I used to ride bikes a lot. When I say a lot, I mean at one point my friend and I rode our bicycles from the Ocean Beach pier in San Diego all the way to the beach in Jacksonville, Florida.
It was a fun challenge. Well, it was a challenge, anyway. Lots of good times and good stories looking back, but not as much fun in the moment. In fact, after completing that ride, I didn’t get on a bike again for almost two decades.
Then COVID came around, and I decided I was ready to ride again, so from 2020 on I started doing a ride every weekend. Since I was doing it by myself and just for exercise and fresh air, I made no effort to track my time or distance or speed or anything else.
That changed, though, last year at this time when my daughter got me a bike computer for Christmas.
Now I have a year’s worth of actual data on my rides, which the bike computer lets me export and play with. Guess what happened? Once I could actually see on each ride how far and how fast I was riding each week?
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If you guessed that I got faster and rode farther, you’d be right. Why did that happen? Because now I could see exactly how I was doing and I naturally started to want to do a bit better each time. Push a little harder, ride a little longer, get that average ride speed up a little.
It didn’t really feel like I was working harder; it was just that with something telling me exactly how I was doing (and knowing how I could do), it gave me less chance to slack off or feel like I was going fast or far enough.
By seeing the data, I was now empowered to improve my performance vs not having any idea and no way to even know how I did one week to the next. I literally got 20% better from January to December just by being able to actually measure my output.
I imagine you can see where I am going with this, since this is, after all, a business growth newsletter. And you’d be right. If you pick meaningful metrics in your business to regularly measure, just by tracking them and seeing them, I can pretty much guarantee you will see improvement.
If you aren’t looking, you will spend your time equally on things that improve your performance and things that don’t. You will also have much less idea which of those things you are doing will help and which ones don’t. There is a good chance that by the end of twelve months, you won’t be meaningfully better off than you were at the start, and if you are, you won’t have hard data to show exactly where that improvement came from.
There is no better thing you can do for your business if you want to improve than to simply start by measuring things you can accurately and consistently track each week or month, and see how you are doing over time. See what things you do make those measurements go up, and do more of those things. Spend less time on things that don’t move you in the right direction. It will make you work smarter because you can directly see how your work (and which work) is paying off.
If there is one piece of advice I can give you to ensure a better 2026, it is to start tracking the key metrics in your business. It really, really works.
Happy Holidays!