numbers game. So when you know what percentage roughly of your email list will sign up to your launch experience, when you know what percentage roughly will engage and what percentage roughly will buy, then we tweak if we can and improve it.

If I've run ads, what ads got them to buy? And then I also look at things like if they didn't buy, why didn't they buy, but also did they take the downsell if there was a downsell? And again, by understanding the numbers, it really helps me to understand what to do next. So if I had a launch that didn't go as well as I would have hoped, I might launch again quicker.

Rather than just going, "I didn't sell as many as I would have liked. What's happened to my percentage?" I was like, "Okay, what might be the problem here, and how can I help people?" Okay, so those are the five numbers I look at to help me make decisions in my business. So let me just recap those for you.

Number one was cashflow, so I know how much I've got in my business. Number two was my email list, to make sure it's constantly growing. Number three was how many people sign up to my launch experience. Number four was how many people engage in the launch experience, and number five was how many people actually buy.

So I wanted to share really quickly three numbers that I also constantly look at, but they don't really make decisions. They're just kind of a so I'm aware about them. So the first one is landing page views, and by landing page views I mean sales pages and conversions on those pages. So one of the things, I'm gonna do a debrief about the summit.

Whereas next time I will know it didn't perform as well, and we need to improve that page because something wasn't quite right on it. So landing page views and conversions, whether it be a sales page or just a free lead magnet page, I watch and I keep an eye on, but they don't make a decision in my business.

But I keep an eye on these numbers just to see, 'cause that helps my general growth, and also just to see what is hitting right now with content. And that's it. Obviously, there's other numbers in my business that I look at, but those are the main ones. The five that help me make decisions and the three that I just watch to give me an idea and a kind of pulse on what is happening right now.

If you are struggling to track any numbers right now, I would advise you to pick even just a couple of those five just to keep an eye on, because I promise you, it's not as scary as you think, and when you've got those numbers, you can do something about it. The hardest thing for me is when someone comes to me and says, "My launch failed," and I say, "What were your numbers?"

Okay, well, where's that problem? Like, what can we tweak there to get people to buy? So tracking your numbers is so, so very important, and it doesn't have to be big and scary. And like I said, if you're not tracking anything, I'd rather you just track a couple of things straight away just so that you've got some things to keep an eye on.