I love metrics. I love data. I love quantifying (or disproving) the assertions of people I work with and for. What makes my job interesting is MarketStar’s business model and its wide array of clients, all of whom have different value propositions, business challenges and successes.

With the complexities and variance between markets, products, verticals, individual company cultures and business objectives, I reject the notion that a canned report (from some online tool) will keep business leaders accurately apprised to the pulse of their business, what its clients want and how their markets are doing. There is simply no substitute for an experienced analyst who understands the subtleties, past experiences and positive (or negative) indicators of your business. Some standardization is fine, but ultimately successful businesspeople have their own metrics and ways of viewing SWOTs.

To illustrate this, I asked a few friends and former colleagues one simple question: What metric do you look at to understand how the economy is doing?

Here are a few of their responses:

“Unemployment rates and housing values. My contention is that these two indicators hit at the heart of (1), the U.S. population’s largest individual asset and its trending value providing regional stability, access to capital, tax revenues, etc.; and (2), the U.S. population’s sustainability and appreciation of its cash flows through appropriate and competitive employment levels.” Ben Cook—Partner, Acumen Learning

“Oil and gas prices are the main economic indicators I believe drive the economy. As oil prices rise, there is a direct negative corollary on consumer sentiment. As prices rise at the pump, median wage earners may consume less in other areas to offset the increase. The cost to ship goods will also increase, which in turn drives up prices at the grocery store. Other consumer goods also are driven higher (i.e. airline tickets). The negative corollary driven by increases in oil literally ripples through our entire economy. ” Shawn Bryant—Director, Global Financial Operations, American Express

“Company stock price. Primarily, it’s the biggest influence on my variable compensation and disposable income and also because it stares me in the face whenever I open our homepage.”  Chris Binns—Planning Director, KLA-Tencor

“Business travel at airports, consumer spending and median housing prices. Business travel tells me that businesses are back out again and winning business. The U.S. is a consumer-spend economy – enough said. Flat and declining housing values on a national basis affect the confidence level regardless of where you live, pushing consumers to pull back.”  Stan Bassett—President at TechMediaNetwork (MarketStar Alum)

“CarMax looks at numerous things, including consumer confidence indexes (from The Conference Board); gas price trends (maybe specific to our industry but tends to have an overall impact on consumer spending); the seasonally adjusted annual rate, which measures new car sales (very specific to our industry, but again likely correlated with broader economic sentiment).
Rob Sorensen—Vice President, Marketing at CarMax

“Retail sales year over year and the growth of the consumer electronics category.”  Jon Pollock—CMO at Polaroid

“M&A activity always seems to be a sign of improvement. When I hear of that, or the lack of it, I assume we’re doing better or worse.”  Chris Hatch—Senior Manager at Dell Inc.

“Elective surgery procedure volume.” Steve Coleman—medical device Regional Sales Manager

There are a few commonalities, but there are more differences. And there should be differences. A company selling cars should be looking at the world differently than a computer company or a medical device manufacturer. I would propose that different managers within the same companies will look at different metrics – and they should! Standardization and automation gets you down the path, but it takes experience and insightful (human) analysis to really keep you informed.

What is my metric?  Retail restaurant traffic, openings and closings. If I’m waiting in line or for a table, if I see new developments opening up with restaurants, then I feel like everyone is doing OK. If there are closings or even worse, newly built buildings standing empty, that’s concerning. Good news on that front: Five Guys Burgers & Fries is opening a block away from MarketStar’s headquarters; based on my little metric, that’s good for both the economy and my lunch hour. Now if we could just get some donuts in Ogden.

What’s your metric?