Maybe not marvelous, that’s a quickie before coffee.

Wouldn’t it be amazing to have a clear picture of your business every Monday morning? That’s 📝Monday Morning Metrics (MMM).

MMM Good

MMM is a simple report that shows a few dozen key metrics across all your departments and business systems. Conditional formatting highlights week-to-week changes:

Red is worse than last week
Transparent is the same as last week
Green is better than last week

Guess what happens when you give a talented team data in this straightforward format… the team gets better.

Why Monday Morning Metrics Works

Our clients see their business improve in a variety of ways because of the 52-times-a-year feedback loop, compared with their previous monthly or quarterly reporting, which was slow and unreliable. These are the biggest areas of improvement we see:

Data quality improves rapidly. Even if the data isn’t perfect, start looking at it to understand why. If you don’t look at it, how is it going to get better? Do it quickly by using this process: 📝First time is Handmade.
Conditional formatting is motivating and educational. Seeing the areas that need improvement in red helps a team understand where to improve right away, and why those areas aren’t green yet. Checking in every week keeps the improvement going.
It levels up the team. It starts with setting a clear goal, and the process is simple: the greener the better. Making the numbers green keeps everyone rowing in the right direction.
You can reliably test creative. At 📝General Assembly, we could see the impact of testing creative, like email subject lines, in the numbers. Every week was a new A/B test. Fun fact: the email title with the highest open rate? “You are not alone.”
Systemic improvement is inevitable. A properly facilitated conversation about the weekly metrics drives improvements across every area of the business. An eye on the right numbers lets you set actionable goals each week.
“Average Weekly” will blow your mind. Every week you get a clean comparison to the previous quarter and to the same quarter last year. For example: “Three weeks into this quarter, your average weekly cash collection is down 7% while cash payroll expenses are 12% higher.” After a few quarters, the Average Weekly starts to drive the conversation, and no one cares about the month-end numbers anymore.
Goals shift to average weekly, too. Once the team sets its goals as average weekly numbers, every Monday tells you whether you’re on track for the quarter.
Monthly financials get simpler. Continue to publish monthly financials, but simplify and automate them.

The Rowset

The Rowset is the simple, consistent way we present your company’s data. We organize it like this:

Marketing Pipeline: channel activity, revenue, and your SQLs.
Sales Pipeline: how many SQLs made it to a closed deal.
AR Roll-forward: the journey from invoice created to invoice collected.
Simple Cash-based P&L: collections less cash out by major vendor, along with cash in the bank.
Service Delivery Pipeline: for a DTC business, the inventory roll-forward.

Weekly Accounting starts the drumbeat

MMM is only as good as the books underneath it, so the accounting has to move at the same pace as the metrics. 📝Weekly Accounting closes the books every week instead of every month. The accounting department might resist it at first, so we created 📝The Weekly Accounting Handbook to help everyone break old habits.

Examples

General Assembly

We first implemented MMM for General Assembly in 2013. After implementing the 📝Integrated Financial Model (IFM), we saw that all the marketing metrics were going in the wrong direction. Because of this finding, we formed a digital marketing team to focus exclusively on improving the key funnel metrics, every campus, every course type, every week, with the average weekly by quarter:

Active emails
Emails sent
Pageviews
Applications
Enrollments
Dropouts
Completions

Monday Morning Metrics enabled our Marketing team to drive down customer acquisition cost and our Campus Directors to fill classrooms driving every campus to being contribution positive. - Jake Schwartz, General Assembly

Assembled Brands

When we turned on HubSpot at 📝Assembled Brands to organize our deal flow, contacts and communication, we immediately created the Weekly Pipeline Report, which included metrics like:

Web Visitors
Apps Submitted
Deals to Credit Committee
Term Sheets Issued
Signed
Closed

Robin Healthcare

At 📝Robin Healthcare we saw the pattern:

Break the team of 80 down into 10 teams.
Give them weekly metrics.
Hold a one-hour meeting with the team leads each week to share best practices.
We reduced expenses by $200k per month in 6 weeks.

Trust & Will

We implemented it at 📝Trust & Will, one of our earliest WeeklyAccounting.com partners, where the team built the most comprehensive 📝Level 2 Marketing Metrics we’ve ever seen.

If you’re not managing your business weekly, you are managing your business weakly.