Mentorship and Metrics

Whether you are a manager or a mentor or a startup team, you know that metrics do matter.

Good metrics are an excellent tool for decision making. They serve the entrepreneur-startupper and the team as well, but are also instrumental to communicate with the stakeholders and generally to the rest of the world.

Vanity metrics on the other hand are useless, if not to serve other purposes …

AVOID the so called “Vanity Metrics” which do not give YOU, the entrepreneur (startupper) the right information to take decisions, but are there to show-off and look good.

If Metrics are tools, then their change over time becomes part of a process of permanent and continual improvement.

Metrics are important they must be:

• Understandable
• Comparative
• Apt to change behaviour
• In a right format (preferably a ratio)

Metrics are thus only tools not an objective per se, and as such need to serve the purpose, for which they were conceived; which is to guide, to indicate progress (… or lack of progress).

Metrics need to be adapted to the type of revenue model that the startup is pursuing. Basically the type of business the startup operates in.

Metrics also depend on the development stage of each business venture and will change over time.