Would you agree that working in an agency is organized creative, fun chaos? That a regular part of your job is drowning in customer requests and figuring out how to stay afloat?

We feel you.

On top of your day-to-day mayhem, you need to prioritize reporting. On one hand you’re accountable to report to your core team and executives with performance updates, and on the other you’re who your clients rely on for killer campaigns, market insights, and data analysis.

I think we can agree that although it may seem as though you are juggling a million different things, the best approach is harmonization between agency and client reporting.

We know, reporting isn’t the most enjoyable part of you job, it’s usually tedious and time-consuming, taking you away from creative projects you do best. In fact, you’ve probably wished that you could just skip your reporting altogether.

Here at Klipfolio, we work with hundreds of agencies who report on a regular basis to their clients… and surprisingly enough, that feeling of dread that arises on a monthly basis around reporting time has disappeared for them.

The truth is, your reports can really make you shine when it comes to your client relationships. By being transparent with your performance data, you give your clients more confidence and position yourself as a trusted advisor. Take the time to nail down your reporting processes, which not only saves you time and money, but provides you the opportunity to showcase your creative flair. How? By building a dynamic dashboard.

One thing that is so important for agencies to understand is that reporting should be collaborative effort, one that takes into account the strengths of all of your team members. By working alongside all departments with everyone inputting their own metrics and klips, you can create a dashboard report that gives your clients a full view of their data and business processes, allowing them to make better, more informed decisions.

And you look like a rockstar.

Not only do you look good in the eyes of your clientele, you now have a deeper understanding of your clients, giving you a full picture view of their business and objectives. Simply put, you can now do better work. Your boss will probably appreciate this too!

“Great things in business are never done by one person” - Steve Jobs

Without a doubt, each member of your agency has individual responsibilities, so naturally, they should each contribute different metrics making building the dashboard a joint effort. The final product will display a full picture for the client, proving that teamwork makes the dream work.

Account Coordinator

An Account Coordinator is all about organization. They are responsible for support and overall day-to-day customer service in order to ensure the client’s objectives are being accomplished through the creative projects and work done by your agency. This includes administration tasks, project tracking, budgets, and research. Some metrics they should consider in the dashboard reporting include:

• Clients Won
• Account by Type
• Revenue and Wins by Type
• Hours Spent on Projects
• Client Balance Summary
• Quickbooks Income and Expenses
• Accounts Receivable and Payable

Director of Marketing

The Director of Marketing is all about innovation and imagination. They are responsible for the development and implementation of marketing strategy. This includes overseeing campaigns, digital marketing and communications. Some metrics they should consider including in the dashboard reporting process include:

• Return on Marketing Investment
• Incremental Sales
• Cost per Lead
• Keyword Performance
• Customer Lifetime Value
• Customer Acquisition Cost
• Click-Through Rate
• Net Promoter Score
• Social Traffic and Conversion
• Social Visits and Leads
• Traffic by Device
• Referred Traffic

Content Creator

The content creator creates. Simple right? But what isn’t as simple is ensuring that they are creating the right stuff. And that it is performing for the client by engaging potential customers and generating leads. From a content perspective, the metrics that could by included in their reporting include:

• Number of Blogs Written
• Backlinks and External Mentions
• Bounce Rate
• Content Downloads
• Content ROI
• Customer Acquisition Cost
• Email Click-Through and Open Rates
• Keywords by Ranking

UX Specialist/Web Developer

This is the tech-savvy specialist at your agency, who designs and evaluates the way in which end users interact with websites and applications. Bottom line, they create the online interactive experience for you and your clients. Metrics that they could add to the dashboard include:

• Number of Fixed Bugs
• Latency
• Net Promoter Score/Happiness
• Task Success Rate
• Error Rate
• Connect to Response Start
• Average Engaged Time
• Number of Improvements to Design System Backlog

Social Media Manager

Your social butterfly is on top of all of the latest social trends they always know what’s up in the news and the business world. The social media manager is responsible for managing social channels and interacting with customers online. To monitor the success of their social efforts, they should include the following metrics:

• Social Interactions
• Social Traffic and Conversions
• Number of Followers and Subscribers
• Number of Page Likes
• Number of Social Posts
• Average Time on Page
• Number of Visits and Time Since Last Visit
• Total Page Views
• Unique Visitors
• Organic Traffic

Be a Data-Driven Rockstar

Like we said, dashboarding is easy when it’s a collaborative effort done by the entire team. From a dashboard software standpoint, you can set up a team approach by doing the following with us:

1. Sign up for Klipfolio
2. Get one of our friendly success team members to turn on Client Management for you
3. Add your team as users so everyone can contribute
4. Add your client accounts
5. Create a dashboard for your agency and dashboards for your clients

a. Connect your data

b. Build your Klips

c. Customize

d. Track, monitor, and re-evaluate

By creating harmony between agency and client reporting, you can focus on the work that you do best. By building client dashboards, you’re not only saving valuable time, but enhancing your client service experience and, in turn, improving the impression your clients have of your agency. Building dashboards for yourself also saves you time, and provides you and your team with quick real-time glances at all of the data you need to know in order to make faster, smarter decisions instantly - it’s a win-win situation.

So, enjoy the organized chaos and happy dashboarding!

Let’s be friends.

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Grab your coffee and get excited - you’ve stumbled upon our super long article on everything SaaS KPIs, created especially for you! It clocks in around 4600 words - so you’ll probably want to come back to it a few times (that’s what bookmarking is for right?).

Sign up for our free SaaS email course.

Learn everything SaaS KPI-related in 5 minute daily lessons.

Receive all of the content you need to feel more confident reaching your business objectives, in bite-sized emails over the course of a week, while you enjoy your coffee!

What we’ve done in this article is created bite-sized introductions, with step-by-step tutorials and examples. We’ve listed each SaaS topic in our “Table of Contents” in case you want to skip forward to a certain segment.

Table of Contents

Here’s a taste of what you’re going to learn over the next few thousand words:

1. An Introduction to KPIs
2. How to Decide Your Organization’s KPIs
3. Best Practices for Picking the Right KPIs
4. The Fundamental Metrics for a SaaS Business
5. SaaS KPIs to Focus on at Each Stage of Growth
6. Why KPIs Fail and Common KPI Mistakes
7. Monitor Your KPIs with Dashboards and Reports

We will also provide you with additional resources that you can access if you wish to explore any of the subjects deeper. Ultimately, this blog will assist you in becoming more confident in driving and reaching your business objectives... no matter how big or small.

Trust us, this is going to be a fun read!

An Introduction to KPIs

Like most data-driven minds, you’re on the lookout for more knowledge. Why? Because in the fast-paced world of SaaS, you fight a continuous battle between fueling the fire and letting your business take off by itself. You know that hard work, creative thinking, and tenacity will help keep your team on top. So here you are, trying to find that balance.

Decision-Making Starts With Data

As mentioned, the world of SaaS is fast. This can cause uncertainty in many aspects of your business. For example, when your product or service components are constantly being upgraded or refurbished, your company is growing, or your role gets even busier than it already is. But this is what makes SaaS so special and what makes data extremely valuable to you.

What this means is that its power should be used to make data-driven business decisions, a smarter quantitative approach to decision-making, instead of relying strictly on your gut feel.

Bottom line, if you and your team are striving towards gaining a competitive edge over your competitors, or staying on top in an ever-changing field, more consideration of your data when making decisions, the better.

What is a KPI?

A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a measurable value that demonstrates how a company is performing. Organizations use KPIs at multiple levels to evaluate their success at reaching business objectives. High-level KPIs may focus on the overall performance of the enterprise, while low-level KPIs may focus on processes in departments such as sales, marketing, finance, or call centers.

Types of KPIs

Depending on the specific department you are developing KPIs for, there are a number types your company should consider monitoring as each department will want to measure success based on goals and targets specific to their line of work.

What makes a KPI effective?

A KPI is only as valuable as the action it inspires. Too often, organizations blindly adopt industry-recognized KPIs and then wonder why that KPI doesn't reflect their own business and fails to affect any positive change. One of the most important, but often overlooked, aspects of KPIs is that they are a form of communication. As such, they abide by the same rules and best-practices as any other form of communication. Succinct, clear, and relevant information is much more likely to be absorbed and acted upon.

In terms of developing a strategy for formulating KPIs, your team should start with the basics and understand what your organizational objectives are, how you plan on achieving them, and who can act on this information. This should be an iterative process that involves feedback from analysts, department heads, and managers. As this fact-finding mission unfolds, you will gain a better understanding of which business processes need to be measured with KPIs and with whom that information should be shared.

Being SMART about your KPIs

One way to evaluate the relevance of a KPI is to use the SMART criteria. The letters are typically taken to stand for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound.

In other words:

• Is your objective specific?
• Can you measure progress towards that goal?
• Is the goal realistically attainable?
• How relevant is the goal to your organization?
• What is the time-frame for achieving this goal?

SMART Examples:

A customer success team member could have a SMART KPI of 20 onboarding calls per quarter or $2000 new MRR per month.

A front-end developer could have a SMART KPI of contributing at least 5 improvements to the design system backlog or fixing at least 5 front-end bugs.

A digital marketer could have a SMART KPI of 90 referral trials per quarter or 5 new guest blogs per quarter.

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” - Albert Einstein

This is the part in the blog that would be a great time to pour yourself another cup of joe. When you come back, you will learn how to narrow down what’s most important when defining your KPIs.

How To Define Your Organization’s KPIs

Understanding what a KPI is? Check.

Effectiveness of KPIs? Check.

Being SMART about KPIs? Check.

Now that you’ve had a brief introduction to the world of KPIs, how do you go about defining KPIs specific to your business objectives as a SaaS company?

Wait a second…

Before we break it down for you, we thought it’d be kind of fun to look at 4 analytics experts’ number one strategies to define their own KPIs.

“Number 1 way to getting actionable KPIs is starting with the end objective in mind and backing out what metrics accomplish this from there...” - Adam Singer, Google

“Less is more – you really only want a few KPIs as the more you have the harder it becomes to know what you should pay attention to and what’s just noise…” - Alex Clemmons, Cardinal Path

“In summary: dig deep, dig deeper, then filter it to find what will make each team most successful…” - Anna Lewis, Polka Dot Data

“Before getting to KPIs, you need to back all the way up to the ‘why’ for your business and determine what the most important questions are that you need to answer…” - Caleb Whitmore, Analytics Pros

How to define your KPIs

SaaS leaders often feel the pressure to measure everything—that is, measure both the true startup metrics they've relied on in the past (daily active users and net revenue retention, for example) and the key SaaS growth metrics (like monthly MRR growth and churn rate) that will help catapult their growth.

This constant piling on of more and more measurables can be overwhelming. Additionally, many SaaS leaders take the natural next step of jumping too far ahead—measuring efficiency metrics such as Gross Margin and CLV:CAC rather than remaining focused on growth. If you aren’t familiar with these metrics, don’t worry, we’ll cover those in Lesson 4.

The advice here is to focus on the KPIs that will get you to where you want to be, rather than on those that keep you where you presently are.

Step 1: Determine your organization’s most important objectives.

Step 2: Choose KPIs that are fixed, and capable of forecasting.

Let us explain further.

Breaking it down: fixed and forecasted

Here at Klipfolio, we’ve been thinking about KPIs for over a decade. After many iterations, here’s the simple definition we’ve come to find most valuable:

A key performance indicator is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives.

To us, a KPI must remain fixed and must be able to be forecasted. Let’s break each of those down:

Finding fixed

When we say fixed, we mean there’s a continuity and reliability among the measured outcomes. In other words, an outcome at one point in time can reliably be compared to an outcome at another time.

For example, if in January and February you found that 1 out of every 100 people who started a trial of your product became a customer, this would be a fixed statistic from which you might want to build a key performance indicator.

Finding what can be forecasted

There’s no need to go full-on artificial intelligence here, but KPIs must, at some level, help you forecast a result.

Let’s say it seems the time between trial-to-customer becomes significantly shorter when you reach a certain Net Promoter Score. This correlation may allow you to forecast: increased customer success = decreased time between trial-to-customer. Depending on what organizational objectives you’ve decided on, building a KPI around this forecast may be worth your time.

Measuring and monitoring business performance is critical, but focusing on the wrong metrics can be detrimental. Take a look at some of the best practices for picking the right KPIs for your business.

Best Practices For Picking The Right KPIs For Your SaaS Company

Data and metrics are everywhere. Measuring and monitoring business performance is critical, but focusing on the wrong metrics can be detrimental (as time and money are spent measuring, monitoring, and trying to optimize metrics that don’t matter much). The same can be said about poorly structured KPIs and KPIs that are too difficult and costly to monitor on a regular basis.

So what makes business performance indicators “key” and how should a SaaS leader, executive, or manager select them?

Here are 6 strategies to help you separate effective, value-creating KPIs from detrimental, value-diminishing KPIs:

1. Pick KPIs that are aligned with your strategic business objectives

We touched on this in the last two lessons. KPIs must be aligned with the strategic goals and objectives of your company. Business “performance” is relative, and ultimately measured against an organization’s mission and goals. KPIs must be grounded by these goals.

Good objectives: Reducing complaints by 50 percent over one year or improve resolution times to customer complaints to a minimum of one business day.

Bad objectives: Quadruple revenue in one month or have coffee with my employees once a week.

2. Make sure the KPIs you choose are attainable

There’s no point selecting a KPI for your company if the data behind the KPI can’t be obtained and presented to stakeholders, or, if doing so would be overly costly. In assessing the cost/benefit of selecting a particular KPI, ask yourself the following "What data points do I need to measure this KPI?" and "What technologies and processes do I need to implement to access this data on a regular basis?".

3. Be acute in your choice of KPIs

KPIs should keep everyone on the same page and moving in the same direction, and should be specific enough to inform distinct actions. If a KPI is too high-level or too vague, it can be interpreted in many different ways, which means it can also be actioned in many different ways - which is not what you want.

4. Pick accurate KPIs

Another important consideration in selecting KPIs for your business is the accuracy of the data flowing into the KPI, and the reliability of the KPI in predicting business performance. Ask yourself the following, "Does the KPI include all relevant information?" and "How accurate is the KPI in reflecting and predicting business performance?"

5. Select KPIs that are actionable

One of the most important considerations that should inform your selection of a business KPI is whether or not the KPI is actionable. Consider a double litmus test: can (at least some) of the events grounding the KPI be controlled by the business? If the circumstances fuelling the KPI are all out of your company’s control, then the KPI can’t be actioned. Second, is the KPI structured and presented in such a way, and to the right people, to incite action?

6. Pick KPIs that are alive

It’s easy to get comfortable with a group of KPIs that you’ve depended upon for an extended period of time, but the high-tech world isn’t static and your KPIs shouldn’t be either. Take the time to review your reasons for selecting specific KPIs periodically. Do these reasons still hold true? Has your business or the context within which it operates changed? Can your KPIs be refined to suit these changes?

Data, metrics, and “KPIs” are everywhere and it's not hard to be disoriented and lose focus on the metrics that are truly mission-critical to your business. Within this context, taking the time to think critically about how and why a particular KPI is “key” to your business is more important than ever.

KPI Planner

Put what you’ve learned so far to work and dive into constructing your own KPIs, with our helpful and simple KPI Planner! Next, we will start diving into a list of the key SaaS metrics every tech leader should be tracking.

The Fundamental Metrics for a SaaS Business

The SaaS model is relatively new, so it’s understandable that it’s not always easy to grasp how it works. We’re not like a clothing store that sells you a pair of jeans and then may never see you again; we’re more like a newspaper or magazine that sells you a renewable subscription. We want to retain customers, and grow our base. Our fundamental metrics explain how we keep track of how we’re doing.

We’re using “we” here because Klipfolio is also a SaaS business. If you’re still in the growth stage, we’ve likely faced similar obstacles. Here’s 5 of the metrics that we use at Klipfolio:

1. Number of accounts
2. Recurring revenue
3. Recurring revenue growth rate
4. Churn rate for both number of accounts and recurring revenue
5. Net recurring revenue retention

The first two metrics are number of accounts and recurring revenue. Together, these growth figures tell us how many customers we have and how much they pay us on a recurring basis.

