Allison Maslan explains how an aerospace company stuck at $30M in revenue broke through by giving each department one primary metric to focus on: marketing tracked right-fit leads, sales tracked conversion rate, operations tracked retention. The key is choosing metrics that actually matter, not tracking everything.
So the Northstar metrics, actually the idea came after an interview with a guy that I did on my podcast and now I can't remember his name, but he ran an aerospace company at a nine figure aerospace company. And they struggled. They were stuck at about 30 million for years until he figured out this one thing and that was if he could get each department focused on one number. One number. And it wasn't that they weren't tracking other numbers, but their main focus was one number and that's all that they worked towards. So for marketing, what he shared with me was number of leads, number of right fit leads. That was their focus. They knew that if they were able to attract X number of leads per month, right fit leads, that they would hit the numbers that they needed. So they were constantly working to up the game. So there's so many other numbers. There's cost of acquisition, you know, there's, you know, lifetime value, all, all that. But it really is helping your clients look at each area of the company. You could take the four superpowers if you want and, but you know, I mean, operations could be retention, it could be, it could be a time like how quickly a bundt cake is made. I, I don't know. I mean, it's like, of course sales is, is conversion. Like, you know, our sales team is just crushing it right now. We don't have enough leads coming in, but the ones that they are, they are, are converting at over 50%. So it's just figuring out what, you know, again, looking at that, my strategic plan and then reverse engineering what numbers you need to hit and then going here and going, okay, what are the numbers we need to focus on to hit those numbers? And then they can break it down by month and by week. And so if you're doing a marketing meeting, if they're doing a marketing meeting weekly, then they know that at the top of the meeting this is the focus. And you start getting everyone thinking that way. Now I know one thing that Steve has been doing is helping each person on the marketing team own their own KPIs so they all have targets. We've never done that before. So it really is, it just helps where they know where to aim. It's like that idea, what we talk about in the ringleader is that the biggest mistake is they don't know what success looks like. But again, this, this gentleman and I do have the interview. It's such a good interview, I'll have to find it. But where he talked about that once they focused on one number per department there, they soared, you know, several hundred million in revenue.
Yeah. Allison, people always Forget that the KPIs is key performance indicators. It's not all the performance indicators. It's key performance indicators. That means less.
Yeah. If you just have all these numbers, I mean, how do you really focus? And at least it doesn't mean that you're not tracking but what the team is focused on. Because if you're going to bring more of the right fit leads in, then it's going to impact everything else. Right, so that is Northstar metrics.
