The #1 Way I Measure Growth

For myself, for our company, and what I look for in other leaders.

Every month over the past four years, Keaton and I have been meeting with one of our mentors and advisors, Charles Fred, of TrueSpace. 

He begins each meeting with the same, simple question: 

How’s the business doing?

A simple question, right? It should have an easy, obvious answer, agreed? 

Here’s the problem: I could take it 82 different directions. “Well Charles,” I’d often start, “it depends.”

The famous PT school answer that was never wrong, but also not right. 

And here’s the reality: While most leaders you see love to proclaim everything is great and numbers are skyrocketing, the truth is probably a mixed bag.

At times, numbers are up, and at times, numbers are down. It all depends on how you look at it, and it’s enough to make you feel like you have whiplash. 

So how do you confidently answer the simple question: how are you doing? 

Here’s how my personal journey to measuring progress in the past, and I hope it helps you frame meaningful growth in the future.

The Early Days: 1MTRTA

In the early days of MovementX, we were inspired by AirBNB in many aspects of their business. From their marketplace structure to their branding, their early journey was a source of insight and guidance. 

Another area we chose to follow their lead was in selecting a North Star Metric, which for AirBNB’s is the number of nights booked on their platform.

We loved what this did for them - it was simple, easy to understand, and aligned the whole organization. At PT Day of Service, we saw this work by closely tracking the number of participant sign ups each week. It helped us build from a few volunteers to over 3,000 from all 50 states and 26 countries in the first year alone.

The parallel metric, at MovementX, was the number of completed physical therapy sessions. Back in 2018, we started measuring the number of sessions our providers held each week, and we aptly renamed it: 

The 1 Metric to Rule Them All (1MTRTA)

This served us well and is still data we closely examine every single Monday morning. It has been fun watching the growth from 10 sessions/wk to >500 sessions/wk, and we think it will continue to carry us forward, to 1,000/wk and well beyond.

Yet, we eventually realized there is a problem with this number: 

It’s a lagging indicator 

In other words, while it tells us how we performed in the week past, it doesn’t give us any sense of how we might perform in the future. 

That’s where things started to change. 

The Middle Days: Leading Indicators

As we became more sophisticated and started to consistently take action that worked well (we did a lot that failed early on, too - a topic for another day), we realized we should start tracking it. 

For example, every time we had a certain type of meeting with a physician, it would result in patients being sent our way. The flow became:

• Marketing meeting with a physician → 

• Patients interested sent our way → 

• More patient evaluations → 

• More patient sessions  

Once we started to see this and other strategies work, over and over again, we decided to start measuring it, developed a set of metrics around it, and called it our location marketing paradigm. 

We now had a set of leading indicators. And while they didn’t speak to the quality of each interaction, we had a baseline set of data to start working from and monitoring. 

Now when Charles asked us how our business was doing, we could surely answer the question confidently, right?! 

Mostly, until…. 

One week, our leading indicators had been up, our sessions were down, and the connection between leading and lagging didn’t seem to work perfectly anymore. I was outright frustrated. 

But here’s the thing- I knew exactly why it wasn’t working. 

In that moment, I found the answer I had been looking for all along. How I wanted to focus on measuring growth, in that moment and in the future. 

The Final Answer 

A bit frustrated, and a bit out of sorts, I ended up answering Charles: 

‘Well, our numbers are all over the place. But if you’re judging us based on how much we are learning, we are looking GREAT!’

BOOM! Learning. That’s the ultimate leading indicator. 

If we are effectively learning, and wielding what we have learned to create effective change, it will lead to growth. 

From that moment on, I’ve refrained from judging our performance based solely on our numbers, but rather based on how much we are learning, and how effectively we are applying that learning and implementing our lessons into a consistent and repeatable system. 

It also led me to a number of realizations: 

• Data itself is not as important as the story it’s telling and the hypotheses you are developing 

• Learning is a core skillset of any leader, and perhaps why so many of the great leaders are prolific readers

• Reflection and integration is a critical component of any leader’s skillset 

Nowadays, especially when the numbers aren’t pretty, I tend to focus on the lessons we are learning. And thus far it has not led us astray. 

The Reality

It’s easy to get high on the highs, and down during the lows, but the secret sauce I have seen to date is consistency over time. 

It’s the balance of:

1. Finding your north star

2. Identifying the leading indicators you can influence,

3. Being aware of what you are learning and how you are applying new lessons to constantly make the system better (what we call kaizen at MovementX). 

When looking at other leaders, I’ve started to look for their ability to master more complex information; to hold within their mind seemingly opposing information and form a comprehensible narrative around it, and to hypothesize a solution around it.  

And whether or not a hypothesis pans out, the key leading indicator for future, the ultimate upstream metric, is how much we can learn and apply.

What about you? How do you measure meaningful growth? Would love to hear.