These two bits of information are the fundamental building blocks necessary to understand how a growth-oriented company (like ours) is performing. These metrics might be simple but you should know these numbers in your sleep!

1. Number of Accounts

The number of accounts is straightforward: It’s the number of customers you have. This is calculated by:

Number of accounts = the sum of existing accounts and accounts gained, minus cancellations

2. Recurring Revenue

Recurring revenue is the money generated on a regular basis by the customers who have signed up for your service. It’s usually reported as either monthly recurring revenue (MRR) or annual recurring revenue (ARR).

There are only four things that can happen to your recurring revenue: (1) you get new MRR from brand new accounts; (2) existing accounts upgrade and pay you more MRR; (3) they downgrade and pay you less; or (4) they cancel altogether.

Recurring revenue = new + upgrades - downgrades - cancellations

Both of these basic building blocks - accounts and recurring revenue - can be looked at over time (for example, we added 10 new accounts today but lost 2 for a total increase of 8), or in their totality, as in ‘we have a total of 5,000 accounts as of today”.

Now that these two basic values are confirmed, we can move on to understanding how the business is growing.

We’ve identified three metrics that are crucial to understanding what’s happening with our accounts and recurring revenue:

• Recurring revenue growth rate
• Churn rate for both number of accounts and recurring revenue
• Net recurring revenue retention

3. Recurring Revenue (RR) Growth Rate

Recurring revenue growth rate measures velocity. This tells us how quickly we are growing and what kind of a growth curve we’re on.

Month-over-month RR growth rate = (net RR added in period) / (total RR beginning of period)

The bigger you get, the harder it is to grow (doubling $50K MRR is very different from doubling $500K MRR). It is said that a company’s recurring revenue growth rate should go like this over its first five years of operation: Triple, triple, triple; double, double. (Sounds like an order at Tim Hortons… pardon the Canadian joke).

4. Churn Rate

Churn rate is the rate at which you lose customers. A subscription service can lose customers very easily, and it can be bad news if you lose even a small number of customers regularly. This is one of those metrics that will catch up with you as your base grows and can, in the worst of cases, mean that you’re losing more customers than you are able to win. Churn rate should be calculated both for accounts and for recurring revenue.

Account churn rate = (number of cancelled accounts in period) / (total accounts beginning of period)

RR churn rate = (value of cancelled RR in period) / (total RR beginning of period)

5. Net Recurring Revenue Retention

Net recurring revenue retention is a way to measure whether your base revenue is growing. Again, we measure it over a time period – a month or a year – and it is the total change in recurring revenue from your existing customers with upgrades, downgrades, and cancellations factored in. The best-in-class companies have a model where upgrades from existing customers outpaces downgrades and cancellations. Do that, and growth will be much easier.

Net revenue retention = (RR beginning of period + upgrades - downgrades - cancellations) / (RR beginning of period)

Looking for more? In this next segment, we break down SaaS metrics even further using growth stages.

SaaS KPIs to Focus on at Each Stage of Growth

They may sound obvious, but these words from Paul Graham, the co-founder of Viaweb and Y Combinator, have grown into a truism for those working in the startup world:

“A startup is a company designed to grow fast.”

And if that startup is a SaaS company, Graham’s words could perhaps become “designed to grow really fast.”

As mentioned, it’s often this speed, and the resulting pressure, that leads to those working in the space to believe they need to always have a grasp on every SaaS KPI under the sun. The result, aside from being overwhelming and nearly impossible, is inefficiency. And inefficiency will ultimately limit growth.

Our CEO, Allan Wille, finds it helpful to organize SaaS KPIs in relation to where they are most important in these three stages of a SaaS company’s lifecycle: Product, Growth, and Efficiency.

Check out the infographic below to better align your KPIs with your SaaS company’s stage of development in order to maximize your efforts.

Product - Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score or NPS is a measure of a customer base’s willingness to promote a product or service to colleagues and friends. It is based on the results of a current customer survey, which asks respondents to answer the following question: (On a scale of 1-10) “how likely is it that you would recommend (brand or product X) to a friend or colleague?” (10 being ‘extremely likely’ and 1 being ‘not likely at all’)?

Responses are grouped as follows: 10s and 9s are brand ‘Promoters’, 8s and 7s are ‘Neutrals’, and any responses below 7 are brand ‘Detractors’.

NPS = proportion of Promoter scores - proportion of Detractor scores

Growth - Brad Feld’s Rule of 40

The rule of 40% is simply a rule of thumb to analyze the health of a SaaS business. It takes into consideration two of the most important metrics for a subscription company: growth and profit (GP).

The formula is:

GP Ratio = Growth rate + Profit

This means your growth rate plus your profit should add up to 40%.

So in our formula above, that would be 40% = growth + profit.

Let’s take a look at some examples to identify our profit, assuming that we know our current growth rate.

• If you’re growing at 20% you should be generating a profit of 20%. (40% - 20% = profit of 20%).
• If you’re growing at 40% you could be generating a profit of 0%. (40% - 40% = profit of 0%).
• If you’re growing at 50% you could even lose 10% of profit. (40% - 50% = profit of -10%).

So if you’re doing 40% you can consider that you have a healthy SaaS company — if you’re doing more than 40%, then that’s awesome - good for you!

In summary, when it comes to SaaS, business usually works as a “winner-takes-all” situation, so sacrificing profit for growth isn’t always a bad thing.

Efficiency - CLV:CAC

The Customer Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost Ratio (CLV:CAC) measures the relationship between the lifetime value of a customer and the cost of acquiring that customer.

So how do you know if you’re spending the right amount? You need some numbers.

First, you need to know how long the average customer sticks with you before they cancel their service, that’s CLV. Because of course the longer a customer sticks with you, the more valuable they are.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) = Gross Margin % X ( 1 / Monthly Churn ) X Avg. Monthly Subscription Revenue per Customer

Once you have the lifetime value of a customer, you can turn your attention to calculating how much you spend acquiring a customer. Ideally, you want to recover the cost of acquiring a customer within the first 12 months or so.

Cost to Acquire a Customer (CAC) = Sales and Marketing Costs / New Customers Won

An ideal LTV:CAC ratio should be 3:1.The value of a customer should be three times more than the cost of acquiring them. If the ratio is close (i.e.1:1), you are spending too much. If it’s 5:1, you are spending too little. In fact, you are probably missing out on business!

Knowing these numbers allows you to understand what drives your business - the better the picture, the more levers you can pull to grow your business.

For more KPI inspiration, check out this list.

Speaking of growing SaaS companies...

Online Reviews

Today, buyers are researching SaaS companies before ever contacting them in the form of online customer reviews. It's a whole new inbound lead strategy for marketers. In fact, 94% of customers read online reviews and 92% of B2B buyers are more likely to purchase after reading a trusted review.

Online reviews also provide a channel for SaaS companies to show customers they care by providing a whole new customer service channel. On top of that, it allows for smaller SaaS platforms to level the competition among the playing field, legitimizing their solutions by putting them on the same pedestal.

Despite all of the knowledge we’ve shared with you, mistakes happen. Below we nail down the most common reasons KPIs fail and mistakes to avoid when determining your KPI strategy.

Why KPIs Fail + Common Mistakes

Okay, so at this point you’ve sat in on what we consider a “KPI definition strategy” session. Your KPIs have been defined, you’ve got a rough outline on how to hit your targets, and your team is pretty clear on how to measure progress - that sounds like it ended on a high note! Easier said than done, we know.

But, when it comes to implementing a performance measurement strategy, the reality is often quite different than your lofty objectives.

KPIs, unfortunately, do fail.

Let’s take a look at 5 ways KPIs typically fail:

• Poorly defined
• Lack accountability
• Aren't achievable
• Lack specificity
• Too hard to measure

Poorly defined KPIs are doomed

A well-defined KPI is one that stands the test of time. Being SMART, as mentioned in Lesson 1, will help with this. The truth is that a well-defined KPI is structured and incorporates feedback from multiple areas of your business.

Cookie-cutter KPIs are a good starting point. But a KPI must address the unique challenges and opportunities of your business. Your unique KPIs should to be a window into your current performance as it relates to your performance objectives.

KPIs often fail when they’re ill-defined. The most common pitfall at the definition stage is defining your organization's KPIs without outside feedback. A KPI should be recognizable and properly communicated outside of your business unit or department. And of course achieving your KPI target should have a clear and measurable impact on the business.

KPIs fail without accountability

You’ve defined a KPI that you know is going to move the needle for the business. Congrats! Now, who owns it?

Each KPI you define must have an owner, someone who is responsible for tracking and achieving the target associated with that KPI. It may sound strange, but KPIs require nurturing and nourishment. An isolated KPI will wither and die on the vine.

KPIs must have achievable targets

So you want to grow revenue to $50 million this year? Sounds great. But if your starting point is $5 million, you may be setting yourself up for a KPI fail.

A good way to set up targets for KPIs is to associate targets with a specific timeframe. This allows you to track progress on an ongoing basis and continually take corrective action.

KPIs without specific targets will fail

Let’s say you’re a runner, challenging yourself to run faster or longer than ever before. It’s a lot easier to achieve your goals if you set out specific milestones. There's a huge difference between saying you want to run a faster 5KM race and saying you want to run that same distance in 30 minutes.

Business outcomes benefit from the same degree of specificity. Rather than consistently challenging ourselves to improve, give yourself a specific target so you know when you’ve reached it, and when you can start working towards the next.

The KPI is too hard to measure

The most common reason KPIs fail is because they can be hard to measure. KPIs blend data, business objectives, and departmental targets to act as guideposts for success. Without that first piece—data—your KPIs are abstract and conceptual.

Data is what grounds your KPIs, so you need to make sure you can actually measure and track your KPIs over time.

Set yourself up for success: avoid common mistakes

Even elite organizations struggle to avoid the most common KPI mistakes. They can occur at various points of a company’s development—including when new team leaders are hired, when new objectives are established, and/or when old KPIs are held onto even as an industry undergoes rapid change.

The most common KPI mistakes are:

• Reliance on intuition. This can arise from the overconfidence effect.
• Blindly adopting commonly-held best practices rather than creating your own.
• Bias toward the most recent information learned.
• Confusing lagging indicators (the easy-to-measure output) with leading indicators (the difficult-to-measure input).

Define and assign your KPIs, avoid these mistakes, and regularly assess your objectives. They are all likely to change as you gather new insights into the SaaS market and/or your product, which means assessments can and should be done both at the company and departmental levels.

Do all of this, and you’re golden! But yes, you aren’t expected to get this done in a week. Patience, diligence and following up are key.

You’re nearing the end. Congrats on getting this far! The last topic is centered around how you can use dashboards to monitor your KPIs.

Monitor Your KPIs with Dashboards and Reports

So now what?

Now you know what a KPI is and the difference between metrics and measures. You know how to define your organization’s KPIs and you know the best practices selecting the right KPIs and for avoiding the most common mistakes. You also know what the most important SaaS KPIs are. What now?

Once you have established benchmarks and targets for measuring KPIs, you’ll want to establish processes for monitoring them. Dashboarding can be critical in this regard. KPI tracking can be done using a dashboard software, giving your entire organization insights into your current performance.

What is KPI software?

KPI software enables businesses to create, manage and analyze data from KPIs. The software allows organizations to enter their data into one specially designed system, or connect external services for faster and more accurate data collection. This type of software allows businesses to visualize and comprehend data from a number of KPIs that represent different areas of a business, all in one place.

Companies benefit from KPI software through faster and more accurate data collection, instant reports on performance, and alerts when a KPI is over or under achieving. KPI software centralizes business's data, while simplifying real-time reporting to always give them a competitive edge. And because it's in the cloud and mobile, KPI software increases data visibility.

KPI Reports and Dashboards

To be useful, KPIs need to be monitored and reported on; if they change in real-time, they should be monitored in real-time. Dashboards are the perfect tool for your KPI reports as they can be used to visually depict the performance of an enterprise, a specific department, or a key business operation.

Have a look at some of our live dashboards for SaaS companies to demonstrate how you can present key performance indicators to your team:

• SaaS Executive Dashboard
• SaaS Growth Dashboard
• SaaS Metrics Dashboard
• SaaS Marketing Dashboard
• SaaS Support Dashboard

Looks like a ton of work to put those dashboards together right? Not entirely. We’ve created pre-built dashboards and metric templates for some of the most popular services and data sources. In only a few minutes, you can use our Gallery to get the dashboards that matter the most to your business.

Imagine if you had a way to see all of your business metrics in one place – whenever you wanted to see them. You'd be able to check in and monitor the health of your business, spot problem areas, and optimize activities that are doing well.

We use our Klipfolio dashboards every day. With all of this data, we continuously make incremental improvements to all areas of our business.

Happy Dashboarding

So, what do you think? Want to see all of your business metrics and KPIs in one place, in real time? With Klipfolio, you can.

KPI Planner

Put what you’ve learned to work and dive into constructing your own KPIs, with our helpful and simple KPI Planner!

Enjoy!

For months now, newspaper headlines have been talking about Canada’s low unemployment rate – the lowest in decades.

We didn’t need headlines to tell us that. It’s been evident for some time that companies like ours are finding it more difficult to attract talent.

One pool of talent tech companies need to pay particular attention to in the current context is students – the ones you hire during the summer, and those who come at other times of the year for placements that are part of their course requirements.

We’ve just said goodbye to our summer group, and that got me thinking about how we approach the hiring of students and interns.

We’ve worked hard to create an environment that profits both the company and its student hires. Over the years that policy has paid off in more ways than one. We have had many former students and interns come back as full-time employees. And, because they enjoyed the experience so much, many of those we didn’t hire have gone on to become brand ambassadors for the company.

Here’s our approach:

1. We treat all interns and students as future hires

This is probably the most important lesson we’ve learned, and I think it should underlie every company’s approach to hiring students and interns. Students and interns aren’t people just passing through, nor are they second-class workers. They are, every single one of them, potential future employees.

And that means they should be treated as such – with interest and respect.

You want to treat them in such a way that when they leave they feel good about the whole experience – the work, the culture, the social environment, the learning opportunities. The aim is that they will want to come back.

2. We place students or interns in all our teams

We’re a tech company, but that doesn’t mean we limit our student hires to people who can write code. We make an active effort to place students and interns in all our teams, including administration, sales and customer support.

Why?

Because students and interns have energy and ideas. And by placing them in every department, the entire company can benefit from fresh thoughts and youthful enthusiasm.

3. We give students and interns real work

We embed our students and interns in all our teams and get them involved in our projects as soon as possible. If we’ve hired them to write code, for example, they are shipping real code – not fetching coffee.

This gives them something they can point to with pride at the end of their placement. They can say, “I accomplished that!”

It’s not about throwing them into the deep end, but making them contributing members of a team. If they need to ask questions to get up to speed, we make sure they have a mentor or someone they can turn to.

Students and interns will rise to the challenge. We’ve found that if we set the bar high – if we expect a lot from our students – they will deliver. And they will enjoy the experience.

4. We pay them a salary

Sometimes, a student will offer to work for free.

We firmly decline such offers. We feel strongly that their work is valuable, and they should be paid for it.

It goes back to the first principle: Treat the students like real employees.

If you are not paying someone, it undervalues their contribution. And the working relationship is different. There’s less commitment. Besides, in today’s tight hiring environment, if someone is offering to work for free, alarm bells should be going off.

5. We give them an awesome experience

People spend a significant portion of their day at work. The experience should be enjoyable, both from a work perspective and from the point of view of interpersonal relationships.

We put a lot of effort into onboarding each cohort. We want to foster the idea that the students are part of the fabric of the company. We encourage them to bond with each other, and we do what we can to ensure they connect with full-time employees – people they can view as mentors. Friendships and social relationships are part of the mix; we think that the social element is important – it helps with engagement and retention.

(If you want to know what the students themselves think of our approach, check out this blog posting.)

In the end, your work culture is important. We want to foster an environment where you work with friends you respect, not just colleagues.

6. We build relationships with teaching institutions

If you want to attract the top students, it pays to develop a good working relationship with the teaching institutions where they study.

That means getting to know the profs, so that they can point promising students your way.

