The Caitlin Mitchell Show
After nearly a decade in business, it's time for me to share what I've learned about building a business focused on service leadership to help you on your journey as a business owner. My goal is for you to walk away from each episode with one thing - one sentence, one thought, one perspective shift, one new idea - that has an impact on you, your business, or your life.
The Caitlin Mitchell Show
The Best (and Simplest) Way to Implement KPIs in Your Business | Ep 10
Join me as I explain how KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) play a crucial role in guiding your team towards your company's goals. Discover how to empower your team to set their own KPIs, fostering a culture of autonomy and alignment.
I also discuss how focusing on just one or a few KPIs, like maintaining a strong churn rate, can impact strategic initiatives. Learn about practical tools, including a Google Sheets spreadsheet, to track important business metrics. Ready to improve your KPI game and celebrate your achievements? Tune in for actionable insights and tips to lead your team to success.
Connect with me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/caitlindmitchell/
All right, you guys, I'm really excited to dive into today's episode, but before we start, I have to present you with a caveat in this, in that I just got in Vizaline so I can barely speak properly. So my, I have a little bit of a list and it's hard for me to speak the way that I normally would, so I just want to preface it with that, but there's still going to be incredible gems. Hopefully you can get past the difference in the way that my voice sounds. I'm sure it's worse for me than it maybe is for you, hopefully, but we're going to be talking about KPIs. These are something that were a thorn in my side for the longest time, and perhaps you feel that way, but I'm going to share with you the best and simplest way to really actually implement these in your business. That is something that you can keep with and actually do and utilize to help propel your business forward. So, without further ado, let's get started with today's episode. So I want to start with a story about KPIs.
Speaker 1:I remember the first time I was on a call in a mastermind group that I was a part of, and they were talking about KPIs and how you need to have KPIs to measure staff performance and blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. And they're like you, you know, do you have KPIs? And I'm like, yes, I definitely do, as I'm like to the side literally Googling what is the KPI? What does this mean? I have no idea what this is or how to utilize it in the business, and so if you're sitting there like don't know what a KPIs trust me or not alone I had no idea. And basically, a KPIs is a key performance indicator, and so there are a couple of reasons that I want to discuss as to why key performance indicators, or KPIs, are going to be important and beneficial for your business, and then I'm going to talk to you about the simplest and best way to actually implement them inside of your own company.
Speaker 1:So number one, why KPIs are important and beneficial is they provide clear alignment and focus for your team. So KPIs provide very clear objectives and a way of measuring your team, and what this does is it allows everyone to be aligned with your company's goals, with your company's vision. So this helps people you know really prioritize tasks or efforts that they're doing towards desired outcomes. It reduces distractions, and we actually had a whole podcast episode about decision making, and these KPIs can be really helpful for your team. When it comes to decision making, right, we talk about as leaders, our decision making comes from the vision of the business. Well, for our teams too, for them to have KPIs as measures of their performance and how they're doing within the company. That's going to allow them to stay focused and not be super distracted in their own decision making too. And the other thing that I love about this is and you'll see as I kind of go into it a little bit I allow my team to come up with their own KPIs and then we have a conversation about why they came up with that KPI and if there's any feedback that I have for them, et cetera. But what it does is it provides, in doing that and allowing them to make that decision, for what they want their KPI to be. It allows them to have autonomy and ownership really over their own alignment to the company's overall vision, and so it creates just this really great culture where everyone is really on board with working toward what they set out to go, do and how they feel like they should be measured measured in their role the second reason why KPIs are important and beneficial and that you should have them in your business if you don't, is that it allows you to monitor performance and it also allows you to have conversations around where your team can improve.
Speaker 1:So KPIs really are these benchmarks for measuring performance over time, and so you can track and see progress, you can identify areas of improvement, you can make data driven decisions and in otherwise maybe not data type of conversation, right, sometimes we wonder, well, how do we give feedback to our team when it's kind of more subjective feedback for them? Well, that's true, but KPIs allow us to have some form of objective feedback to have a conversation around. So I'm going to talk more about that when I share my actual strategy with you guys, and then what's great about KPIs and you'll see the way in which I utilize this with my team is that you can regularly monitor your KPIs of your staff, and that allows you to make really pertinent and timely adjustments to strategies, to things that aren't working. It provides the opportunity to, you know, optimize certain processes or areas of focus things along those lines. So it's a really great discussion tool for those types of conversations to be elicited in just a natural way. That this is just what we do here. It's a part of our workflow, it's part of our process is to have these KPIs and talk about them and measure them on a consistent basis.
