Measure twice.. cut once but always start with why

It's an old carpenter's proverb but it applies equally to modern business, especially if performance metrics are easy to measure.

The other day I bumped into an acquaintance at CIC.. his legal services company was doing well and he said his next step was going to invest in a new website.

Why?

Now I'm a web technology guy and I'm always talking about how social media can be leveraged and optimized for almost every situation.. so he gave me a very perplexed look when I asked him why

• Do you have a site? yes..
• Is it working (i.e. creating new business opportunities)? umm..
• Are you tracking visitors/leads generated from your site? no
• Start there..

I gave him a couple of ideas about how to monitor/evaluate basic performance as well as tracking leads from face-to-face meetings (via business cards). I also suggested he might get more traffic by writing a blog centered around the topics that most of their potential clients were facing BUT only if he could prove readers would be interested.

Run Lean

I'm a huge fan of the lean startup, customer development and creating validated learning through the Build-Measure-Learn loop. In this case they had already built something but didn't know what was working and what wasn't. Another loop through the cycle would be time consuming, expensive and an inefficient way to learn how to determine the optimal next steps .. Waste like that is not something most startups can afford.

Establish baselines, measure performance and make sure you are focusing on the things that will really make a difference. Out of all the people he had talked with, I was the only one who asked the simple question why.