As we head into 2017, I have a steady stream of operating plans hitting my inbox. Since many of our investments are companies that are scaling, vs. companies that are just getting started, there are a lot of derivative metrics in these plans.
Q1 is the easiest quarter to make your plan, so most of these companies are getting a free pass for the next three months after fighting the good fight of making or beating plan in Q3 and Q4. For the SaaS and recurring revenue companies, if they missed by more than 5% in 1H16 and didn’t reforecast, they’ve had a particularly grueling uphill climb for the past six months.
While the relief of Q1 was missing last year because of the existential freakout caused by the public markets (anyone remember that?) I know a bunch of people who are hoping Q1 will be nice, calm, and normal. Good luck with that.
Regardless, you can start the year off by being clear on how you calculate your various derivative metrics and make sure that your plan – and the expectations of your board and investors – fit what you are putting out there for the next year. Before you say, “yup – no big deal – we are great at that” go read two posts by Glenn Wisegarver, the CFO at Moz.
If you’ve worked with me, you’ve probably heard me call out CAC as a nonsense metric, since it’s super easy to game. Or maybe you read my post about ICDC (increase conversion, decrease churn). Or, instead of growth rate at a moment in time, you’ve heard me ask for a monthly graph of trailing twelve month growth rate so we can see the actual acceleration or deceleration of growth, which is way more interesting than last months growth number.
There are tens of thousands of words written on the web about SaaS metrics, consumer metrics, recurring revenue metrics, and all kinds of other metrics. Entertainingly (at least to me) there are very few words written about CE / hardware metrics (other than nonsense about how to value CE companies).
As part of getting your metrics together for 2017, I encourage you to go read some of these articles. And think hard about which metrics really matter and where the change in them will impact your business performance in 2017.