Some Things Just Cannot Be Measured

This year, we are going to invest in employee-training programs. It’s an important initiative, but tracking its results, and its ROI, would be difficult.

By Ami Kassar

I have friends who run their businesses off of key-performance-indicator dashboards. Their companies have cultures in which pretty much everything is measured and tracked. If something is important, it gets tracked. I have been in rooms with EOS implementors who preach that every goal needs metrics behind it, and if you can’t measure it and hold someone accountable for the result, that means it’s not a real goal and it’s not essential.

But is everything black and white? Is everything quantifiable? To me, this kind of thinking is as extreme as the belief that artificial intelligence is going to take over the world or the old argument that e-commerce was going to replace all shopping malls. I believe there are times when we have to do things that are extremely important even if they are challenging to quantify.

For example, my company is a B2B services business. One of these days, we will conclude that a refresh of our website and brand is important and necessary. It’s been a few years, and it’s time. But will I be able to quantify or measure the impact of this investment? I could hire an analyst or two to develop an abstract model to determine the value, but this process might cost as much as the actual refresh.

This year, we are going to invest in employee-training programs. Tracking the results of this initiative presents challenges similar to measuring a website refresh. It’s an important initiative, but tracking its results, and its ROI, would be difficult.

Of course, there are plenty of opportunities that can be measured. If we invest in a direct-mail campaign, for example, we can tell fairly quickly whether it’s working. The same could be true with the hiring of a new salesperson or the opening of a new retail location.

But are the quantifiable initiatives more important than the “softer” projects? I don’t think so, and I would argue that it would be a mistake to drop a project just because you won’t be able to measure its impact definitively.

Sometimes, I meet entrepreneurs who are so obsessed with KPIs that I think the need to measure overwhelms the importance of results. I know of one entrepreneur who obsesses over how many Instagram followers he has and actively measures this. But which is more important, the quality or quantity of followers? Quantity is easy to track. Quality is trickier. 

I encourage everyone to think these ideas through when deciding what’s important.

Ami Kassar is CEO of MultiFunding.