One of our goals at Exygy is to be transparent with our team about our performance. We created an internal dashboard that highlights (what we consider to be) our most important metrics of success. This is a way of holding ourselves accountable and focusing our collective efforts on achieving our larger mission.

The Exygy Dashboard is decidedly low-tech and easy to understand. It’s a Google spreadsheet that is divided into four quadrants for each of our top KPIs: client happiness, staff happiness, business metrics, and impact. Here is why we chose these four measurements:

1. Client Happiness

We know that having really happy clients is a sign of a healthy business, and by encouraging referrals, will help ensure a thriving future business. We also knew that the client happiness data would be really valuable because we have a really high average client score. This would be a marketing tool for us. Another incredibly important aspect of this data is that we would uncover reasons for client dissatisfaction. It created a process for raising client happiness scores because we had a way of surfacing and resolving important issues.

2. Staff Happiness

We are a human capital company. We are only as valuable as the aggregate skill and determination of our team. We knew that making sure everyone feels really good would drive meaningful outcomes for the business. Similar to client happiness scores, collecting data would uncover unmet needs of employees, and help us determine the most meaningful ways to increase employee happiness. Outside of being intrinsically important, increased happiness has positive business outcomes, like increasing retention.

3. Business Metrics

Prior to 2015, Exygy never did any financial planning. No budget, no long-term projections, no way to figure out how much money we might be making in the future. We now have a much more robust approach to forecasting. We monitor things like our Salesforce data, budget, staffing assumptions, hiring calendar, etc. in order to ensure that we are driving towards and fulling our high-level business metrics.

4. Impact

Being a Certified B Corporation and a mission-driven company, impact is a critical measurement of success for our business. When we created the dashboard we wanted to publicize how well the clients and projects we took on aligned with our mission and vision. Admittedly, we are still in the process of implementing our impact advisory board plan, but look forward to the near future when we can point proudly to our impact score.

 

Why The Dashboard Matters

The value of the Exygy Dashboard is not necessarily in the numbers themselves–it’s in the process that we undertake to get to those numbers. We are collectively learning about how to create a better culture, a better company, better systems and processes to help people flourish, and to deliver amazing value for our clients. For example, the employee reaction to the dashboard has been very positive. They understand more about how things are going. That has prompted feelings of gratitude for being at a company that discloses this information. It also has inspired curiosity about wanting to know more about the business metrics, among other things.

 

How You Can Create Your Own Dashboard

If you want to set up something similar at your company, I have two main questions for you:

• 1.  How will you collect the data? You need a good, reliable, repeatable way to collect data. It doesn’t have to be high-tech. Google spreadsheets are a great way to track this information.

• 2. What are your KPIs? This is a philosophical question around how do you measure success for your business. I’ll discuss more about how you can measure success in your business in an upcoming blog post.

Hopefully this helps you set the groundwork for a meaningful dashboard for you and your organization. We’ll get into more of the specifics of the different metrics as we move forward in this series of posts about the dashboard.

 

Best,

Phil