How to build a relationship? Sit on panels. Volunteer to speak in classes. Offer tours to groups of students. Anything that builds your company’s profile.

7. We build relationships with students

By creating a positive relationship with students and interns, we create a space in their minds for Klipfolio.

That has all kinds of positive fallout.

For starters, when they are in a position to look for a job, they will think of us.

And if they have enjoyed their experience at Klipfolio, they will talk positively about us to their fellow students and their teachers.

We figure that each student intern is an opportunity to reach at least 10 other students – and to have those 10 hear about what an amazing experience the internship was.

We find that students who come here on placement are looking for more than just learning. They want career advice and life advice too. They want to know whether they are in the right field. They want to know how to find their passion.

We create a positive experience by helping them build new skills and see a career path before them.

8. We make early offers of internships and summer hiring

Because the market is competitive, you cannot sit around and wait. If you come across a good student, someone whose skill set would contribute to your team, make them an offer as soon as you can.

We plan for students at least four months in advance, but we have already made offers for next summer to some of the students we hired this summer.

Some accept and end up working with us for two or three summers.

Others prefer to go get experience with other employers.

Either way, if they like what they’ve sampled at Klipfolio, there’s a good chance they’ll consider us when they are looking for a full-time job.

It’s also worth noting that more and more students are taking control of their own work terms. Instead of relying on the school to come up with a list of potential placements, they are reaching out themselves to places that interest them. And that may be earlier than you’d planned. It’s best to be ready.

9. We keep them engaged

Sometimes, a really promising student comes along. You may be able to keep that person engaged after their placement by offering them a part-time job. We’ve found that quite a few students are open to the idea.

(If we do offer a student a part-time job, we do make it clear that they are to put school first.)

You can also keep students engaged by inviting them to company events, or taking the time to see them if they happen to drop by the office.

In conclusion

A company may take in dozens of students and interns a year. It can seem routine. But remember ... for the students, the time with you is anything but routine.

Their time with you is hugely important to them. It might be their first real paying job. Or their first big break. Or the time they discovered their passion.

Make it as engaging and as memorable as possible.

This is the first of three pieces on how to create a deliberate and measurable plan for growing your company. Today, I look at the importance of setting a vision and a mission for the company. Next, I will talk about the yearly planning cycle. Finally, I will set out a series of steps for turning the long-term objectives for your company into a measurable plan for the coming year.

When a company is just starting up, its founders are unlikely to spend a lot of time thinking about vision and mission statements or even guiding principles.

For one thing, the company founders probably have a clear vision in their heads. Why write it down?

Besides, as long as the group is small and working closely together, these things seem to get communicated by osmosis in the hothouse atmosphere of a startup.

But something important changes when the number of employees rises beyond a certain point, usually above 40 or 50. Lines of communication lengthen and the people you hire may not be as naturally aligned to your mission.

At that point, it becomes important to spend time and effort creating a clear mission and vision statement for the company – one that attracts the right employees by creating a work culture employees can relate to emotionally, and helping them understand why they get up in the morning and come to work.

Not having clarity harms you

It’s actually harmful for a company to operate without a clearly articulated vision of where it’s going, and why.

I didn’t realize this at first, and for a long time I resisted the idea of taking the time to create a clear vision statement for the company.

But as the number of employees grew, I watched as people in various departments started to struggle with everyday decisions.

Should they invest in one type of customer or go after a different type of customer? What kind of messaging should they use? What features should they build? Employees couldn’t seem to decide.

And because they couldn’t decide, they started asking the executives for guidance.

But even within the executive team, things got fuzzy. Our decision-making wasn’t as crisp as it should be.

Our inability to be decisive about where we wanted to go was slowing us down, creating inefficiency and anxiety.

At first we thought we just had a problem with decision-making.

Our first response was to work on ways to help people make decisions, so they would know which way to turn when they came to a fork in the road

After surveying employees, and after countless executive meetings, we came up with five guiding principles for decision-making:

1. Think like a customer
2. Choose the future
3. Be open to change
4. Think big, start small
5. Do fewer things really, really well

For example, if one of our employees in support was working through a ticket, they would know to slow down and take the time to really understand what the customer was trying to accomplish.

If someone in user experience was designing a customer journey, they would make sure to envision the ideal future journey, but prioritize and start with the most important features and do them really well.

If someone was wondering about whether to invest in a new technology or process, versus refining an existing technology or process, they now knew they should ‘choose the future’ by investing in the new stuff – and not resist change.

These guiding principles will help, but not enough. We are really only scratching the surface of what is needed to be effective.

In fact, we're realizing that to make the guiding principles truly effective, we need to anchor them in a vision of the company – a vision that includes our values, our mission, and a clear sense of who we are and where we are going.

In other words, the guiding principles are just tactics for decision-making; they do nothing to help our employees feel proud of working at Klipfolio – something we felt was necessary if we want good decisions to become second nature.

Creating a mission and a vision is hard work

And in retrospect, we realize we should have created these first.

Why?

Because it helps anchor everything you do in a framework that touches each employee personally, at an emotional level. And that stimulates engagement. People not only know where they are going, they know why they are doing it.

First though, let’s define the idea of a vision statement and a mission statement.

We worked with an outside expert who helped us. It was not an easy process; in fact, it’s far more difficult than you can imagine.

That’s because in order to truly resonate, your mission and the ideal future have to reach employees at a gut level. They have to reflect something authentic that touches them emotionally, and encapsulate something they are passionate about, something that will truly make the world a better place.

People won’t connect with something that is slightly ‘off.’ They have to understand at a very deep level why they get up in the morning and come in to work. They want to feel proud of what they do and be able to articulate how they are making the world a better place.

I think if you can’t answer that question it actually harms the company, by limiting how much effort and engagement the employees demonstrate in their daily tasks.

We started off a few months ago at a meeting in our office kitchen, and ended up creating an original mission and vision statement based on our answer to the question: Why do we do what we do?

The mission and vision – which is still up on the whiteboard in the kitchen – has been massaged and modified at least 10 times.

Working with an outside moderator was very useful. It helped working with someone who is not consumed by our business. We also involved our employees in the process; they are an amazing sounding board.

We’re proud of the mission and the vision. And it’s a good first step, and actually fits with our guiding principle number four: Think big, start small.

Communicating is essential

Recently, I was interviewing a new hire. At one point he said: “I have a question for you. What’s the purpose of the company? Where is the company going?”

The question was like a gift. I responded immediately by saying that “our mission is to help everyday people succeed with data.”

And then I watched his reaction.

I could see he connected with it - strongly and more positively than people had with earlier iterations of the vision.

The opportunity now is to communicate our vision and purpose – to make it crystal clear in everyone’s minds.

We’re displaying it on our walls in the kitchen and voicing it in all-hands meetings. As we refine and refresh it, we want to make sure it gets communicated to everyone – employees, potential hires, customers and investors.

Already, I am sensing that having clarity of purpose and direction – even the start of one – is making it easier to apply our guiding principles to decision-making.

There are also other benefits.

We’ve always said we’re driven, friendly, helpful, knowledgeable and respectful. Our mission and vision statements help us make sure we hire people who share our values, and they help employees understand how to be effective.

We plan to put our mission, vision, values and guiding principles into a booklet we can use to educate employees as part of the onboarding process, as well as post on career sites.

This can’t happen soon enough. Because I’ve seen what happens when people struggle with ambiguity.

And the big lesson for me is that clarity and purpose just don’t happen spontaneously. You have to work at it.

Workplace culture can make or break an organization. It comes as no surprise that it has a tremendous impact on productivity, morale, and overall happiness of employees. Both WelchGroup and Klipfolio are recognized for their ability to offer their employees a family dynamic, with social initiatives, flexibility, and career growth opportunities at the forefront of their organizational cultures.

Although similar, there are many differences between the 100 year old professional services firm and the rapidly growing SaaS startup. Similar to WelchGroup, the Klipfolio offices offer tons of natural light, an open concept, and flexible work hours. But what sets Klipfolio apart is an office anointed with whiteboard walls, multiple espresso bars, bright colours, and the occasional visit from their Chief Cuddling Officer, Bentley the bulldog.

So, the two companies set out to discover what happens when you take a team and drop them into an exciting new atmosphere for a day. The answer is simple. Collaboration, cross pollination, team building, open discussion, and increased productivity.

The day started like any other, with WelchGroup filling up their coffee and getting down to business. The morning was spent collaborating with members of the Klipfolio team, namely Allan Wille, CEO, and David Mennie, CPO. This notion of idea sharing became a theme for the remainder of the day.

Kyle Turk, Director of Marketing and Communications at WelchGroup, spent time with the Klipfolio marketing team, sitting in on their weekly scrum and chatting with Klipfolio’s Director of Marketing, Jon Milne.

“With WelchGroup’s marketing efforts primarily outbound, and Klipfolio’s inbound, we were able to compare and contrast best practices and tools that help make each of our teams’ strategies successful. I left with a couple of solid takeaways that we will definitely be able to apply to our marketing strategy.”
- Kyle Turk, Director of Marketing and Communications, WelchGroup Consulting

To break up the day, Senior M&A Advisor, Cody Sorensen of WelchGroup, gave a presentation to the entire Klipfolio team about his experience training and competing with the Canadian Men’s Bobsleigh team at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.

The presentation touched on the importance of team, and how many of the ways in which an Olympic team is formed and prepares for the games can be applied in a corporate setting. Cody drove home the notion of being friends first, doing the little things right every day, and not focusing too much on successes, but celebrating your failures. His presentation sparked an open a dialogue amongst Klipfolio staff about how they can weave these practices into their individual team dynamics.

WelchGroup team members also had the opportunity to participate in a strategy meeting with Klipfolio’s executive team. It was beneficial for the Klipfolio team to receive input and a fresh perspective from the new faces, while WelchGroup learned the inner workings of the SaaS company and the exciting things that are being rolled out over the upcoming months.

The afternoon was spent working from different areas of the Klipfolio office. It didn’t take long for the WelchGroup team to realize how the layout of the office allows for open discussion with members of teams you wouldn’t normally interface with. It was noted that these organic conversations spark idea generation, cross pollination, and transparency across teams.

In addition to transparency across teams, the WelchGroup team spoke to how the mix of quiet and open areas in the office allow for both individual work, as well as socialization and team building. Although perhaps counterintuitive, the ability for a great deal of socializing with others actually has a positive impact on the productivity of a team as team members can share ideas and work together to overcome roadblocks.

Overall, the experience was a solid opportunity for both Klipfolio and WelchGroup to learn more from each other’s way of doing business, their team dynamics, and perspective on various business problems. Above and beyond a physical office space, this exercise proved there is great value in collaboration and cross pollination with other organizations, specifically those who operate in varying industries, offering a unique set of views, values, and new strategies.

This is the second of three pieces on how to create a solid, measurable plan for growing your company. Today, I write about the yearly planning cycle. The previous piece looked at the importance of setting a vision and a mission for the company. The final piece will set out a series of steps for turning the long-term vision for your company into a measurable plan for the coming year.

Even though the new year does not start until January 1, there’s something about the fall that speaks to new beginnings. Kids go back to school and people come back from vacation, ideally rested, energized, and ready to jump back into the fray.

Though our fiscal year, like the calendar year, does not begin until January 1, we also start thinking about new beginnings every time the falls rolls around.

That’s because fall marks the beginning of the yearly planning cycle for our annual work plan. We start preparing it in September so that it’s ready to implement in the new calendar year.

Let me share our cycle, and how we use it to drive our growth. Without proper planning, a company will have a hard time meeting its objectives.

I have found that there are three natural phases that occur throughout the year:

1. Plan and prepare (September through December)
2. Execute (January through May, and September through December)
3. Reflect and recharge (June through August)

In addition, we have a rolling, three-year vision for the company. This allows us to create long-term goals and plug them into the annual work plan as needed. We work on it throughout the year. I will discuss the rhythm the three-year plan further down.

1. Plan and prepare (September through December)

There are three parts to the plan-and-prepare part of the cycle.

• First, with the help of the management team, we debate, discuss, and align on the long-term vision and objectives of the company and then set measurable goals (we use objectives and key results, or OKRs) for the coming calendar year.
• Then, each department develops tasks that will help the company meet its objectives.
• Finally, we build the financial and resource model required for the tasks assigned.

The executive kicks things off by looking at the company’s long-term goals and vision, and doing a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) of the current situation.

We’ll often have an off-site, moderated strategy session. Having a moderator allows everyone to participate without having to worry about running the meeting. Plus it helps avoid going off on useless tangents. If an idea comes up that could pull us down a rathole, the moderator is able to park it for discussion when we’re done with the essential stuff.

The executive always has in hand a three-year vision for where the company is going (more about that later). And in the initial phase of the planning cycle, the executive looks at the three or four things (the main objectives) the company needs to focus on in the coming calendar year to turn elements of that long-term vision into reality.

When we consider objectives, we always make sure they are measurable. For example, if our vision is to be “the world’s ecosystem for metrics and KPIs” (key performance indicators), then one measure might be getting a minimum of 500,000 unique visits to our website each month.

Whatever the objectives the management team sets, at this point the measurable key results are always high-level, and as few as possible.

Then we see how each department can contribute to achieving the high-level results.

To go back to the example of 500,000 unique visits to our website, Development might say it can help achieve that goal by creating a viral loop that sends customers back to the website. Marketing might propose a campaign and/or content that drives traffic. And so on for each department.

Once each department has weighed in with a proposal, we look at what financial resources are needed for them to act.

This is where reality kicks in: Is the plan too costly? What is the confidence of exceeding the plan? What needs re-evaluating?

In any event, all the components of next year’s calendar plan – what it entails, what resources it needs and how results will be measured – have to be in place before the end of the current calendar year. In fact, the complete plan has to be ready soon enough so that the board can advise and approve it before it takes effect.

A word about December...

In theory we don’t need to have next year’s work plan ready until December 31.

The reality is that for many companies, including Klipfolio, December is a strange time of year.

Personal life and business life collide, as people prepare for Christmas, go to parties and perhaps make holiday travel plans while rushing to complete current projects, hit revenue targets and clear the decks for the following year.

My rule for December is simple: To minimize panic, make sure everything important is done before the Yuletide season kicks in. That includes next year’s work plan.

2. Execute (January through May and September through December)

There are three distinct components to this part of the work plan cycle:

• Communicate the plan to employees.
• Coordinate things so that it rolls out smoothly.
• Tweak as needed.

We start each calendar year by communicating to employees our objectives and expected results for the year.

In addition to knowing what they are expected to do, everyone needs to understand why we are doing it. The more employees understand why they are given a specific task, the more they feel they are contributing to the success of the company. I’ve written previously about this.

We make sure Klipfolio’s mission and vision are always visible to employees. We frequently talk about the initiatives that support our objectives at all-hands meetings. And then, each department will communicate to its members what objectives it will execute on.

As the projects and initiatives gets going, it’s very important to have a coordinated roll-out.

The customer doesn’t care about our departments or our teams; what the customer wants is a delightful journey from A to B.

It’s very easy for different departments to march to a different beat, so up-front and continued coordination of overall execution is essential. Think of a story being written by multiple authors. Even if the story gets told, inconsistency in tone, tense and person may leave readers very confused. We want everyone and every team thinking of the entire customer journey.

One way to do that is to set short-term objectives.

While the company as a whole might measure its goals on an annual basis, departments need to measure them at much shorter intervals to make sure they are on track.

Development, for example, works in two-week sprints: planning, developing, testing, and a retrospective. It’s the right cadence for them and very common among agile development teams.

Finally, we tweak our projects as needed.

Because we’re always measuring results, we can correct our course fairly quickly. In addition, we take time to learn from each thing we execute. We ask why did it work (or not work)? Why did customers like it (or not like it)? And we always ask: Are we on the right track?

3. Reflect and recharge (June through August)

For many businesses, things slow down a touch during summer. Up to one-quarter of our staff can be on vacation at any one time in the summer months, and a similar number of our customers are usually on vacation as well.

If things are going to slow down, take advantage of that time to reflect and recharge.

We often plan a mid-year strategy session in the summer, and I encourage everyone to take the time to think about the future when things are less hectic.