Speaker 1:And then the third reason that I want to point out as to why KPIs are important and beneficial is that it provides accountability and motivation. So establishing KPIs creates accountability within your team, because your staff, your employees, your team are responsible it's their job for meeting specific targets and contributing to the company's overall success. So that's their job. This is how we're going to measure a 10 out of 10 performance in your role, and when you have clear expectations set from the get go that you and your employees and your staff agreed upon together, it's very clear what the expectations are. This is what it means to operate at a 10 out of 10. This is what 10 out of 10 performance looks like, and I'll give you an example so you can see this in action. But then it creates a transparent measurement criteria that I know as a staff member. If I hit this KPI, I'm going to be. I'm doing a great job right, I'm crushing it in my role, and that allows me to be motivated as a staff member. It's gonna allow your team to be motivated as someone who works for you, because they're going to strive toward that 10 out of 10 level of excellence, and that fosters a culture of accountability. It fosters a culture of achievement. All right.
Speaker 1:So again, I apologize for the Invisalign situation. Some words are apparently harder to pronounce than others. So those are the three reasons why I think KPIs are extremely important. So if you're not utilizing them in your business yet, hopefully that makes the case for why you should start to consider it, and what I'm gonna share with you of how I structure this. I think it's gonna make it a lot less daunting of a task for you, because I do remember when I first went to put them into place in the business, it was like everybody had like 15 or 20 KPIs and well, yes, I am measuring other areas of success. I found that when we whittle it down to like one, two or three KPIs at the most per staff member, it's actually allowed us to have richer conversations, for my staff to be more motivated towards those goals. It allows us to actually track data and use it over time in a way that's actually beneficial to the business and isn't just like bogged down data reporting and granted. This is just my experience that I'm sharing with you.
Speaker 1:You might find that you want to measure more within your team, and that's totally fine, and you might hear from somebody else that it's a better way to do it over this way, and that's the thing that I love about business is, at the end of the day, you gotta find what works for you, what works for your staff, and it's something that you're actually going to implement. And that was the area that I ran into. A frustration was I was given guidance on how to implement KPIs in the business and I just, for whatever reason, could not follow through on it. It felt heavy, it felt convoluted, it felt like kind of big brother-y of my team and a lot of the times seemed like we were reporting stuff just to report stuff, right. So I broke it down into the way that I've structured it now. I've been using this for the past year and some change, and it really has been the best, most effective way for us to utilize KPIs within the business.
Speaker 1:So what I wanted to do, and what I set out to do, is I wanted something that I would use. I wanted something that would allow every member of my staff to measure what a 10 out of 10 performance looks like. What does 10 out of 10 success mean in my role within the company? And I wanted to be able to have a one-on-one conversation with everyone on my team on a monthly basis. And what was important with that was I wanted to be able to utilize metrics and performance to be able to have an open and honest conversation about how each team member is performing in their role. So that was my goal, like that was my intention. That's what I set out to do, and so when I have this intention in place that I want to meet monthly, I want to meet one-on-one with every single person, I want to measure 10 out of 10 success and I want to use metrics and performance to have these conversations. That was my intention. That's what I set out for. So, in order to do that, what does that actually look like? And so I want to walk you through how I structured it, but you might structure it differently depending on the size of your team. So I have a larger team.
Speaker 1:There are 16 employees who work for EB, and when I initially put this in place, I tried to meet with all 16 staff members and it just didn't work, for two very specific reasons One it was a lot of meetings. That was taking me away from other things within the business that needed me. So it was a lot of time on my calendar, but that was kind of irrelevant compared to the second reason. The second reason was that I was having conversations with staff members that I actually didn't know how their performance was within their role, because I don't work with them, because I don't oversee them, I'm not their manager, I'm not in that department. So for me to be having a conversation without the head of department with this particular staff member made absolutely no sense, and so what I decided to do instead is because I have heads of departments. So I have a head of schools, I have a head of marketing, which is me, I have a head of customer service, I have a head of fulfillment, head of membership, et cetera.
