You will be able to choose leading indicators you can act on weekly and lagging results you review monthly.
At the end of March, Mei Ling looks at her bakery's sales for the quarter and sees they were lower than the quarter before. She wants to know why, and she wants to fix it. The quarter is over, though. Whatever went wrong happened weeks ago. The January orders she missed are gone.
Sales figures are honest, but they arrive late. To steer a business while there is still time to change course, you need numbers that move earlier. This lesson is about telling the two kinds apart and choosing a few of each.
A lagging number reports a result after it has happened. Revenue, profit, new customers, repeat orders, students enrolled for the term. These are the numbers the business exists to produce, and they are the ones your goal from lesson 6.1 was written in.
Their problem is timing. By the time revenue for March is counted, March is over. If it was a bad month, the lagging number tells you so, but it can't tell you which part of the work failed, and it can't give you March back.
Use lagging numbers to review the plan, and look elsewhere for something to steer by. Look at them monthly or quarterly, compare them with the goal, and ask what they say about the plan as a whole.
A leading number moves before the result does, and you can influence it this week. Enquiries, trial classes booked, quotes sent, sign-ups to your email or WhatsApp list, visits to your order page, calls from your Google listing. These are the steps people take on the way to buying.
Because they move first, they give you warning. If Mei Ling sees that enquiries dropped by half in the first two weeks of January, she has time to act before the month's sales come in low. She can check whether her Google listing still shows the right hours, send a broadcast to past customers, or post the Chinese New Year menu earlier than planned.
The best leading numbers have two features. They come before the result in the customer journey, and you have a way to change them. Enquiries meet both tests. The weather does not, however closely it tracks your sales.
The channel numbers you set in lesson 6.1 are leading numbers, chosen so you can see each week whether the channel is on course, long before the term's enrolment is known.
A goal only works if, on a given day, you can say whether you hit it. "Get more orders" fails that test. More than what? By when? Measured how?
A usable goal names the number, the amount and the date. "Take 60 custom cake orders between April and June" can be checked on 30 June. "Receive 25 enquiries a month through the WhatsApp catalogue" can be checked at the end of each month. Both figures are examples from Mei Ling's bakery. Yours will come from your own records.
Many people use the SMART checklist for this: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. You don't need to memorise it. The two parts that cause most trouble are specific and time-bound, because vague goals with no date feel comfortable. Nobody can say you missed them.
Set the number from your own past results plus a stretch you can explain. If you took 45 orders last quarter, aiming for 60 needs a reason you can name, such as a new channel or a new partnership.
Once you start measuring, it is tempting to track everything the apps offer. Reach, impressions, profile visits, link clicks, saves, shares, open rates, follower growth. Every dashboard shows dozens of figures, and each one moves a little every day.
Too many numbers hide the one that matters. You spend your weekly check scrolling through charts, nothing stands out, and you close the laptop no wiser. For most small businesses, three to five numbers in total is plenty: a few leading numbers you check weekly and one or two lagging numbers you review monthly.
Here is Mei Ling's example set:
Leading, weekly: new enquiries through WhatsApp, counted from her chat list. Leading, weekly: calls and messages from her Google Business Profile, from the listing's own statistics. Leading, weekly: past customers who reply to the monthly broadcast. Lagging, monthly: confirmed orders, from her order book.
Four numbers. Each has a named source, so she isn't guessing where to look. Each leading number belongs to one of her two channels, and all three lead towards the lagging one. If confirmed orders fall, she can look at the three leading numbers and see which channel slipped.
Knowing where each number comes from matters as much as choosing it. A number you have to reconstruct from memory every Friday will stop being checked by the third week. Where you can, pick numbers that a tool, a chat list or an order book already records for you.
In the activity below, choose your own three leading numbers and one lagging number. For each, write the place you will read it from. If you can't name a source, that number isn't ready yet, and you should either find a way to record it or pick a different one.
Pick three leading numbers and one lagging number for your plan and write where you will get each one from.
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