The three-year plan

Gord Wyse, our new Chief Financial Officer, has made a point of reminding us that long-term planning has to be worked into the yearly cycle.

That means having a rolling three-year plan that lays out the direction the company wants to move in and acting on parts of it each year.

Work on the three-year plan has its own cycle.

The plan, once created, should be reviewed annually near the end of the first quarter. That means taking time to review the company’s vision and mission, and asking: Three years down the road, where do we want to be as a company? For example, do we want to serve a new market or develop a new product line?

In the second quarter it’s time to start fleshing out those goals by asking what big, multi-year initiatives do we have to put in place to achieve our long-term goals? How will those initiatives help us achieve the long-term objectives defined in Q1?

By the fall, as we start working on the annual plan for the coming year, we should be asking what initiatives we can undertake in the coming year to help us achieve our long-term objectives. And from then on, elements of the long-term plan get incorporated into goals for the coming year.

In Gord’s view, the most common mistake start-ups make is not having given enough thought to the long-term things they need to keep progressing on – things that don’t have an end result in the current year.

In other words, if you don’t take time to think freely and creatively about how you are going to leap-frog your competition, you will have a hard time doing so.

One final word to the wise: The best-laid plans will almost never execute smoothly. Circumstances will inevitably change. Recognize that whatever you’ve planned, you will always be reassessing.

So you’ve built a great database. Or you have access to one.

You know the database is full of valuable data, but accessing and manipulating that data to extract useful information is complex and time consuming.

At best (if you know the database well and are confident writing SQL queries) you can produce a backward-looking SQL report that can be shared with colleagues via email, or at your next meeting.

But that will only help the business identify past problems and opportunities.

The data that you need to overcome current challenges (and to take advantage of the opportunities that exist now) will probably be written to your database as you deliver your report.

In other words: It will be old by the time you start pulling together your next report!

That’s why you need a SQL database dashboard.

Preferably one that serves up data from your SQL server in real-time, giving you and your team ready access to the information you need to continually improve business performance—rather than course correcting periodically.

This article will help you create such a dashboard.

What is a SQL dashboard?

A SQL dashboard is an assembly of metrics, indicators and visualizations that pull in data from a SQL database, which is a relational database that can be managed with SQL (Structured Query Language).

How to create a SQL dashboard

Options

There are a variety of ways to create dashboards by pulling in data from a SQL database. In all scenarios you’ll need to:

• Assemble SQL queries to pull in the raw data;
• Manipulate and aggregate the data to build metrics and KPIs;
• Visualize and assemble the metrics and KPIs to create a dashboard.

There are a variety of ways to accomplish these three tasks, and a variety of services and platforms that can help you along the way.

If you’d rather not write SQL, you can use a free tool like Metabase, which allows you to point and click your way to pulling in slices of data via handy drop downs (the SQL query gets written behind the scenes).

The MySQL add-in for Excel helps you in a similar way by enabling you to select and dump rows and columns of data into Excel without writing SQL.

Alternatively, if you’re handy with SQL and your data is in a MySQL database, you can use a free tool like phpMyAdmin to write the query and then select the option to export the data you pulled as a csv or xml file.

BI tools like Tableau and Klipfolio come with their own tools and wiziwigs to pull and view data from a SQL database.

These same tools can help you aggregate and “mashup” SQL database data with other data sources to build metrics and KPIs, and to visualize and assemble the metrics and KPIs to create dashboards.

So you’ve got lots of options to consider.

Questions to ask before building a SQL dashboard

In weighing your options to build your SQL database dashboard, consider resources (time and financial), the type of dashboard you’re trying to create, and how you intend to use it.

Here are a few questions worth answering before getting started:

Will the dashboard be shared with people outside of your organization?

If so you may want to consider a cloud-based solution that enables you to publish public (indexed by search engines like Google) and/or private (not indexed) links. If you’d like to open these dashboards up to the public, look for applications that support embedding data visualizations or entire dashboards on web pages.

Do you want the dashboard displayed on large-screen TVs and office walls?

Again, cloud-based solutions tend to excel in this area. Services like AirTame, RiseVision, True Digital and Screen Cloud can help you get your dashboard up on office walls, if your dashboard has a URL. If you’re working in a desktop application, you won't have this capacity unless you publish it to the web—make sure you can.

How “real-time” do you need the dashboard to be?

Lots of dashboard providers claim to be “real-time,” but most aren’t in the true sense of the word (updating when your data updates).

And most of them that are tend to be quite costly. Do you need your dashboard to be updating minute-by-minute? Every time you sign-on? Every few hours? Different dashboard applications will have different limitations surrounding data refreshing.

What’s your budget for getting this up and running?

Dashboard applications that enable you to plug-into SQL databases can cost you hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars a year.

Those that are more costly tend to be more enterprise focused, and usually come with a bevy of more advanced functions and analytics associated with traditional Business Intelligence.

The less expensive options tend to focus more on plugging into the data and visualizing it, with less power/emphasis on data discovery and analysis.

Will this be used for SQL reporting?

In addition to monitoring the data on a dashboard, you may want to send static reports or screenshots of the dashboard in certain instances (I’m thinking client reporting, or to share KPIs and data visualizations with someone who’s not going to be looking at the dashboard regularly).

If you want the ability to do this, make sure you can download dashboards and data visualizations as images or PDFs, and that the look and feel of the data visualizations are maintained when you do.

How big is your data set and how much data do you need to visualize?

Some dashboard providers store the data you pull in, and some don’t. Some have limitations on how much data you can bring in at a time. Look into these limitations and consider them against your needs.

Will you be combining SQL database data with other data sources (data mashups)?

If so, consider the number of data source integrations the dashboard provider offers, the “openness” and flexibility of the app infrastructure (if a web service is RESTful and follows best practices you should be able to connect to it), and the opportunities and limitations surrounding mashing up data sets.

Does the dashboard provider offer some sort of editor or WYSIWYG to manipulate and mashup data sets? Does this process require coding or IT support or can you handle this yourself?

Is Klipfolio the right solution?

It’s a tool that will take you a bit of time to master, but if what’s described below is what you’re looking for, you’ll be glad you invested the time.

• Pull in moderate amounts of data from your database (2,000 entries or less);
• Build custom data visualizations and dashboards to spec;
• Have data visualizations and your dashboards update in near-real time (refreshing up to every 60 seconds);
• Share and view dashboards on mobile devices and large screen TVs;
• Not spend hundreds of dollars a month.

If Klipfolio feels like a tool that could be right for you, here's an introduction and a few tutorials to help get you building SQL dashboards:

Building SQL database dashboards with Klipfolio

Klipfolio is a cloud application for building real-time business dashboards, helping you connect to and visualize data from virtually any data source, including databases.

With Klipfolio, you can connect to a wide variety of database management systems including:

• MS SQL (Microsoft SQL Server)
• MySQL
• Oracle Thin
• Oracle OCI
• Sybase SQL Anywhere
• PostgreSQL
• Firebird
• DB2

You can also connect to cloud data warehouses like Amazon Redshift and Google BigQuery, and to APIs like Segment.

In this tutorial I’ll walk you through the steps to:

1. Connect a MySQL database to Klipfolio
2. Write a SQL query to create and save a SQL data source in Klipfolio
3. Build custom data visualizations with a SQL data source

I’ll also introduce you to Metabase, one of my favourite tools for building SQL queries, without having to write them manually.

Connecting database data to Klipfolio with SQL

The process of building custom data visualizations and dashboards in Klipfolio starts by connecting your various data sources to Klipfolio, and you do that in the data library.

Here’s a video tutorial on how to create a SQL database data source to Klipfolio (if you’d rather read about it, the step by steps are below the video):

Please note: In this video tutorial, we’re using a host that is no longer accessbile so if you use the sample credentials you won’t be able to connect. Feel free to connect to your own SQL database. We are working on building a live sample database that we can use in this tutorial. Please reach out to us if you get stuck anywhere.

From the dashboard page click Library, then select the Data Sources tab, and click Create a New Data Source.

To connect to data that lives in a database, select the SQL Database Query from the list of core connectors on the right hand side.

Fill in the fields provided, write your query, then click execute and save. You’ll have connected a new database data source to your Klipfolio library.

Here’s a sample SQL query I used to create a new database data source, referencing our sample MySQL database (you can play with this sample data as well, using the database information listed up top):

SELECT order_date, company, first_name, last_name, product_code, product_name, unit_price, quantity

FROM customers

INNER JOIN orders on customers.id=customer_id

INNER JOIN order_details on orders.id=order_details.id

INNER JOIN products on order_details.product_id=products.id

ORDER BY order_date

By the way if you’re new to SQL, there are tons of great sites and tutorials out there to learn how to write SQL. Here's a great one at W3.

And if you don’t care to learn SQL, that’s not a problem either. I’ve fallen in love with Metabase, an open source tool that helps you build SQL queries without having to write SQL. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to use Metabase to build a SQL query that you can use to access your data in Klipfolio:

Now that you’ve connected your database data source to Klipfolio, you can reference it to build data visualizations (we call them “Klips”), and every time your database data source updates, so will your Klip.

Building a data visualization in Klipfolio with a database data source

Once you’ve connected your database data source to Klipfolio, you can create data visualizations and dashboards based on that data source.

Here are two tutorials that will walk you through the process of building a multi-component Klip (if you’d rather read about it, the instructions are down below):

From the dashboard page click Add a Klip, then Build a Custom Klip.

Then select the visualization component you’d like to start building with, and on the next screen where you’re asked what data source you’d like to start building with, select Use an existing data source from the library.

Then find and select your database data source from the drop down list.

That’ll take you to the Klip Editor where you can reference your database data source to build out a custom data visualization.

A final word

We know firsthand the challenges that can arise at various parts of this process. I’ve watched people at all levels successfully build out SQL dashboards, and I’m convinced that you can as well.

Especially because our customer support team is here to help you at every step of the way.

I’m also happy to field any questions you may have. Just drop them in the comment section below. Best of luck!

Also See:

Building a dashboard with Excel data in Klipfolio

About Ageras

Founded in 2012 by Rico Andersen and Martin Hegelund, Ageras is an accounting matchmaker. Small business owners use the platform to search for qualified accountants and bookkeepers by receiving quotes and comparing them against one other. Qualified accountants and bookkeepers subscribe to the platform in order to get access to new customers.

With matchmaking comes monitoring everything in between, to create a superior experience and strong matches, while being money-making. Because Ageras is a young company, the company culture has traits from its’ time as a startup - dynamic, agile, and fast-growing.

Klipfolio creates new points of view, all around the office

Ageras strives to use their data as effectively as possible in order to keep track of small operational KPIs to big strategic goals. In practice, the company uses Klipfolio to display key figures all around the office, in order to monitor performance of different markets, keep track of clients to make sure they get the best possible user experience, and give employees an individual dashboard so they know where to deliver maximum value. Their Klipfolio dashboards are displayed on multiple screens as the day-to-day way of keeping track of how Ageras is performing against the targets set for the company, for the teams and for the individual employees.

Built from scratch: manual to automated

Since the company was established as a start-up in 2012, everything had to be built from scratch, even the dashboards. Without having an online service to run the dashboards, meter-long cables were drawn along the corners of the office to display the Excel sheets that were manually rescaled to remove borders and hide menus on various screens around the office. Maintaining the dashboards was an even more time-consuming task than the setup - the computer or Excel would freeze and the screens wouldn’t update. This meant that the computer running the dashboards had to be restarted every other day to cope with the memory usage. Yikes, right?

Then Klipfolio made magic.

Forecasting numbers and driving performance with ease

Ageras tracks various key metrics and has high requirements for the individual ways they are calculated and displayed. This, in turn, means that the demand for customization is a huge deal and usually exceeds the possibilities that different tools provide. Using Klipfolio has kept customization on the forefront, through the powerful input field and built-in functions. Having more time to focus on tasks where the CMO or data analyst’s skills play a vital role rather than having to look for specific functionalities or settling for the second best option when visualizing, is a major reason behind the adoption of Klipfolio at Ageras.

At Ageras, metrics are held up against targets and use Klipfolio to both forecast and compare the numbers for the current month including:

• Website activity (Google Analytics) - sources and traffic; sessions
• Website / server speed and bugs
• Clients who need attention (eg. did not yet receive a satisfactory quote)
• Best rated accountants - and worst rated, so they can gently “kick” them off the platform
• Coverage in geographical regions - where to focus
• Matches - every time an accountant is chosen by a client

A new market meant a new dashboard - but not anymore

As a fast growing company, Ageras expands to new geographical markets quickly (such as the UK in 2018). In the beginning, each new expansion required a new dashboard to be created. With Klipfolio, the drop-down filter has made this manual task obsolete. As the company grows, Klipfolio helps to push the importance and value of focusing on actionable information in the form of day-on-day data or week-on-week data.

A correlation between data and growth

“The increasing value drawn from the data definitely played a vital role in company growth. Moving towards using data as a tool in decision-making is a vital change for any company and it is therefore also important to draw a both realistic and detailed concept around how the data should be used.”

This is the third of three pieces on how to create a solid, measurable plan for growing your company. The first piece looked at the importance of setting a vision and a mission for the company. Then, I discussed the yearly planning cycle. This final piece sets a series of steps for turning the long-term vision for your company into a measurable plan for the coming year.

In recent posts, I’ve written about how to create a vision and mission for your company, and how the vision and mission get worked into the yearly planning cycle.

Today, in the third and final piece about the road from vision to reality, I want to present a step-by-step formula that will help turn the ideals contained in the vision and mission into real, measurable results.

What I’m presenting here is based on what we do at Klipfolio. The exact formula we use may not be right for everyone. But I strongly believe that each company has to create a planning process that measures results.

Step 1: Define your mission and your values before you do anything else

Your vision and mission need to be defined before you dive into any meaningful strategy session; otherwise, participants will be spinning their wheels. Participants need to know where the company wants to end up, and why, before figuring out on how to get there.

Defining corporate values is just as important as the mission and vision. You not only need to know what mountain you want to climb, but also why and how.

For a detailed look at creating a vision and a mission, see this piece I wrote a few weeks ago.

Who to include in the strategy session? We brought together the entire management team and a few other important players in the company. It was a relatively large group (just under a dozen people), and within reason a bigger group can be a good thing. People who have a hand in defining goals will be motivated to turn them into reality.

Step 2: Create objectives and key results through a visioning exercise for the future

Having a clear set of objectives and key results to shoot for will help bring the future into focus.

We started with a visioning exercise to set our objectives. We asked the question ‘What do we want to be in three years?’ and after some debate we settled on four meaningful objectives for Klipfolio within a three-year timeframe:

• Be an amazing place in which to work
• Be the world’s leading ecosystem for metrics and KPIs
• Change the way everyday people make decisions
• Generate high-growth economic value

We then worked through the key results for each of those objectives.

A key result is something we can measure. We can set measurable results over three years, but also for the year ahead.

For example, for ‘Be the world’s leading ecosystem for metrics,’ one of the key results for 2019, the measure might be to have 300,000 unique visitors to our website each month.

By the way, we brought in an outside consultant to help us with the strategy session, and if we found that one idea or concept was bogging us down, we ‘parked’ it for discussion later if there was time.

Step 3: Create concrete steps for achieving the key results over three years

This is where things start to get real. After imagining the future from 30,000 feet, we started looking at what things we could actually do to achieve the results we were aiming for. For example, what do we need to do to increase the number of unique monthly visitors to our website by the end of next year?

Having a one or even three-year timeline for results can actually take a burden off your shoulders. Instead of feeling you have to do everything right away, or feeling that a task is so big that it’s impossible to know where to start, it’s now possible to imagine it in steps. And you realize it won’t all have to be done at once.

Step 4: Tease your next year’s initiatives out of your long-term goals

To decide what we should tackle in the next year, we went through what I call an ‘intense sticky-note exercise.’ The process ended up taking up a good part of our day.

We did our brainstorming around answering the following question: By the end of 2019, what major initiatives will we have had to tackle to make progress on reaching our goals?

Each idea was written on a sticky note, and when we had a bunch we started grouping them into clusters, with the idea that we should be able to describe each cluster with a single “slogan-like” statement - one that would fit on a tee-shirt.