Speaker 1:So what I did, instead of meeting with every single staff member, is I meet with my heads of departments bi-weekly. So well, twice a month, so bi-monthly. I don't know how ever you wanna say that I meet with them twice a month, every single head of department, and that's four meetings that I have bi-monthly with the heads of departments on my team and they in turn, my heads of departments meet with their staff on their teams on a monthly basis. The reason that I meet with my heads of departments on a bi-monthly basis, twice a month, is because typically there are more constraints or issues that pop up that I wanna be able to have two touch points with them that are like scheduled on the docket we're gonna have time to have a conversation on my calendar Whereas, opposed to my heads of departments with their teams, they are meeting weekly on a weekly basis in their team meetings and things like that. That doesn't exist with my heads of departments per se in the same capacity. So that's the reason I structured heads of departments I'm meeting with twice a month, but then I have my heads of departments meet with their staff individually once per month. So my heads of departments are running their own one-on-ones with everyone on their team in the same way that I run my one-on-ones with my heads of departments. So, for example, my head of schools is meeting with everyone on the school's team once per month Because, like I said, there's really at this point no way for me to meet with everybody and I wanted to allow my heads of departments to have autonomy and ownership over their departments and it simply did not make sense for me in that regard to meet with everybody.
Speaker 1:Unless something comes up. That's absolutely necessary, but otherwise it's big brotherly. I'm sitting there watching how my staff are managing their staff and I don't like that. I want to give my heads of departments the ownership, the responsibility, the leadership capabilities to be able to go lead their staff in the way that I lead them right as heads of departments. And I will say in the beginning of my business, I absolutely would have met with everybody back then because back in the day, like I was the head of every department, I was head of marketing, head of fulfillment, head of customer service, et cetera. So I would have had to have filled all of those right Because I would have been in charge of all of the staff. So maybe that's where you are right now. There might be three of you on your team. I would do my one-on-ones with every single person on the team.
Speaker 1:Okay, so when I set out to structure this, I knew there are a ton of different ways to do this, types of KPIs to measure, but again, I wanted something simple and streamlined that met the intention that I had for these KPIs Build accountability, increase performance and to have a discussion point to allow both my staff and myself to be able to measure if they were in fact performing at a 10 out of 10 in their role. So, like that's the conversation 10 out of 10, are you performing at a 10 out of 10? So here's how it works Every single quarter, every team member decides how we can measure a 10 out of 10 performance in their role. So, right away, I am giving ownership over the outcome to them, because they're the ones that are determining what a 10 out of 10 outcome and performance looks like for them in their role. And I have a great podcast episode that aired a couple of episodes ago, all about intrinsic motivation, and this really speaks into that intrinsic motivation that I want to build within my team, and that's why I allow them ownership over the KPIs that they set forth for themselves. But, of course, if there's something that's like way off the mark, we're going to have a conversation about that, but that actually has not ever happened. 9 times out of 10, I'm like, oh, this is a great KPI, right, better than maybe I would have come up with, which I love. So I want to give you an example of this in real life what this actually looks like.
Speaker 1:So my membership manager, brooke her sole KPI as our membership manager is churn of our membership and she set a goal of less than 3.4% churn on a monthly basis. So this is how we are measuring her success in her role, because everything else that she does to support that KPI of 3.4% or lower churn to meet that KPI, that's going to demand of her to start to think differently about retention. So does that mean that she wants to go through a program to help her with our onboarding? Or perhaps she wants to look for some coaching and support around a variety of other strategies that she can utilize to enhance retention, et cetera? So it allows her to think about ways in which she can show up differently for the business, because she owns this metric of 3.4% churn and that is her like right or day, that's her 10 out of 10 performance.
