Weekend Workshop: Measure What Matters

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[Music]

Week in workshop, measure what matters. Measure what matters and make the right best decisions. What are the best decisions? Well, they are data driven. That's what we're gonna talk about today.

Welcome to Side Hustle School. Welcome to this segment, weekly segment, all about helping you learn the key steps to a new side hustle in 2025. Coming up on halfway through the year, basically doing one step or concept per week. We are using the book, Side Hustle, from idea to income in 27 days as our text. That's available wherever books are sold.

And I'm taking you through the key steps along with listener stories and examples throughout the year. Now, today's episode comes from day 23. It's all about how to track your progress, measure what matters, as mentioned, and decide on next steps. So your learning objective here is to learn which metrics actually matter for your business and how to use them to make smart decisions. And just by point of introduction, sometimes when people are starting a new business or side hustle or project, they kind of get into the weeds because any platform you use provides all kinds of analytics.

And they're like, "Here, look at all these fancy numbers." And sometimes they graph them out and you can see a whole dashboard and it's like all this different stuff. And it really doesn't matter that much. Like most of it doesn't matter. Like there are a couple points that matter, which is what we're talking about here. But most of those things, it's like you just gotta focus on, you know, building out your business to start in the first place.

And the analytics are not necessarily your friend, at least all of them, okay? So if you ask most business owners how things are going, they typically say something like, "Fine, like it's okay." But a business, of course, is never simply fine. It's either growing or shrinking. It is improving or declining. Understanding exactly how your business is performing requires tracking the right numbers.

Not worrying about 100 different statistics, but maybe choosing two or three, which is in fact what I encourage you to do. Gonna talk through which three I think are best here. But let's start with an example. Tim wrote about him in the book "Side Hustle." He had this resume design business. He started on Fiverr, offering custom resumes for just $5 each.

That was cool. He got a lot of customers. People were like, "Sure, I'll pay you five bucks." But the math didn't work for him. You know, he was spending 30 minutes or more on each resume, meaning he was earning less than minimum wage for his efforts. Nevertheless, it's always good to experiment.

You can try stuff and see what works and perhaps identify a skill that you can then upskill or at least learn to charge more for. So by tracking his time and income, Tim first realized this approach wasn't sustainable. And rather than abandon the business entirely, he used that information to pivot. He created a collection of premium resume templates that customers could customize themselves. So now, instead of earning $5 for each custom design, he sells templates for $11 each.

Now, $11 is still not a lot of money, but the point is he's made them once and people keep buying them over and over. So every sale is 11 free dollars, basically, or maybe about nine or 10 free dollars if you consider some costs, but still, it's a very high profit margin item. So then he goes off and sells thousands of dollars of those, and that's great, right? So the key to his success was tracking the right metrics, not social media followers, not even website visitors, but the numbers that truly mattered for his business model, which were hourly earnings and sustainability. And so for most side hustles, I'll give it to you straight, three metrics matter most.

Profit, not just revenue, but actual profit, so your income after expenses, time invested, and customer growth or retention. And so by watching these numbers, you're gonna see the real story of your business and know exactly when to pivot or proceed. Maybe I should say whether to pivot or proceed. If things are going well, you just keep doing that. Do more of what works, but if it's not working, you need to try something else.

So let's talk about that in the next section. Gonna take a quick break when we return, making data-driven decisions. So you have learned to measure what matters. Now, what do you do about it? [Music]

All right, once you have good data, you need to use it to make decisions.

Okay, so you have figured out what are the few things I need to track. Gave you a couple of examples. It might be different depending on your business. You might want to track email newsletter signups, for example, or new sales. But there are typically three possible outcomes.

Whatever you're tracking, you decide what's important, and then you're like, what do I do with this? You got three outcomes, okay? First outcome is you're crushing it. The business is performing beyond expectations. So there, the path forward is clear.

Keep doing what's working and looking for ways to scale up. Sometimes in this situation, people are like, "Oh, we need to sell a bunch of other stuff," and that actually dilutes the core mission. So you want to be careful that you are not stopping the main thing that's working. So you're crushing it, keep going. Number two, outcome number two, it's not working.

It's failing, and let's just call it what it is. It's okay, we all fail at some things. Despite your efforts in this situation, the business is not gaining traction. The best decision might be to cut your losses and try something different. I encourage people all the time, nothing wrong with giving up.

In fact, it's a very powerful strategy. Give up, walk away, do something different. You get all that time back. You get a new perspective as well. But there's a third outcome, okay?

Third outcome is it's showing some promise, but it needs refinement. Like your business is working sort of, okay? And this is the trickiest, but it's also probably the most common outcome. Your business might not be a total flop, but it's also not this huge success. So what do you do in that situation?

Well, there you're like, something needs to change, okay? So you've got some information and you're like, I need to try to change one of these variables, an important variable perhaps. And we've talked about this in some other episodes of the Weekend Workshop, how to split test, how to change your copy, your headline, your offer, figuring out where you get the most bang for your buck, and hopefully get a different outcome as well. Now the notes page for every Weekend Workshop includes an action exercise. This one is to create a simple tracking system for your business.

So this is probably different than the fancy dashboard that you see in your website platform or whatever else you're using. You just want to track a few things. So you start by identifying what are the three numbers that will tell you if your business is truly working, how and when will you collect this data? And I recommend you look at it at least once a week, could be every day just quickly, but not less than once a week. And then what specific changes might you make based on the results?

If you have concerns, if you notice, like what was his name, Tim, with the resume design business, oh, I'm selling resumes, but I'm selling them for $5 each and I'm doing a lot of work for them. Let me try selling them for $11 each and do no work for them. Once the initial design is done, that's better. So that's a price increase, but just as importantly, or probably actually more importantly, he's no longer doing custom work at that price point. So what three numbers will tell you if your business is truly working, how and when will you collect this data, and what specific changes might you make based on different results?

Tracking metrics is not about obsessing over numbers, it is about gaining clarity. Once you know exactly how things are going, then you can make much better decisions, data-driven decisions, in fact, about the future. And last but not least, something I try to say in each of these episodes, it's always better to have a simple idea. You can start and grow right away than a brilliant idea that never launches. I'll leave you with that today.

Thanks for joining in, episode 3074. Much more is coming up. I'm excited to bring you the second half of the year and so much more. But for now, thanks for listening. My name is Chris Guillebeau.

This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

- From the Onward Project.