Step 5: Rank and prioritize

There are always lots of things you want to do, but the crux of any planning exercise is deciding what you actually will do (and how you will do it).

So the next step of our strategy session was to prioritize the clusters.

We had created about 15 different clusters of initiatives we felt we wanted to undertake to achieve the results we are aiming for.

We certainly could not do all 15 things. If we could only tackle five of the 15, which would they be?

This was probably the most difficult part of the exercise, and a real eye-opener because we had to evaluate each of the 15 clusters to see whether they moved us along towards our long-term goals.

We debated long and hard, and came up with five major initiatives we needed to undertake to move forward in 2019. Some of those five things aligned with our three-year vision – and surprisingly, some did not. In other words, we had identified new things we needed to do. We would never have uncovered them if we had not done this exercise.

Step 6: Review and refine the goals you have set

We ran our strategy session on a Friday. This allowed participants to spend the weekend reflecting on the discussion. And when we all met in the office on the following Monday, we were able to bring some perspective to the next step of our discussion.

On Monday we still had the same four objectives. But the things we planned to do to achieve them had changed because of the Friday exercise.

For example, on Friday afternoon we identified the onboarding of new customers into our application as one of the top five priorities for 2019 - a “growth” mindset, obsessing about the efficiency of our funnel. This was something we decided we really needed to become good at, but which we had not captured in our three-year plan.

Step 7: Create yardsticks for measuring your progress

It is critically important to be able to measure your progress towards your targets. If you don’t, it will be difficult to know whether you are making any headway.

So the next step, well before you put any new plan into place, is to create simple ways of measuring your progress.

For each of our four objectives, we have now crafted only two key results that measure our progress very clearly, often with a yes or no answer to a question.

For example, one of our objectives is to be an amazing place to work. One way to measure that is by having a retention rate greater than 95%. Have we met the 95% objective, yes or no?

Goals have to be clear, and having simple measures is one way to get clarity. And if you can’t measure it, it’s not clear.

In closing

As I mentioned earlier in this blog, my previous post explores how I work through the yearly planning cycle. The allocation of budgets and staff is a part of that planning process.

The exercise I have laid out here is critically important to helping allocate money and resources judiciously.

If you’ve created a good plan, with prioritized, measurable goals for the coming year, you will be able to feel good about your financing and human resources decisions.

Sooner or later, just about every company has to move its office. For a growing start-up, moving into a bigger space can be a rite of passage, a clear sign to employees, the community and customers that the company’s future is bright.

But any move is fraught with peril. Dozens of things can go wrong, from service interruptions to employees quitting because they don’t like the new location. Therefore any move, even the smallest, has to be thought through and planned to minimize the inevitable disruption.

Klipfolio moved into a new space on January 29, 2018.

One year ago, co-founders Allan Wille and Peter Matthews wrote about how they prepared for the move.

Now that the company has settled into its new space, they are reflecting on lessons learned.

The day we moved into our new space in downtown Ottawa, in January 2018, we kept the doors closed until we were good and ready to let the employees in.

There’s an indoor space in our building, with a food court, and people gathered there while they waited. The atmosphere was festive, and the excitement in the air was palpable.

When, at around 10:30, we finally gave the word that the doors were open, a cheer went up. As they filed into the new space, people were beaming.

It was an emotionally charged moment for both of us.

As co-founders of Klipfolio, we have shepherded the company from a shaky start-up to a going and growing concern. And now we were watching it take a sure and very visible step forward by moving into a new and bigger location.

Thankfully, our move went smoothly overall.

But now that the dust has settled, there a few things about moving we’d like to share with anyone contemplating a move themselves.

1. Plan for (and budget for) delays

Very few construction projects are ever delivered on time. If your move involves building or renovating, you should expect and plan for delays.

We moved into a large space in an existing office building in downtown Ottawa. But of course the space had to be arranged to suit our needs, and there was a lot of construction involved.

At first we expected to move in October, 2017; then the date got bumped back to November. Then the week between Christmas and New Year’s. In the end, our actual move day happened over the last weekend of January, 2018.

Not only was the delay frustrating, it put us in a precarious position for a while.

We had told our former landlord we’d be gone by a certain date. But the date came and went, and we hadn’t budged.

We were lucky, because our landlord didn’t yet have a new tenant lined up, and was willing to extend our stay on a month-to-month basis.

But we were also worried about further delays, and we started to devise plans to allow employees to work from home, or to move our office to a temporary location.

We’d originally given ourselves a two-month buffer; it wasn’t quite enough. Our advice: Give yourself a bigger buffer than you think you’ll need, and make contingency plans just in case.

2. Put a lot of effort into planning and coordinating your move

A move is hugely disruptive, yet it has to happen seamlessly. Your customers (at least the ones who don’t come to your office) should not even notice anything is going on.

That means every detail of the move has to be meticulously planned and coordinated.

First, have a plan for the employees.

Our move was scheduled for a weekend. A few days before, we gave our employees boxes and asked them to pack up the contents of their desks. People were expected to come in on the Thursday, pack up by noon, and then take the rest of the day off. (Remember to take account of any employees on vacation or sick leave.)

The following day, the Friday, we asked everyone to work from home while movers began dismantling equipment and prepping for the actual move.

Our employees took the move in stride.

Spirits were high, and as moving day approached, people got their work done (the way they do before leaving on vacation), then packed up. There was lots of reminiscing and lots of chaos, but it all went smoothly. The boxes were labelled and left for the movers.

Then, it was over to the movers.

Had we been a slightly smaller firm, we might have been tempted to do the move ourselves.

We are so glad we didn’t! We hired a crew of movers, and they were worth every penny.

Not only did they physically move boxes and equipment to the new location, they also were also a huge help setting up - even connecting all of the equipment. They had dollies, for example, which made it possible for us to change our minds about the final location of quite a few large items.

Our furniture supplier, Ottawa Business Interiors, was also in the space, setting up new desks and helping us get organized.

In the end, the move went so smoothly it was almost enjoyable.

For that, we have to credit Stephanie Laframboise, our People Operations Lead. She was instrumental in organizing us and keeping the actual physical move on track.

3. Pay special attention to IT

We would have been dead in the water if IT hadn’t been on top of things throughout the move.

That meant setting up wifi in the new space in advance so that we could just move right in, while keeping things running in our old location until everything had been successfully transferred. At one point, we had two systems running at the same time.

Though we would have preferred more time to get things organized, and though some members of the team had to work some crazy hours to get the work done, thankfully it all went well – due in no small measure to Karl Raffelsieper, our IT Manager. He had to get pretty creative at times, but the moment we moved in to our new location, our IT infrastructure was working reliably. And it continued to work reliably in the weeks after the move, as things got tweaked.

4. Sweat the details as you prepare the space

You want employees’ first experience of the new space to be positive, so pay attention to every detail before letting them in.

Both of us - Peter Matthews and I - were in the new space Friday, Saturday and Sunday, working alongside the movers – placing things, cleaning things up, even staging the furniture. It took hours and hours of our time, but it was worth it. By the time the employees got their first peek at the new office, the place looked both finished and professional.

Paying attention to details helped make the whole move-in experience positive.

For example, our building is an LEED Energy Star building, and the HVAC system goes off overnight and on weekends.

But there was a lot of residual dust in the new space as a result of the construction. To minimize the impact of the dust, we had the building owners run the HVAC for three days before our move, so that the employees’ first days in the building weren’t marked by coughing and sneezing.

5. Make a big deal of the first day in the new space

We made a big deal of the first day at the new location, and we are very glad we did. It created a memorable experience shared by all employees and visibly showcased our corporate culture.

From a morale perspective, keeping people out of the office until we were ready to let them all in at once was a huge success. Positivity and excitement were off the charts!

We’d advise anyone planning a move to make move-in day a special occasion.

6. Don’t sweat the clean-up and adjustment phase

Your new space may be lovely, but it won’t be perfect. Expect that it will take time to settle in. And you will need to make adjustments.

Our big issue had to do with acoustics.

We have high ceilings and concrete floors, and as a result there was a lot of echo all over at first. The acoustics were so bad that in some rooms, it was incredibly difficult to have a conversation.

We had to act quickly to make adjustments.

First, we ordered lots of carpets, thick carpets with pile to absorb sound.

Then we hired a company to supply us with plants – lots of plants, including two big trees, to act as acoustic barriers. (Employees love the plants, by the way.)

And in really problematic spaces, we ended up installing acoustic foam on the walls.

For the most part, the sound issue has been resolved. However, we do employee surveys and those surveys indicate that acoustic issues remain in at least two areas. We will continue to adjust based on employee feedback.

We’ve also had issues with lighting, and with the HVAC system.

One year later, not all of our issues are resolved. In fact, we would advise people moving into new office space to expect that some of the problems will just never get fixed by whoever installed the systems or created the issues in the first place. Six months later, those people will have moved on to other projects.

We ended up hiring a handyperson firm to handle small jobs – patching walls and shimmying doors and things that didn’t get addressed by the builders. Problems that aren’t fixed grate on staff; we’re glad we hired the outside firm.

7. Set aside money for iterative improvements once you’re in

Changes and adjustments cost money. If there’s one thing we wish we’d done, it’s set aside a budget for iterative improvements in the space after the move-in.

Some of the fixes are minor, and they were covered by the firm we hired to do small jobs.

But some of the adjustments – for example, the fixes to address acoustic or lighting issues – can be quite costly.

It pays to watch your bottom line as you make your adjustments.

It’s all too easy to just say yes to whatever is proposed to fix a particular problem; but it’s better to make cost-effective decisions and look for efficiencies. Don’t be afraid to push back or get a second quote when you are told something will cost a certain amount of money.

8. Recognize that your new space has value

We’re very pleased with our new space. All the work we did – preparing for the move and tweaking after the move – has made for a pleasant space to work in.

In retrospect, we could have done a better job of articulating the value of the new space to the company – because it does have value.

We’re leveraging that value by sharing the space to both boost the company’s image.

The office has been featured in magazines, for example, and we’ve opened it up to outside events. In any given month, we can have up to 200 guests in the space for meetings or events. It shows them who we are – and in a very positive light.

And our new, improved office is now a recruiting tool, a part of our brand.

Our move has done way more than provide us with more space. It’s helping define who we are. And one year later, we couldn’t be more pleased.

Once again, let me give a big shoutout to our architects, Linebox;, the project management team at Cresa;, and the building’s management at Quadreal., I’d also like to thank our construction company, Bassi, the engineering firm, Goodkey Weedmark, and our networking specialists at FCI and Fibrenoire.

At Klipfolio, we believe that continuous learning is like blood in the veins of an engineering organization.

If the learning stops, innovation stops. And if innovation stops, so does progress.

Products lose their competitive edge and, more importantly, so do employees. The best people are eager to learn and grow; if they can’t, they disengage and look for an employer more attuned to their needs.

We have worked, by experimenting with different solutions, to build a culture of continuous learning at Klipfolio.

In this post, we will talk about the essential elements of a learning culture, as well as the initiatives leaders can take to facilitate and nurture such a culture.

What is a learning culture, and why is it important?

A work environment with a learning culture is one in which employees are encouraged to learn and grow.

That may seem self-evident, but in fact, it’s not. Some companies, for example, may value compliance with the rules over risk-taking, or blame people for failures rather than see the occasional failure as a learning opportunity.

Much has been written about creating a culture of continuous learning, but four pieces stand out. They are references for managers looking to learn more on the topic.

1. In his book, Drive, author Daniel Pink argues that money is not the best way to motivate employees. People, he says, perform better and are more satisfied with their jobs when they feel they can direct their own lives, learn and create new things, and improve themselves and the world. He calls these three motivators autonomy, mastery, and purpose. ‘Mastery’, one of the three, is achieved through learning.
2. American sociologist Ron Westrum is an expert on organizational culture. Through his research, he concluded that there are three kinds of organizations – pathological (power-oriented), bureaucratic (rules-oriented), and generative (performance-oriented). (See here and here for a more detailed explanation of Westrum’s work.) A crucial element of a performance-oriented work culture, he says, is the ability to learn from failures; that means making occasional failures acceptable within the organization.
3. Google has done its own research and concluded that psychological safety – being able to take risks without feeling embarrassed by failures – is an essential element of a successful team.
4. The State of DevOps 2018report identifies the climate for learning as one of the contributing factors to software delivery performance and successful teams. (The report represents five years of work surveying over 30,000 technical professionals worldwide.)

How we built our own culture of learning

From Klipfolio’s perspective, having a learning culture is important for two main reasons.

First, it allows us to build great work teams. Our teams learn so they can build the skills they need to get their work done.

Second, having a learning culture is critically important for employee engagement and retention. Employees who feel they can develop and hone their skills are more likely to be engaged. And employees who are engaged are better employees.

For those reasons, over time we’ve built our own culture of learning.

How?

We did it through research and a bit of experimentation. As we built it, we also got our employees involved. We regularly survey them to ask them whether they feel they are learning and advancing their careers. Their feedback is critical – and part of the reason we think our learning culture has been a success.

The 9 elements of our learning and growth culture

There are nine elements to our learning and growth culture:

1. We encourage risk-taking and experimentation
2. We encourage blameless retrospectives and post-mortems
3. We have a growth framework based on objectives and key results (OKRs)
4. We have a training program for employees
5. We have a coaching program for employees
6. We offer what we call ‘lightning talks’ in the office
7. We organize lunch and learn sessions
8. We encourage the formation of groups of similar interests; we call them guilds
9. We hold hackathons

Risk-taking and experimentation

We believe very strongly that engineers who stay within their comfort zone are not going to learn and grow. We also believe that if people are afraid of failure, they will choose the safe path, not the risky one, and fall back into their comfort zone.

Progress and innovation demand risk-taking. Innovations happen and new products, tools, or processes are built when people push the norms.

It is also true that people who don’t push the norms stagnate. Employees who are bored are apt to leave you for other, more stimulating employers. As leaders, we are responsible for helping people take risks and jump from one growth curve to the next.

One example of risk-taking is how tasks are allocated. We often encourage tasks to be picked up by the next available developer, instead of the developer with the most expertise in an area. This encourages a developer to learn something new, reduces our “bus” factor, and may bring new perspectives to that area of the product.

For those two reasons, it is actually cost-effective to favour risk-taking over the safe path.

Blameless retrospectives and post-mortems

A necessary part of a risk-taking culture is making failure acceptable (within reason). It also means making blameless retrospectives a regular and frequent activity in the organization. We use retrospectives to look back on production incidents, large features, and each sprint to reflect on what could be improved going forward. The retrospectives are used to build a shared understanding of any problems and provide a forum to discuss improvements, not to assign blame.

Going back to Ron Westrum’s three organization types, the generative, performance-oriented type (which is what we aspire to be) encourages learning from failures; the pathological, power-oriented type finds scapegoats when things go wrong; the bureaucratic, rules-oriented type raps people on the knuckles.

A growth framework based on objectives and key results (OKRs)

Various forms of goal-setting frameworks can be used to help people achieve their dreams. We like the OKR system because it focuses on aspirational goals and measurable outcomes. Also, it links personal objectives to the organization’s goals, thereby creating a win-win situation for people and the business.

As part of our quarterly OKR-based goal-setting program, we review every employee’s objectives and the key results they are aiming for. Then we make sure these help employees get to where they are heading personally, while aligning their goals with where we want to go as an organization.

Employee training

Our training program provides the means for employees to learn what they need to learn. We have a training budget, too, and we give each employee dedicated time that they can allocate to learning.

The budget allows them to buy online courses and books, or go to conferences. The dedicated time for training keeps work-life balance in check so that people don’t have to spend all their personal time on their growth, and have time for their families and fun too.

We also provide in-house training sessions when we believe a group of people would benefit from learning about the same topic together.

Employee coaching

A coaching program is an essential element of a learning culture. Done right, it also results in cross-pollination and knowledge-sharing between teams – breaking down silos and reducing the implied hierarchy of seniority in the group.

In other words, a great coaching program focuses on helping people learn from each other; it’s not just about senior people teaching others.

