One metric is key to the success of your business
Find your North Star Metric and let it guide you
"What gets measured gets managed."
This adage, often attributed to Peter Drucker, has become a mantra in the business world. As a result, many companies find themselves drowning in a sea of metrics, KPIs, and dashboards. They measure everything from website traffic and social media engagement to employee satisfaction and quarterly revenue.
But here's the uncomfortable truth: many of these measurements are nothing more than vanity metrics. They might make us feel good or look impressive in a meeting, but they often fail to drive real business growth or meaningful change.
Even worse, this obsession with measuring everything can distract us from the metrics that truly matter – the ones that directly correlate with our business success and long-term vision.
So, how do we cut through the noise and focus on what's really important?
Enter the concept of the North Star Metric.
This isn't just another number to add to your already crowded dashboard. It's the single most important metric for your business – the one that, if improved, will have the greatest impact on your success.
I'm going to share Honeycomb's North Star Metric and how it guides the way we run our business. Your business will also have a North Star Metric. It probably won't be the same as ours, unless you have a very similar business. If you can figure out what it is, measure it, and start to improve it then you'll move faster towards your ambition. This isn't the only thing that matters - you need to measure other things too - but improving your North Star Metric should take a larger share of your energy.
"Learner advocacy is our North Star Metric"
Honeycomb is a consulting skills training business. Our core is helping consulting team leaders develop their people. The core of this core is our training delivery. We typically run firm-specific courses with anything from 3 to 30 learners in a cohort.
Most of our ‘client interaction’ time is spent with our learners. They are rarely the people engaging us or paying our invoices, but they are hugely important to us. We care a lot about them having a great experience - and not just because of the nice warm fuzzy feeling of a job well done (although we do like that too!). We care about their experience because it drives our growth.
💡And so, the number that matters most for us is Learner Advocacy. Simply put, would the clients we spend most time with recommend us to someone else?
We measure this with a simple & well-known question:
"How likely are you to recommend today's session to a colleague?"
You will have seen variations of that question everywhere. It originates from Fred Reichheld at Bain & Company, my old consulting firm, who devised the Net Promoter System for driving growth through customer advocacy. Fred wrote the book on this from his research which showed that companies with stronger customer advocacy than their competitors grew faster, made more profit, and earned higher return on capital.
Scores of 9 or 10 are the only ones that indicate someone will advocate for you - that they'll act as a Promoter of your service. Anything less translates at best as, "Meh - it's ok".
I believe Learner Advocacy is central to our growth as it gives us three things:
1. Repeat Business. The lifeblood of any services business. We typically get engaged by the firm owner, or an HR or Talent team leader. They care, a lot, about how their teams experience our courses and what they get from them. When their feedback is good, we are asked to train a new cohort of learners from the same firm. In short - Learner Advocacy creates Repeat Business.
2. New Leads. When I look at our pipeline of new clients, 75% of them came from a referral - someone saying, "You should talk to Honeycomb". Most of the time this referral comes from someone who has had a great experience with us previously (or knows someone who has - a second order referral). Ultimately, Learner Advocacy brings New Leads.
3. Conversion. When I added testimonials into our proposal decks we suddenly jumped to over 90% proposal acceptance rates. New clients want confidence that their teams will have a great experience. No better way to show that than with recent, relevant testimonials from people who are strong promoters. So, Learner Advocacy supports Conversion.
By focusing on our single North Star Metric we drive repeat business, new leads, and conversion. Pretty important things if you're trying to grow a services business of any kind.
Knowing and measuring isn’t enough
So, you need to know what your North Star Metric is. And you need to measure it regularly. But that isn't enough - you need to get under the skin of what drives it so you can actively improve it.
Through more detailed surveys, 1-2-1 feedback calls with learners, and our own post-delivery reflections we've identified five things that seem to be key to strong Learner Advocacy.
Knowing this ensures we focus on the things that matter. We adapt content to make it relevant for the people in the room. We ensure we allocate the best Trainer for their needs. We prioritise clarity of content over gamification and fun - fun is great, but not if it comes at the cost of clarity. We consider different learning styles, and provide written and auditory content simultaneously. We make sure that people leave the room feeling ready to do something different in their day-to-day work.
We are now directly measuring these 5 elements and look at correlations with our Net Promoter Scores. We're learning more and more about the underlying drivers so we can continue to iterate and improve our North Star Metric.
My challenge to you:
Identify your North Star Metric. What single number, if improved, would have the greatest impact on your business?
Implement a system to measure it regularly and reliably.
Dig deep to understand what drives this metric. What factors influence it most?
Focus your energy on improving these underlying drivers.
Remember, this doesn't mean ignoring all other metrics. But it does mean giving your North Star Metric the attention and resources it deserves.
In a world of endless data, the ability to focus on what truly matters could be your competitive edge. Find your North Star Metric, and let it guide you.
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There are several other ways you can interact with Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training….
Connect with Deri Hughes (Founder & MD) on LinkedIn
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Book a 30 minute intro call with Deri Hughes
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