I Don't Manage With My Heart. I Manage With Statistics.

Heart Into the Work, Statistics Into the Decisions

I don't manage with a heart, even though I put a lot of heart into things. I manage with statistics. Statistics are how I determine whether something needs more attention or whether it's doing well and I just need to keep it going the way it's going.

And many times I see other entrepreneurs, business owners, and brand owners not paying enough attention to this. They run on feel. They run on instinct. That's how you miss problems for weeks that a simple number would have shown you in a day.

Statistics can be day to day, like yesterday's revenue compared to today's revenue, or they can be weekly. What was last week's revenue? How many emails went out? There's a list of statistics I like to keep, and it changes based on whether you're running an e-commerce brand on Amazon or Shopify, or doing lead generation to sell services. I do both, so let me show you my actual list.

The Stats I Watch Every Single Week

On the e-commerce side, here's what I monitor consistently, daily and weekly. First, e-commerce revenue. How much revenue did I produce daily on Shopify? How much on Amazon? I also look at it weekly. This is how I make decisions right away.

Second, email opt-ins. You've heard the saying in the game of business: the money is in the list. Well, you have to get people to opt into your email consistently, especially for an e-commerce brand. Same with SMS. How many phone numbers are you acquiring, and how many communications are you sending to that list? Sometimes when you actually look at the statistics, you'll see that for some reason you stopped acquiring new phone numbers and emails. The stat shows you the problem right away, and you can pick it up, solve it, and keep going.

Third, CAC, customer acquisition cost. This is so important, especially for a consumable brand. I have a beauty brand and a dog supplement brand. These aren't products you buy once and never again. People keep buying. So even if it costs me $50 to get a customer to buy $70 worth of products, and I potentially lose money on that first purchase, I know that in the long run, six months, nine months, one year out, I'm now making money on that customer.

Fourth, average order value, and this one is fascinating. On our NaturalSlim brand, when a customer orders on Amazon, they spend about $30. On our own e-commerce, about $100. In our call center, about $200. I monitor that because I want to spend as much as possible converting each customer into a valuable long-term customer. And finally, social media reach and new subscribers: how many people and accounts am I reaching monthly, and how many recurring customers are getting on a subscription model.

Up Trend? Reinforce It. Down Trend? There's Always a Reason.

This is what guides my decisions. If I see a stat that's booming and going up, I go in there and find out exactly what's causing it so I can reinforce it and do more of it. If I see a statistic going down, I have to get in there and fix it by finding out what we were doing up here that we're no longer doing anymore down here.

There's always a reason. You will always find it. If you manage by statistics, eventually you will always be able to reverse a down statistic. That's not a hope, that's a method.

And this applies even at zero. One of my new brands still has very little volume, but I still look at these things weekly. Total revenue, email open rates, emails out, texts out. Even if it's zero, it gets reported. You have to manage by statistics even from the bottom.

How I Build a Statistic in Seconds With AI

In the past, you needed expensive software subscriptions to create statistics. That process has been dramatically simplified. I use ChatGPT, and you can do it with any of the AI tools.

Here's my trick: I'm a faster communicator than a typer, so I use the microphone and just talk to it. First, I ask it what to measure. I described my agency by voice, the leads, the webinars, the retainer clients, and asked for the exact five top statistics I should be tracking weekly. It came back with newly generated sales calls booked, new retainers closed weekly, client retention rate, and total monthly recurring revenue. Solid list, generated in a conversation.

Then I build the stat itself. I voice-texted the yearly revenue of my agency going back to 2017, from $546,000 in that first year up through the growth years to where we are now, and asked it to put that into a yearly graph. Just like that, I had a document I could share with my team. I hit download, attached it, and said guys, let's get to work.

The Graph Asks the Questions For You

When I opened that yearly revenue graph, one year jumped out. A downtrend. Wait a second, what happened over here? That single picture lets me go back to that exact time and find out if there's something I stopped doing that I was doing before. And you know what? I probably fixed it, because the trend went back up the following year.

That's the whole power of this. When you manage by statistics, you can correct the things that aren't doing well and reinforce the things that are doing really well. Have a conversation with AI about what statistics your specific industry pays attention to, then track them daily, weekly, or monthly.

Managing by statistics is the key to the expansion of your business. My target for 2026 is to keep building on that momentum, and every decision along the way will be built on actual logic, not just heart.