When we organize a coaching program, we emphasize mutual learning opportunities for both the coach and the mentee. We encourage cross-team coaching. And we make it clear that a mentor or coach is someone who has something to share, not just someone with seniority and tenure. Team leaders should lead by example and make sure they have mentors both senior and junior to learn about the topics that they are not familiar with.

We organized the coaching program this year, and it has been a resounding success with about half the development team signing up as either a coach or mentee.

Lightning talks

In an engineering team, people are learning continuously and naturally as they work on new tasks, solve problems, and use new technologies. However, sometimes this knowledge remains within the group and does not get shared as much as it could.

By lowering the barriers to sharing experience, you can foster a culture of sharing and learning.

Lightning talks are an effective way of making this happen.

These are talks that are offered in the office. Presenters don’t need slides; if they want to, they can just show code or whatever else they are working on. Talks can be as short as 10 minutes and don’t have to be on big novel topics. Anything that people have been working on and learn from is fair game and worth sharing. A nice side effect of encouraging lightning talks is that team members get a chance to practice their communication skills, which will help them as they grow their career.

Lunch and learns

As the name implies, this is an initiative that encourages teams to get together, have lunch, and learn something new. The way we usually do them is by watching online tutorials or by doing mini code challenges. The frequency and length of these sessions depends on the team’s end goal, which can be anything from learning a new technology for an upcoming project to brushing up on old concepts.

Attendance at these sessions is voluntary and they are meant to be held in a relaxed setting to foster learning. The most successful lunch and learns are those that are small in numbers (three to eight people) and attended by people who already know each other; this ensures that everyone is comfortable enough to be vulnerable and ask as many questions as possible. After all, you want employees to be engaged and have fun.

Guilds (groups with similar interests)

Our guilds are interest groups focused on specific topics. At Klipfolio, these groups get together every two weeks or so to discuss their topic of interest in depth and move that topic forward in the team and for the company.

For instance, at Klipfolio we have UI, platform, agile, data science, and automation guilds, to name a few. These guilds have been instrumental in knowledge-sharing and creating in-depth discussions and talks, as well as bringing in new ideas to the company on those topics.

Hackathons

Many engineers learn by doing and are excited by the prospect of trying new things. Often, when there are deadlines and day-to-day tasks to complete, people focus on what they have to do. They don’t have the occasion to free their minds to explore.

Hackathons facilitate risk-taking by allowing employees to experiment with new methods, technologies, or work with other engineers who are not on their own team.

During the last hackathon, seven developers got together to try a new animation library. This resulted in a much better shared understanding of how to implement animations, and a decision to move forward with this particular library. Many of these animations have now made it into the product.

In conclusion

I don’t pretend that we have discovered the secret of continuous learning. The methods I have discussed here are methods we use successfully; there are certainly others. And in keeping with the spirit of continuous learning, we are always on the lookout for better ways of doing things.

But what stands out overall is this:

To foster a culture of learning, you need a multi-faceted strategy that combines traditional methods of learning like formal training with organic methods or learning on the job.

We’ve done so by facilitating guilds, coaching, hackathons and lightning talks.

And being able to take risks is an essential part of the mix.

Many engineers learn best by discovery. But for them to discover new things, they have to step out for their comfort zone and take risks. And they’ll only do that if failure is acceptable in the organization’s culture.

Major leaps forward take courage.

Eighteen months ago, during a series of all-hands meetings, Peter Matthews, my co-founder, Mark Priatel, our CTO, and I took the significant step of signalling the start of a new development initiative.

It would be the most important step in aligning with our vision to really help everyday people succeed with data.

Introducing ‘Metrics’

Today, I am very excited to announce the open Beta of this important initiative, called Metrics, to all of our customers and to the millions of people tasked with making good, data informed decisions.

The New Klipfolio

Let me rewind the clock a bit and share with you why this is so important to us.

As many of you can attest, deploying a business intelligence tool is no walk in the park. Almost every step of the way, from querying and loading the data, to cleansing and transforming it, then mashing, blending, and visualizing it can be a challenge.

Entire cottage industries have blossomed and charge a king’s ransom to connect the pipes, manage data prep, and deploy and maintain these BI tools - typically with lacklustre user adoption.

It’s where terms like master data management (MDM), extract-transform-load (ETL), data blending, and many other important sounding acronyms have instilled fear and opened wallets for years. Philosophies have come crashing head to head, pitting business intelligence centers of excellence (BICCs) against Citizen Data Scientists - which, by the way, is all being nixed by digitally transparent, data savvy millennials.

Let’s stop there though, because this is where things get interesting for Peter, Mark, and I.

Power and flexibility

Klipfolio as thousands of people know it, is powerful and flexible. Those are words we’ve heard many times over. They are referencing our vast ability to connect to nearly any data source, and our formula language that allows you to wrestle your data to the ground like no other BI tool out there! Mic-drop … but hold on.

Are the apps that have changed the world powerful and flexible?

A steep learning curve

There was something else we were hearing in addition to being powerful and flexible… a steep learning curve. The primary goal, of-course, is for everyday people to make better decisions. However, the realities of wrestling with data was getting in the way.

This continues to be the key challenge for everyone. But rather than build out complex data modelling workflows and toolsets like every other BI vendor, we decided to turn the challenge on its head.

Our north-star was born

We know that successful decision makers start with meaningful business metrics. We needed to make this starting point magical and keep coming back to it.

Our north-star was born, and has now been crystallized as our rallying cry -- to help everyday people succeed with data.

And it’s big. It’s not about dashboards and reporting. It’s not about business intelligence. It’s about you! And it’s about really thinking about how to make you succeed.

So, what does this mean? And where are we?

As opposed to a data warehouse being the central cog, as in most systems today, our CTO promoted the atomic element itself; the metric. This lets us take a more specific and valued approach - putting the metric in the centre of the value equation.

❤️Your Metrics

With the metric at the core, we are free to think about new user stories... Such as building blocks: where the more metrics you have, the more insights and value we can deliver. Or as a service: where any number of things can be asked of a metric.

Klipfolio 2.0 is now in open Beta.

Staying on top of your results and knowing how your business is performing by looking at your data trends and insights is key. With Klipfolio 2.0, you'll have the ability to compare this month to last month or the same period as last year with a single click. The choice is yours.

See how you can use Metrics in your Klipfolio dashboards here.

We’re relentlessly committed to helping everyone make more informed decisions by unleashing the power of their data.

I’m grateful to all of our customers… and as always, I look forward to learning from your feedback.

Almost every day of the calendar year can be attributed to a designated celebratory/holiday day - if there’s no “official” holiday to celebrate that day, you can be guaranteed there’s an unofficial one that you can jump in on. (If you’re wondering, it’s Grilled Cheese Day on April 12 and Sugar Cookie Day on July 9).

As a tech company, it’s fun to sometimes acknowledge some of the non-religious holidays, such as Data Privacy Day. But these days are all pretty inconsequential. There’s no real need to celebrate a particular type of food or highlight the importance of emojis (yes, there is an emoji day).

Of course, there are official and widely recognized “holidays” that hold significance. Today is one of those days, one of which Klipfolio is proud to celebrate.

What is International Women’s Day?

International Women’s Day(IWD) is dedicated to celebrating all women around the world - bringing together people in the spirit of unity, advocacy, celebration, reflection, and action. This awareness initiative is a call-to-action to move towards gender parity and to recognize women for their social, economic, cultural, and political contributions to society.¹

The history of International Women’s Day

During the second International Conference of Working Women, the leader of the ‘Women’s Office’ for Germany’s Social Democratic Party, Clara Zetkin, proposed the idea of International Women’s Day. The premise of the day would be a multi-nationally recognized day during which women could, “press for their demands.”¹ The notion of International Women’s Day was widely accepted by many countries, though it was officially celebrated by the United Nations on March 8 of 1975² - solidifying it in calendars.

Why is IWD so important?

Canada as a whole is pushing through barriers and helping women break through the glass ceiling that has been present in their careers for centuries. That being said, there is still a ways to go to get to gender parity. The tech industry, specifically, is lagging behind the times - there is a distinct lack of women in our sector.

In a study conducted by PwC, MaRS Discovery District, and MoveTheDial, it was found that the average Canadian-based tech company executive teams consisted of 13% women while over 50% of companies have 0 women on their executive teams.³

*Heads up to those 50%: it’s been proven that companies with female representation at the top levels outperform companies with none.⁴

Let’s break down the facts:

• In a report on the top 100 publicly traded Canadian companies, conducted in 2018, of the 540 Named Executive Officers, 51 were women, 489 were men.⁵
• As of July, 2018, 680 Canadian companies reported the make-up of their board seats; 16.4% of seats were held by women.⁶
• The S&P/TSX 60 - a group consisting of leading companies featured on the Toronto Stock Exchange - has a goal to increase female representation on all their companies to just 30% by the year 2020.⁶

So, why does all this matter? On the surface, representation for 50% of the world’s population matters (as it does for all other marginalized groups). But in a business sense, any group outside the majority brings with it a vast bank of knowledge, experience, and insight to the table that previously may have been overlooked and thus can lead to better overall success in the marketplace. So yes, it’s ethically and morally sound to have legitimate representation throughout your company, but it’s also just plain smart.⁷

What is Klipfolio doing?

“There remains a perception among 52% of women that technology is a male industry.” - Gillian Tans, President & CEO at Booking.com ⁸

Don’t you think it’s time to change that? Klipfolio certainly does.

We have no delusions that we can completely fix the gender difference in one blog post, nor can we do it through a generation of hard work. But, we do have the ability to help.

Everyone hears about these big tech names: Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos (to name a few). For women, and particularly non-white women, this can be hard to identify with, which makes it that much harder to see oneself in that position in the future.

Luckily for us, we have tons of incredibly dedicated, intelligent, ambitious, and talented women on our team that make Klipfolio what it is today.

Meet Klipfolio’s women in tech!

I am honoured to once again be able to write this year’s piece on International Women’s Day. The women I get to work with every day inspire me with their tenacity and innovative ideas and it is such a joy for me to be able to highlight them. These mini-spotlights only touch on a small part of each of their stories. I could easily write a novel on every one of them - but this captures a glimpse of what makes everyone so integral to the success of Klipfolio.

Katya Zeisig, Digital Marketing Specialist

Adamant lover of traveling, skiing, crime-show watching, and napping.

Attended

Dalhousie University, Business Management

Accomplishment

Being an activist and vocal intersectional feminist ♀️Learning how to code!

Favourite Metric

Google Analytics Landing Page Views and Conversions

---

Jieyi Rong, Customer Success Guru

I love trying new things, run different experiments, at work and at home.

Attended

Carleton University, Electrical Engineering

Accomplishment

Learning Spanish.

Favourite Metric

Demo Conversion Rate

---

Meggan, Senior Manager of Support Services

Loves euchre, archery and cocktails at the cottage.

Accomplishment

Camping all over Northern Canada and US in a little yellow tent and taking a quick dip in the Arctic Ocean.

Favourite Metric

Zendesk Ticket Analytics

---

Caileigh Simpson, Product Manager

When I was a kid I was an extra on Degrassi a couple of times and I got to meet Drake.

Attended

Queen’s University, Physical & Health Education

Accomplishment

Conquering a major backcountry ski run in the BC mountains recently.

Favourite Metric

Daily Trial Starts

---

Trish Mermuys, Customer Loyalty Manager

Interested in all things customer success, retention, loyalty. Love playing sports and reading sci-fi in my down time.

Attended

Carleton University, Electrical Engineering

Accomplishment

Recently - teaching myself how to make sourdough bread.

Favourite Metric

# of Onboarding Calls

---

Le Liu, Web Developer (Co-Op)

A cat lover and always appreciate the beauty of art and coding.

Attended

Algonquin College, Mobile Application Development & Design

Accomplishment

Understanding how AMP works and integrate to Klipfolio.com

Favourite Metric

Google Analytics Website Performance

---

Addie Stewart, Software Developer

When I’m not coding, I can often be found canoeing, hiking a trail, or painting.

Attended

Queen's University, Computer Science (Hons)

Accomplishment

Working for a company with a way above average percentage of female software devs!

Favourite Metric

Net Promoter Score

---

Samantha Wilkie, Receptionist & Admin

If I’m not at work you will most likely find me at the gym working on becoming a strong woman (emotionally and physically!)

Attended

Carleton University, General Arts & Psychology

Accomplishment

Recently purchasing my first car!

Favourite Metric

Time Spent in Meetings

---

Kalyani Khandelwal, Customer Support Team Lead - India

Meditator and Volunteer!

Attended

Bachelor of Computer Engineering

Accomplishment

Becoming healthy by losing more than 10 Kgs of weight!

Favourite Metric

First Response Time

---

Holly Ebbs, Technical Documentation Manager

I love camping, hiking, biking, and running - anything outdoors! I also love creating - baking, gardening, sewing, knitting, and drawing.

Attended

Carleton University, English Literature

Algonquin College, Technical Writing

Accomplishment

My two strong, intelligent, loving daughters.

Favourite Metric

There are so many it’s impossible to choose!

---

Krista Matthews, General Counsel

My favourite place in the world is being on the dock at our cottage.

Attended

University of Ottawa, English Literature & Law

Accomplishment

My three amazing sons

Favourite Metric

Monthly Recurring Revenue

---

Natalia Castillo, Software Development Manager

I love cats, video games, recycling and napping.

Attended

Autonomous University of Nuevo Leon, Systems Engineering

University of Ottawa, Electronic Business Technologies

Accomplishment

Hosting a woman in tech panel at uOttawa and being able to type without looking at the keyboard.

Favourite Metric

At work: Anything in Mixpanel; At home: Average Spending per Month

---

Shima Beigzadeh, Professional Services Ninja

Love travelling, spend time with my friends, and see my tropical plants survive in CA’s weather and give flowers.

Attended

University Technology Malaysia, IT Management

University of Ottawa, Systems Science, Msc.

Azad University, Mathematics, Msc.

Accomplishment

Might be late to start, but motivated to continue learning skating before the end of winter. Going to practice every night no matter what kind of air condition :)

Favourite Metric

Ninja Hours and Hubspot

---

Seema Nikam, Technical Support Guru

Love singing and reading. I am a good listener and always a student. One word which describes me? A Lionheart!

Attended

Bachelor of Engineering and PG-DAC

Accomplishment

A proud daughter of my lovely parents :)

---

[June 2020 Edit: No longer with Klipfolio]

Jaslyn English, User Experience Researcher

Avid fan of travelling, data, politics, and thought experiments.

Attended

McMaster University, Neuro & Cognitive Science

Wilfred Laurier University, Social Psychology

Accomplishment

Having and continuing to grow an expansive community of friends and family around the globe.

Favourite Metric

Metric Creation Funnel

---

[June 2020 Edit: No longer with Klipfolio]

Kaushi Bandara, Product Manager

Lover of travel, food, photography, Scottish whisky, cycling and destroying bigotry. Mama to two beautiful cat babies.

Attended

University of Toronto & University of Victoria, Astronomy & Astrophysics

Accomplishment

Designing and building a Hobbit hole shaped shed in my backyard!

Favourite Metric

Customer Retention Rate

---

[Oct 2019 Edit: No longer with Klipfolio]

Pamela Buffone, Director of Product Marketing

Defender of the reality based community and evidence based decision making.

Attended

University of Ottawa, Finance & Marketing

Western University, Richard Ivey School of Business

Accomplishment

Designing a passive solar house in the country and being the designer and general contractor of an infill home.

Favourite Metric

Monthly Recurring Revenue

---

[Oct 2019 Edit: No longer with Klipfolio]

Danielle Hodgson, Senior Product Manager

I am an outdoor fitness fanatic. You can find me enjoying the great outdoors in all extreme weathers!

Attended

Concordia University, Economics (Hons)

Accomplishment

I am proud of the strong and positive community that I have built around me.

Favourite Metric

Net Promoter Score

---

[Oct 2019 Edit: No longer with Klipfolio]

Marisha Sesto, Digital Marketing Specialist

Always looking for ways to learn the next digital trend. In my spare time, you can find me reading, watching Friends, creating charcuterie boards, & hunting down new coffee shops or cocktail bars.

