Go Beyond the KPIs

 

For all company leaders, heading into a new year is an exciting time. It’s a chance to approach your company goals with fresh eyes and include your team in looking forward to achieving even more in the coming year.

But like any progress, it takes getting clarity around where you are, and where you want to go.

Return to Your Mission

The best place to start, before you even look at numbers and projections, is the “why” behind your company’s upcoming goals — the larger, mission-driven impetus that’s driving you and your team.

With our team, when we talk about goals and Key Performance Indicators, we like to come back to why we’re doing any of this in the first place. We talk about the people we’re serving, the families and individuals whose lives and legacies we’re impacting with our efforts. We reflect on the IULs that are allowing families to send their kids to college with tax-free policy loans.

We share stories of our clients’ business ventures that have been made possible through their IUL loans. We also talk about the retirement journeys of our older clients, those who are now enjoying their golden years, without the fear of outliving their money. We talk about the death benefits that have gone on to bless families whose loved ones have passed on.

That kind of focus always helps us remember why we do what we do, and it helps us stay motivated to find ways to do what we do better.

We also talk about how each of our team members is critical to meeting our overall KPIs and goals, what they contribute, and how valuable they are.

Break It Down

 

When it comes to actually focusing on your company’s goals — for example, your target revenue for the year — it helps to not only identify that big-picture number, but to break down what it will take to get there by reverse-engineering your smaller goals for each week, month, and quarter.

And a word of caution, when setting things like revenue goals, it’s important to consider things like past performance, current resources, etc., so your goal is realistic. You don’t want to pull it out of a hat just because “it would sure be nice to hit that big juicy number.” You need to know where that figure is driving from and how are you going to achieve it.

For our team, I’ve found it helpful to put ourselves on a growth trajectory, aiming for bite-size growth, such as 2% per month.

If I were to say instead, “Let’s grow by 40% every year, because we can 10-times our company’s revenue in five years if we do that,” well, that can sound daunting. Now there’s nothing wrong with that goal, but as a company leader, you need to help your team see that the bigger goals are achievable by breaking them down.

Because if you’re achieving 2% growth, compounded month over month, you can effectively get close to that 40% annual growth.

KPI, Dashboards & Scorecards

Now I’d recommend going even deeper in breaking down those goals. For example, we have several stages in our sales cycle, and we track each of those stages, so we can clearly see our factors like conversion ratios and performance in real-time. This makes it easier to compare to what we’ve done in the past, so we can see where we’re ahead or behind and use the data to identify where we can improve.

We have a dashboard that I share with the team where we can check our progress on a weekly basis, with a scorecard total of 80 potential points. If our score is trending lower than average, we know where we need to pick things up. If we’re right near that 80-point mark, we know what we’re doing is working.

Boost the Team With Incentives

 

It’s also helpful to create incentives around reaching your goals. With our team, we’ll deliver rewards for reaching goals on a monthly basis. Depending on the department, those rewards can be cash bonuses, extra PTO, etc.

As a side note — our administrative staff has loved receiving paid Fridays off. It’s amazing to see how much it means to them (and their families) and how much they want to earn those again.

So as you look ahead to your company’s 2026, I encourage you to return to your “why,” set realistic topline and supporting goals, track your progress, reward your team along the way, and include them in the excitement of serving your clients with energy and vision.

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As entrepreneurs, we’re often asked to share business strategies, which we’re happy to pass along to our professional clients via our books, YouTube channel, podcast, and here in our “3 Dimensional Wealth Living” Business Builder column.