Recently I got a WHOOP device to help me manage my health.

If you haven’t heard of WHOOP, it’s a device that you wear around your wrist like a watch. It measures different health metrics like your heart rate, sleep cycles, blood oxygen, respiratory rate, etc. It’s kind of like an Oura ring, but with more and better data.

I got a WHOOP strap because I’ve been having horrible sleep for a couple months now and it was starting to really affect my productivity. So I finally said screw it, and spent a couple hundred bucks on a device that would monitor my sleep every night and tell me what was going on.

So far it’s made a massive difference to my sleep quality, and I have about 2-3x the energy now as I did before getting it.

…Now this got me thinking about the different measurements I take for my business.

I measure about 8 or 9 different metrics every month, and compare them to our averages over the past 6 months. I also compare them to the measurements from this month last year.

After all, if you don’t measure your blood pressure, how are you going to know if there’s a problem? Odds are you won’t until it’s too late to easily fix any issues.

That’s why they take your standard measurements (weight, blood pressure, vision, etc.) when you go to the doctor. Or why they take X-rays when you go to the dentist. You’ve got to know your baseline so that you can watch for unexpected deviations.

Getting back to your business, how are you going to know if there’s room for improvement in sales if you don’t measure your Close Rate? How are you going to know how much time and money you can spend to acquire a customer if you don’t know your average customer’s Lifetime Value? Or how are you going to minimize your financial risk if you don’t update your Balance Sheet every month?

You just can’t maximize your profit or minimize your risk if you don’t track these things.

Fortunately, often just the process of taking note of these metrics makes them improve over time. (This is because now you are paying attention to them, and your mind automatically starts searching for ways to improve them.)

Measuring this stuff isn’t sexy, but it can be an easy way to start bumping up your margins without too much effort. And that IS pretty sexy.

For example, last month I noticed our Leads-Generated-per-Month metric was way down, so I did some digging. Turns out that due to an update in May, the spam filter on my website’s Contact Us form was malfunctioning. It was being too aggressive and blocking real people from contacting us to set up meetings. This probably cost my business at least $10k in revenue. (That certainly hurts, but imagine the losses if it took me 6 months to realize there was a problem!)

Remember, informed decisions are always better than wild-ass guesses!

After all, you wouldn’t cut a board without measuring first.

(P.S. – You can download the exact template I use to measure 7 key metrics in my own business for free HERE.)