Attended

University of Ottawa, Commerce, Marketing

Accomplishment

Recently, winning 1st place in the Michel Cloutier Marketing Competition with a creative strategy & campaign for Wesley Clover Parks.

Favourite Metric

Trial to Win Rate

---

[Oct 2019 Edit: No longer with Klipfolio]

Prerna Luthra, Channel Success Guru

Part-time drummer, interested in anything music related. Love all different kinds of music.

Attended

Symbiosis International University, Business Administration in IT

Accomplishment

Supporting the LGBT community. Love is love. Also bought my first home in less than a few years of being in this beautiful country.

Favourite Metric

Number of Partners Over Time

---

[Oct 2019 Edit: No longer with Klipfolio]

Keely Davison, Director of Support Services

Love to backpack around anywhere in the world, garden and spend time with family and friends.

Attended

University of Manitoba, Computer Science

Accomplishment

Finally being able to keep up with my 94 year old father-in-law when we are skiing double black diamond runs.

Favourite Metric

Number of Tickets and Chats

---

[Oct 2019 Edit: No longer with Klipfolio]

Mallory Richard, Technical Writer

My favourite places include museums, libraries, art galleries, and spaces with an abundance of trees. I enjoy cooking, painting, writing, videos games, and puns.

Attended

Wilfrid Laurier University, English & Film Studies

University of New Brunswick, Education

Algonquin College - Technical Writing

Accomplishment

Getting a shout-out during the grade 12 graduation speeches when I taught at an international high school in Trinidad and Tobago.

Favourite Metric

To-Do Tasks

I’ve recently taken on a new role as Klipfolio’s Chief Innovation Officer. It’s an exciting change for me, and it’s allowing me to spend some time thinking about – and researching – the whole concept of innovation.

It’s a fascinating area, and I’ve learned two big lessons so far.

The first is that innovation is hugely important. Companies quite literally live and die by their ability to innovate.

The second is that most companies equate innovation with mad scientists wearing lab coats. They don’t understand the process, and as a result aren’t deliberate about being innovative.

What I want to do in this post is to share what I’ve learned during the process of moving into my new role, and in particular I want to spell out how a company can make innovation a part of its culture.

What is innovation?

There are plenty of definitions of innovation, both for tech companies and for businesses in general. I like the simple approach taken by Bill Aulet, an MIT Professor and Managing Director at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. In this YouTube video, he explains that an innovation, in the business sense, is an invention that generates value – or as he puts it, Innovation = Invention X Commercialization.

Another way of saying that is that innovation is “the process of translating an idea or invention into a good or service that creates value for which customers will pay.” (Source: The Business Dictionary)

The Conference Board of Canada expands on that, saying that for businesses, there are four kinds of innovation:

• Radical changes to products and/or services
• Radical changes to processes
• Incremental improvements to products and/or services
• Incremental improvements to processes

In their definition, the Conference Board adds that most companies adopt innovations created by others rather than create something wholly new. That is an important distinction, because it widens the scope of innovation. An innovation that is new to your industry can be just as effective as a brand-new idea.

All the definitions point to something that I think is important: Innovation is not about some mad scientist yelling “Eureka!” in a lab somewhere; innovation is a deliberate process that is the result of thought, planning, and effort throughout an entire company. It’s a collective and collaborative effort, not the purview of a single person or division.

There is an element of risk to innovation. It’s not easy creating or discovering something new – and it’s even more difficult to convince people to adopt it. (More about that later.)

Finally, it bears mentioning that innovation is not limited to science or business. It can happen in any field. But from a strict business sense, an innovation has to be something you can make money with.

Why innovation is important

You’d think that companies would spend time thinking about how they can innovate.

But the fact is, most don’t. Most get too caught up in running their business on a day-to-day basis to think about the future. Or they spend time and effort looking to improve existing products or processes instead of truly innovating.

There’s a danger in that approach. Not innovating threatens the survivability of any company.

Think of Kodak, or Xerox, or Blockbuster. They were big companies in their day, but they did not move with the times.

So, companies need to look to the future – they need to anticipate trends and see how they can take advantage of them (or work around them).

In fact, a company that wants to grow must innovate.

Klipfolio has been innovative in fits and spurts. But it usually has been in reaction to a disruption in the market. We innovated to leap-frog, or at minimum, catch up.

I’ve come to the conclusion that if we want to grow more predictably, we need to focus much more on innovation – and do it in a structured way. We need to build a culture of innovation at Klipfolio.

How do you build a culture of innovation in your company?

Innovation is not a one-shot deal. It’s not about coming up with one good idea and letting things ride. It’s more about making sure you are always coming up with good ideas, and implementing them. It’s about anticipating trends, and linking innovation to survivability.

And the only way to do that is to build a culture of innovation into your company. Innovation is everyone’s job.

That is not only necessary for survival, but also good for employee morale. Who wants to work for a company that’s not innovative?

Here’s how to create a culture of innovation:

1. Start with a mission statement

A mission statement is a long-term, strongly held belief about what the company needs to do to make the world a better place. It defines your purpose and helps explain why you do what you do. (I wrote about the need for a strong mission statement last year.)

The mission statement cannot be product-centric; products and markets evolve, and your mission statement must transcend that.

If your mission is broad – to ‘rid the world of cancer,’ for example – you could end up working all sorts of promising areas, shifting focus as circumstances change. You could create medicines, develop innovative surgical techniques, or maybe even develop lifestyle techniques that prevent cancer in the first place. But if your mission statement focuses on something too specific, for example ‘develop better drugs to treat cancer,’ you may deny yourself the ability to shift your focus.

There is a long list of companies that failed to adapt to change by remaining too closely focused on a product or service because their mission statement was not broad enough.

But if you can create a broad mission statement, you're off to the races.

2. Learn to observe

To be truly innovative, companies (and the individuals within them) have to pay attention to what is happening in the world around them.

That includes being able to observe mega-trends within society and the world as a whole, but also changes happening within their own industry and among their customers. For example, what hacks are your customers (or your employees) using to get around certain problems?

Be aware also of things happening in other industries and consider how they might be applied to yours.

Look also for the unexpected.

Percy Spencer was an American engineer working with radar in the 1940s. He noticed that microwaves from a radar set he was working on melted a chocolate bar he had in his pocket. He wondered whether microwaves could be used to cook food and soon began experimenting with popcorn and eggs. From that observation (and his subsequent experiments) the microwave oven was born.

Spencer was not the first person to notice that microwaves acted on food, but he was the first to follow through with experiments.

3. Turn observations into ideas

The next step in the process is turning observations into ideas for innovation – as Percy Spencer did.

This is where a company really has to be deliberate, for example by setting up ideation or blue-sky days where you ask ‘what if’ questions and consider realistic (or at least possible) future outcomes – something called speculative design.

Don’t be afraid to get creative when speculating about where innovative ideas might lead in the future. Stay within the bounds of reality – no unicorns or flying elephants – but push the envelope where you can.

There’s a really cool exercise Airbnb does where they ask people to imagine an experience in an Airbnb accommodation, and ask them to describe what a one-star experience would look like, then a two-star, and all the way to an 11-star experience.

An 11-star experience might be completely absurd – it might include getting met at the airport by a famous actor and being driven to your Airbnb accommodation in a motorcade of limousines – but the point of the exercise is to get people to generate ideas. Because sometimes, among all those crazy ideas, are things you can actually do. (Here’s some information about the Airbnb process – a blog and an audio clip.)

Everyone in the company must be involved in the generation of ideas; it can’t be dumped on just one person. I may be Chief Innovation Officer, but what I’d really like is for someone else in the company – an intern, perhaps – to approach me and say: “I’ve observed X and I think it’s something we can really learn from.”

4. Put worthwhile ideas into practice

Believe it or not, this is the hard part.

Why?

Because people are often reluctant to adopt new and different ideas or ways of doing things.

Think of Crossing the Chasm, the landmark book on marketing high-tech products in the start-up phase. It explains that new ideas are embraced by only a small percentage of people. (About 16% of the market is made up of innovators and early adopters.) It says there is a chasm that must be crossed before an innovation reaches the rest of the market. Those who aren’t innovators or early adopters need to be convinced.

Even among the employees of a tech company, there’s a chasm to be crossed before an idea is widely embraced – especially if it’s a disruptive idea.

What every company needs is a way to push good ideas forward.

One concept that caught my eye is the 'squirmy no.’

If you present an idea and everyone says no, then the idea is probably not a good one.

If everybody says yes, then the idea is probably not innovative enough.

What you want is what I’ve heard described as a ‘squirmy no,’ where people don’t necessarily agree, but it’s not an immediate no. If you get a squirmy no, you are probably on the right track.

Another problem with getting innovative ideas adopted is that there’s a measure of risk involved – and some people (think venture capitalists and investors) are going to be assessing how much risk they face if your ideas get implemented. The bigger the risk or disruption, the bigger the upside needs to be.

Innovative ideas, ultimately, are far too easy to kill.

They need to be nurtured and protected.

It takes courage. It starts with a strong mission and a desire to choose the future. It’s about understanding the risk and opportunity and pushing past most of the naysayers. Watch this space for updates as I work to make innovation a part of everything Klipfolio does.

Every company with something to sell depends on attracting customers and getting them to trade money for value. That’s true whether you are selling sports gear from a bricks and mortar location, or a software solution online.

We have always found it worthwhile to pay attention to the larger customer journey – the process that starts with them identifying a need, and that intersects, ideally, with them finding you and making a purchase.

Today, I want to talk about what we’ve been doing maximize the potential of our customer journey. The principles I lay out here can be applied to any company looking for customers, be they a software-based service provider or a retailer.

Why the customer journey is important

Without customers to buy their products or services, sellers go nowhere.

If you are contemplating starting a business, you need a pretty good idea of who, where, and how big your market is. If you already run a business, you probably have a slightly better sense of who your customers are.

But do you know enough about them – what motivates them, how they make the decision to buy, how much they are willing to spend? Do you know where do they hang out, who they look to for validation, and how big your market is? Only by understanding your customer funnel can you make informed decisions that send customers in the right direction.

It’s all too easy, when looking to the future, to rely on what worked in the past.

But that can be dangerous, because the world is constantly changing. New competitors, new products, and new ways of doing things can appear out of nowhere. You have to stay on top of things.

Besides, just saying you will continue to do what worked well in the past doesn’t give you much control over outcomes. If you want to ramp up your rate of growth, you need to do better than you did last year.

Understanding and improving your customers’ journey allows you to have a measure of control over the process, and lets you improve the odds of positive outcomes.

The bottom line in all of this: Having a clear plan for tweaking the customer funnel allows you to back up revenue projections with logic. And that takes some of the guesswork out of the process.

Before starting my third internship, I didn’t think I would go back to the same company. See, I had a golden rule for internships:

NEVER GO BACK TO THE SAME PLACE TWICE, TRY SOMETHING NEW!

Since I had a total of four internships, it only seemed natural to me to try out a new experience each time and to take advantage of this opportunity that students have with internships to try different places! But, recently, I broke my own rule and decided to go back to the company I last interned at: Klipfolio! Here’s why I decided to go back to Klipfolio for my last co-op and what factors were in play that helped me pick a company for an ideal internship…

A bit of a background about myself, I’m currently in my fourth year of Computer Science at the University of Ottawa. I’ve had the opportunity to work at Kinaxis, a large supply-chaining management company for my first internship, IBM for my second internship, and later an Ottawa-based software firm called Klipfolio, for my third internship. I’ve also had the amazing opportunities to be part of so many clubs and associations on campus like uOttawa IEEE Student Branch, SESA, uOttaHack, but also found myself doing various part-time jobs at the university since first year, which gave me very valuable technical experience. From starting out with my first IT job at the university’s co-op office, to later being a Student Mentor and then a Teaching Assistant for a first year course; all of these have also fairly impacted my software career and contributed enormously to my communication, leadership & technical skills.

Perfect environment to grow

One of the ways in which Klipfolio and its environment challenged me the most is by being surrounded by a number of talented and humble people, I was able to approach anyone in the office whenever I needed a question answered or simply needed their help. This meant anyone from the CTO, to the co-founder to even managers. The fact that Klipfolio has an open space, it meant being able to reach out to ANYONE, literally anyone in the office whether you are looking for technical help, have a new idea to launch, or want to learn something new and need a mentor for it.

Cross-functional collaborative teams

I didn’t realize how important this one was until seeing workplaces that lack cross-collaboration. In fact, if a company generally doesn’t demonstrate cross-collaboration across teams, it might just mean a lack of communication between teams often. To me, cross-functional teams means that different people across different teams often come together when needed to solve a problem. Something I’ve witnessed at Klipfolio is this open-mindedness towards cross-functional and cross-collaborative teams. I’ve seen people from my team temporarily join another team to maximize productivity and success of new ideas. I’ve also seen new teams being formed when a new idea or project needed to be explored or brought to life. 🤔 This mindset and openness contributes greatly to the culture of the company and its overall success and its capacity to grow so fast as a company. 👏

uOttawa Engineering Students tour Klipfolio’s new office!

A rapidly-growing company, maintaining culture

One of the things that I enjoyed the most about Klipfolio, is how open everyone was to change and how they adjusted to it. Last November, Klipfolio was recognized by Deloitte in their North American Technology Fast 500 and in their Deloitte Canada Tech Fast 50, so of course, it has grown so fast, but that doesn’t mean they are losing their awesome culture or becoming a large corporate company where it’s employees are unhappy. In fact, the people and teams at Klipfolio are so open to change, exploring new solutions, experimenting and learning, that is it literally the perfect environment for interns and even for full-time employees. People here don’t just go with the flow and follow existing flawed processes, they sometimes question processes, create new and better ones, or even reinvent certain ways we do things at Klipfolio, they always find a way to innovate. This made it especially easy for me, as an intern, to have a say in things and express myself. In fact, I felt way more comfortable at Klipfolio expressing my opinions and my ideas, and sharing with my team and others than I ever did at any other workplace. I think they’ve built this awesome culture over the past few years that they’ve managed to maintain despite growth and its made it an awesome place to work at.

The open-communication, the challenging work, the dynamic work environment and even little things; the friendliness of the people, the dog-friendly office has made Klipfolio an attractive company to work for, which is exactly what I was looking to find through my internships.

Celebrating some key milestones at Klipfolio with some 🍰&🍕!

Onboarding Experience

Think of any experience you’ve had, like attending a conference; once you arrive at a conference, if the registration process is anything else but seamless, then you’ll have something to complain about. Similar to your first few hours at a conference when registering and not having to wait in line for a long time, your onboarding process whether it be as an intern or as a full-time employee should be as seamless as possible.

This is no longer a want for employees, this is a need. Every company should have a seamless onboarding process, or else it’s just a bad onboarding experience. In fact, studies have shown that the onboarding experience is a strong key factor for employee retention. Klipfolio gave me one of the best onboarding experiences and allowed me to quickly hop to work, which made the entire experience enjoyable and effortless. Usually, the onboarding experience has a great representation of how the company will treat its employees, that’s where the next three points come in.

Trusting Their Employees

The first and best thing you can do to retain and keep your employees happy, is trust them. The executives and management teams at Klipfolio did an excellent job at this, by trusting their employees as much as they can, and intervening when needed. No one likes to be micromanaged, and it shows lack of trust in their employees. Managers at Klipfolio always put trust in their employees, which actually allows room for innovation and creation. Also, something interesting I read in an article about flexible working, is that “For all the benefits that flexible working brings and the new ways of working offered by technology, none of it can happen without trust." See, flexible working not only refers to when/where you work, how you chose your work hours, but also how open the management is to your working situation. I loved how at Klipfolio, working was so flexible and accommodating that it made it fun and exciting often to work & collaborate with people who were working remotely!