Speaker 1:And what I love about this is that by having this be her sole KPI and her sole focus, she is able to very intentionally dictate where she spends her time. Is it worth her time to be over here dilly-dallying in this maybe not so great retention idea when she needs to hit a 3.4% churn in order to be operating at her highest capacity in that role? Maybe not, maybe she's more strategic or pickier, so it's like I said at the beginning, allowing her a decision making filter through which to pass her decisions through. Does this or does this not have the ability to impact churn and retention within the business? And if the answer is no, we ain't going to do it. If it's yes, let's get on board.
Speaker 1:Now, this isn't to say, right, this is the only thing that Brooke is tracking on a monthly or even on a weekly basis when it comes to membership. This is, though, her main key performance indicator that she and I are having conversations around when I meet with her, and if she's not hitting this number, well, what are the constraints? Why, what are the causes of not hitting a 3.4% turn? Is something happening in onboarding? Is there a disconnect between our marketing and our membership experience? So it allows us to have these open conversations around? What can we do to get better?
Speaker 1:The other thing that I want to say about this is she is tracking other items, other metrics when it comes to membership, so she's tracking number of logins, completion of onboarding, interaction in the Facebook group, email open rates, clickster rates, attendance at our events so many different metrics, a variety of them, but these all really, at the end of the day, truly funnel into one main KPI that she and I get to take a look at together every single month. We have a conversation about it, we identify roadblocks, we identify constraints, and this also allows me insight into how she's performing in her role in the business. So she might say, you know, like, oh, our churn was 5% this month and I went in and I looked at the cancellations and I solved the reasons why. And this is what I noticed and these are the things that I'm going to do for the following month. So it's giving her just this great tool really to use as to how she can get better and improve in her role, because, at the end of the day, we all always should be striving to become a better version of ourselves in our roles in the business and never just remain stagnant.
Speaker 1:The other thing that I do that I want to point out during these one-on-one calls is we also review their job description together. So I know this doesn't have anything to do with KPIs, but I figured at this point I'm meeting with everybody at least once a month with my heads of departments. They're meeting with their staff once per month. We need to utilize this time to ensure that all of everybody's job descriptions are up to date, because I'm sure that you found in your business, as time goes on, role shift a little bit, responsibilities change a little bit. You're like, oh, can you do this too? And oh, can you do this too, but then a job description is never updated and so we're talking about this monthly so that I can make sure that I have the most up to date information regarding their responsibilities within the company and because I have this just baked into this process. It is easy.
Speaker 1:I constantly have a pulse on whether or not team members might be feeling overwhelmed, like I looked at Megan's job descriptions the other day. I was like, oh okay, megan, like how are you doing Right? Is this too much? Are you good to go? I might find somebody else doesn't have a lot going on. Maybe there's more room on their docket for them to take on more responsibilities within the business. So it's really cool. I love doing this because it does provide this incredibly simple insight into the inner workings of the entire business, when in reality, like, I'm not seeing that necessarily on a day to day basis per se in my role anymore. So, like I mentioned above, my heads of departments do everything that I just talked about for all of their team members who work under their leadership. So I'm technically, technically, only meeting with four different team members for these, one on ones, and, like I said at the beginning, I've been utilizing this process for the past year and I will say it has been the simplest to use, it is the easiest to actually stick to and utilize and it has been the most helpful for having some difficult conversations, but also wonderful conversations about how everything in the business is rolling forward toward our big company vision. So I hope that that helps you.
Speaker 1:I track all of this in a spreadsheet in Google sheets. It's very simple, nothing fancy. You can use it on Monday, which you could use if you wanted to, but it really is a simple structure that I've built in and if you want me to, I'm happy to share a screenshot of my actual spreadsheet with you. If you just send me a direct message on Instagram and ask me, I can send it your way, no problem. And then my Instagram is Caitlyn D Mitchell.
Speaker 1:All right, you guys? Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. Hopefully, the list wasn't too much of a distraction. I think I'm getting better at talking with these in this line in, and I would love to connect over on Instagram. Send me a direct message, let me know what you think about the podcast, what you're struggling with, what you want an episode about, what you need more support with. I'm happy to record something around, whatever it is that you need, because that's why, quite frankly, the podcast exists is to help you be more successful as the CEO of your teams. All right, you guys, I will see you next week on the podcast. Bye, everybody.