Knowledge Sharing

I noticed, that a lot of the leaders at Klipfolio, excelled commonly at one thing that is very critical: knowledge-sharing. I read an article once, by Kevin Alavi, which explained why it is important to be replaceable. “Be replaceable. Put systems into place and share your knowledge so that everyone learns from it. Being replaceable means you have the confidence that you will not lose your job because you are sharing your knowledge and creating a succession plan. Being replaceable is the most selfless act one can do for any organization. By being replaceable, it means you are putting the company above your own agenda and needs.” You ever worked at a company where one person was the expert for a given area, and the second that person leaves the company, everyone freaks out because no one else has knowledge in that area? Well, that’s no good! At Klipfolio, we constantly had lightning talks, Klip Talks* and even knowledge sharing sessions in other forms that continuously encouraged us to share knowledge among others. What I liked about this, is that it was not always work or technology related! Sometimes it was just something exciting that someone chose to share to benefit others, after reading a book, or attending a conference, for example. There’s one important factor that comes before the idea of knowledge sharing…

*A Klip Talk is a talk about any topic you’d like to share with everyone, doesn’t have to be tech or work related!

Others Always Willing To Help

Within my first few days at Klipfolio, someone had asked me what made it feel so different than other workplaces. I told them, the continuous effort of everyone always willing to help others; “no team member is an island”. An important concept that a colleague, Chris, explained to me, is that as you grow as a developer, you become knowledgable, and when you gain knowledge, you try your best to benefit others with it. Say, throughout your work day, you take the time to help two or three people with tasks they might be struggling with, or something they are stuck on. What if you hadn’t taken the time to so do, and you decided to focus on your own task to finish it? By investing in others knowledge and enabling them to solve their problem, you are not only knowledge sharing, but you are also investing in the company and the people you work with. Why help only one person (yourself), if you can also enable others? This takes lots of selflessness and humility, and I’m glad to see my colleagues at Klipfolio are always willing to help.

Hack Days

Hack Days have become a very popular practice in the software industry, and I can understand why: they help you to innovate a new idea and they allow you to explore a new tool or area of technology. In my last week at Klipfolio, I worked on a hack where I got to learn things about the backend, new things about front-end technologies, and even tools that I hadn’t used throughout the term. The coolest part about this, is that hack days challenged me to expose myself to a new area of the product, but also a different area of technology that I didn’t necessarily feel comfortable with. This is where mentorship also comes into play…

Mentorship

I talked a lot about knowledge-sharing & others always willing to help, this is essentially what mentorship is about. Mentorship is necessary for both interns and full-time employees. It allows both the mentee and the mentor to benefit from this relationship, learn from the other and develop new soft or technical skills. At Klipfolio, it was pretty cool to see that even full-time software developers took the time to ask people to mentor them in different areas! Do you want to learn more about product management? Ask someone to be your PM mentor! You want to learn more about a specific back-end technology? Ask someone to mentor you on the back-end side! People at Klipfolio will take out of their time to mentor you and eventually you will be able to mentor someone too!

Code Quality

Within my first week at Klipfolio, one thing that I really noticed is the overall quality and cleanliness of the code. Yes, the code of the product I was working on was barely a year old, but it was overall well documented and up to date. I felt the overall code culture and practices there emphasized a lot on code quality. It wasn’t something they simply said, it was something they also executed. Our VP of Software Development, Ali, used to compare code to a park, “always leave the park cleaner than you found it.” which also applies to coding. I developed this mentality that if I run into a piece of code that I don’t understand, or I feel it doesn’t follow good practices, I can take a bit of my time to 1. Learn about this area of the code 2. Leave it a little cleaner, or refactor it if I am working in that general area.

Other cool things I loved about Klipfolio!

• The doggos! 🐶
• Genuine and kind people! 💙
• The office space! 👀
• Awesome kitchen snacks! 🍪
• Unlimited growth & learning 💪

In a recent article, Allan Wille - Klipfolio’s Chief Innovation Officer - shared his thoughts on why companies should care about creating a culture of innovation. Companies that don’t spend time exploring future trends, may not survive in competitive markets.

Companies that want to survive and grow must create the conditions to innovate. This means being able to identify trends and to come up with new ideas to address those trends. Setting the conditions for an innovative environment is an ongoing commitment because new trends emerge all the time.

Innovation must be a shared responsibility. Everyone in the company should feel compelled to contribute. This guarantees that new ideas are continuously flowing into the process. There are some obvious advantages in making innovation a collaborative effort. Having more people involved means having a more diverse set of perspectives to explore future opportunities. Also, giving everybody a chance to provide ideas boosts team morale and creates shared ownership (fundamental for when it’s time to implement those ideas).

Creating a culture of innovation may seem daunting - it requires a deliberate effort to make it happen. However, a few simple activities can be very effective in making a company take the first steps towards building an innovative environment.

In this article, I want to share a few initiatives we've taken at Klipfolio to formalize the collaborative culture of innovation.

It starts with a purpose

Before jumping into describing the initiatives, it is necessary to talk about purpose. If you are unsure about your company’s mission, stop reading this article and go check why your company needs to have a purpose.

The purpose is the reason for the existence of your company. It’s the foundation on which your team and you stand to make decisions that will impact your customers. Without a purpose and a clear mission, it will be extremely hard to succeed in creating a culture of innovation.

One for all and all for one

You might be asking yourself: If innovation is a collaborative process, why does Klipfolio have a Chief Innovation Officer? Isn’t it contradictory to share the responsibility for innovation and, at the same time, to have a person in charge of it?

At Klipfolio, we believe that it’s not only possible, but also highly beneficial, to do both. Here’s why:

To begin with, the role of the Chief Innovation Officer is not about being in charge (like a boss) as much as it is about fostering a cross-functional, all-hands philosophy about innovation. It is essentially about facilitating and creating the conditions in which innovation can emerge. This means educating the company on what innovation means, explaining how it is done and how to evaluate it, and advocating for innovative ideas to be adopted. Depending on what the context is, for example, if the company is not willing to take risks or has never intentionally thought about being innovative, building the bridges to make innovation happen could easily be a full-time job.

It is possible that the controversy about having someone leading the innovation initiative comes from mixing a job role with a mindset. Saying that innovation is a shared responsibility means that everybody in the company needs to have a mindset of innovation. Drawing a parallel, it is commonly expected that employees will adopt a cost-effective mindset, saving the company’s money by avoiding unnecessary expenses. Not all employees are in the finance team of course, but the fiscally responsible mentality and responsibilities are distributed to all the teams. Similarly with branding. Not everybody works for the marketing team but the company certainly expects all team members to represent and advocate for the brand. So, why would innovation be different?

You may or may not choose to have a Chief Innovation Officer. The job title, in this case, is not especially relevant. But having someone championing the initiative is. The role will most likely help in creating the right conditions and that means, among other things, making sure that the innovation mindset is universal.

Creating the spark

Hopefully creating excitement around innovation shouldn’t be too difficult. In general, people feel good about being part of forward-thinking teams. However, engaging team members and making them part of the process, especially in the early stages, can be complex.

This complexity stems from making sure everyone is heard because, in the best case, everyone is excited to participate. In the worst case, team members are passively waiting for others to guide the process. Whatever the case may be, conducting internal surveys early in the implementation process can be really helpful in engaging people on their own time.

Internal surveys are a simple and relatively easy way to create excitement and engagement around innovation. Surveys are a very inclusive method that helps tease out the team’s opinions on topics they are passionate about. Consider using internal surveys to ask your team about their perception of the current state of your product/service. Also, challenge the team to speculate about the future challenges and opportunities in the problem domain your company is operating in.

At Klipfolio, we designed an internal survey to be the initial step of our innovation initiative. The survey was open to all staff, and the goal was to understand our current baseline as well as to collect insights of an envisioned future. Here are the questions we asked:

1. How would you describe our current customers?
2. What are the two things they love most about Klipfolio?
3. What are the two things they want the most with respect to Klipfolio?
4. Who, in your opinion, will be our future target user?
5. Thinking of this persona, in the future, what two things will be different about their day?
6. How will Klipfolio help them succeed?
7. What do you think the next big trend in technology will be?

Most likely, the results of the internal surveys will reveal a broad set of perspectives from which you can extract a few themes about what might be coming in the future. These themes represent the insider view, the gut feeling, and the experience-based opinions of those in the battlefront working on and with your product/service on a daily basis. Compare the lessons from the surveys against trends suggested by market experts to see how they align or diverge.

Deepening the conversation

Another good way to spark a culture of innovation is through promoting lightning talks. A lightning talk is a very short presentation — usually 10 to 15 minutes long — given with the goals of sharing knowledge and engaging the audience to motivate action.

In the context of Klipfolio’s innovation initiative, lightning talks deepened the conversation about topics that emerged from the initial internal surveys such as technology and industry trends. These talks also created the opportunity to explore new topics such as global mega-trends, and topics that instigated creative thinking within the frameworks of Design Thinking and Speculative Design.

Lightning talks are great for planting the seed of collaborative culture and for expanding and sharing knowledge about what companies need to prepare for in the future. It is also a safe space for team members to contribute with richer and more fleshed out ideas (more than they would through a survey, for example). So, to increase the potential for innovation, it is extremely important to make sharing insights an established practice.

Lightning Talks are good for creating excitement around innovation.

Converging and aligning ideas

Both internal surveys and lightning talks are very effective ways of laying the ground for an innovation culture and opening the door for people to express their ideas. However, to foster a collaborative exploration of these ideas, it is necessary to converge them in the format of workshops and finalize the collective vision.

Here’s the thing: sparking the interest and deepening the thinking about new ideas is essential for a culture of innovation to thrive but if the team members cannot see themselves executing on those new ideas, all the innovation talk is in vain. Translating innovative insights into a concept that is tangible and executable will keep the team focused and more resilient to endure the long journey towards implementation. If the team is aligned and can clearly see the north star, it will be able to withstand the pressure of reactive, short-term demands in favour of the long-term goal.

Blue Sky workshops are highly effective for converging ideas, building alignment, and articulating concepts. The caveat is that workshops are less inclusive for a very practical reason: depending on the size of the team, having everybody participate can be nearly impossible.

In most cases, blue sky workshops will have a representation of the larger group. This means it is important to be extra careful with the preparation of the activity. When planning a blue sky workshop, it is crucial to consider:

1. What information from previous activities should be used to set the context for participants. Not all workshop attendees would have participated in previous activities. So, set some time in the beginning to share a summary of the insights collected so far.
2. Make sure all key stakeholders are included. Equally important, have a list of people that don’t need to (or shouldn’t) be included. Keeping in mind the goal of the workshop will help you to define those two lists. For example, when we decided to run a blue sky workshop about the vision for the product, the list of participants included designers, product managers, developers, marketing, and customer support. It was a product-focused workshop. In comparison, a workshop about the holistic customer experience would likely include other teams such as sales, business ops, etc.
3. Whenever possible, invite the executive leadership. This will facilitate buy-in as the company leaders will share the ownership of the outcomes - It won’t feel as they are being imposed with an idea they are merely supposed to support.
4. Because many team members may not be involved in the workshop, it is highly recommended to plan for a follow-up activity where the outcomes are shared with the entire team, which will create the opportunity to capture any ideas or opinions that might not have been represented in the workshop.

Blue Sky workshop. Converging ideas helps the entire team understand the vision.

Just the beginning

It is the commitment to fulfill the company’s mission, and the intention to stay ahead of market trends, that will sustain a long-lasting culture of innovation. It is by sharing the responsibility to innovate, and through a collaborative culture that teams will endure the ups and downs of building on innovative ideas.

Identifying and organizing activities that create conditions for innovative thinking to emerge in your company is just the beginning. Hopefully, the initiatives shared here will help you and your company to get started.

If you are looking into investing more into the culture of innovation at your company or if you already have experience with similar initiatives, we’d love to hear it! Share your opinions, questions, things that worked, and things that didn’t, with us on Twitter. For us at Klipfolio, the journey has just started, and we are excited to share what we learn along the way. Stay tuned and check back in on our Klipfolio Labs blog for more!

You’ve got data, now you need metrics

Here at Klipfolio, our vision is to help everyday people succeed with data. With our newest Klipfolio experience, we are doing just that, but taking it to the next level.

PowerMetrics is here

What are PowerMetrics?

Metrics are a new kind of building block within Klipfolio that offers the fastest and simplest way to go from data to insights to help you work faster, visualize your data instantly, and create dashboard reports in a simple, intuitive way. When you create metrics, you build them once and get to use them over and over again to tell your data story.

Getting friendly with key terms

Metric: A Metric stores your data and gives you more than just the numerical values you want to monitor - it comes with built-in filters, stores your data history, and provides unlimited ways to visualize your data. PowerMetrics supercharge your metrics so you can see trends at a glance, slice and dice your data, and make confident business decisions by understanding your performance.

Metric HQ: The easiest way to connect data to a Metric in Klipfolio. All the heavy lifting is done for you. Available both in the application and via the web, Metric HQ allows you to choose from a list of services or specific pre-built Metrics to track. In a couple of clicks, you have visibility into your data.

Dashboard: An interactive workspace within Klipfolio where you can pull together different views of your Metrics in a snap.

People ❤ PowerMetrics

“PowerMetrics are much easier than building Klips and it’s a great way to track KPIs. I really like that you have the ability to filter and segment the data with a couple clicks.”

- Vinicius Simioni, Agente Imóvel

“I like the simplicity and elegance of PowerMetrics. This is a great feature for non-technical people who wouldn’t have a dashboard otherwise.”

- Brice Sloan, Sloan SG

Getting started with PowerMetrics

Here are some quick steps to follow as you start your data journey:

1. Decide which metrics you should track.

Choosing which metrics to track is not always a "one-size-fits-all" decision. Consider your team and company-wide goals and projects. Need some help deciding? Here’s a long list of KPIs and metrics to get you thinking.

2. Add a Metric in Klipfolio.

Choose from our list of pre-built Metrics or build your own custom one. Metrics are built based on a modelled data source. If you have an existing data source you want to use, you must model it before building a Metric.

3. Explore your Metric - customize and experiment with how it looks.

This is the fun part. You get to experiment and play with your Metric. Apply different time ranges, choose a different visualization type, mix and match by segmenting and filtering - and see the impact of each of your selections as you explore.

4. Share your discoveries.

Keep everyone aware of trends in your data by sharing a Metric (or a group of Metrics on a dashboard), or, give an in-the-moment, contextual view of your discoveries by sharing a link to a Metric or dashboard.

5. Monitor your Metric every day.

Display and interact with your Metrics on a dashboard. Checking in on your Metrics every day ensures you and your team are always aware and on the same page.

Hey Data Nerds: Combine your Metrics

Use two or more Metrics in a formula, such as a ratio or a percentage. Defining a calculated Metric will result in accurate representation of the result in different time ranges.

For example:

Cost Per Click = Ad Spend / Clicks

Bounce Rate = Bounces / Sessions

Email Open Rate = Email Opens / Emails Sent

A data ecosystem

Klipfolio works as an ecosystem. It’s an exciting workspace that brings data together so you can work smarter and drive results. With Klipfolio, you have the freedom to combine your data, any way you like, all in one place.

Our team is thrilled to share this new experience with you as we continue to help people succeed with data. From data lovers to soon-to-be data wizards, Klipfolio continues to innovate in order to help our customers’ feel confident in their work and business, and make actionable decisions, backed by data.

We hope you enjoy PowerMetrics and we look forward to seeing your data story unfold! Start building here.

And as always, we’re here to help you every step of the way. If you have any questions or feedback, we want to hear it. Shoot us an email at support@klipfolio.com or check out our Help Center.

Logicalis is an international multi-skilled solution provider that uses digital enablement services to help customers harness digital technology and innovative services to deliver powerful business outcomes.

Their customers span many industries and geographical regions. Logicalis’s key focus is to engage in the dynamics of their customers’ vertical markets; including financial services, TMT (telecommunications, media, and technology), education, healthcare, retail, government, manufacturing and professional services. They aim to apply the skills of their 6,500 employees in modernizing key digital pillars; data center and cloud services, security and network infrastructure, workspace communications and collaboration, data and information strategies, and IT operation modernization.

Meet Andreas...

Andreas Richter is the Head of Marketing and Communications for Germany & Europe at Logicalis. He started in April 2018 at Logicalis Germany and has more than 15 years of experience in the IT and marketing fields.

Andreas’s job covers all aspects of state-of-the-art marketing including digital (SEO, SEA, SEM, etc.), branding, marketing automation, social media, events, press, print, internal communications, and demand generation. Logicalis has close alignment between all departments, especially sales and practices (technological business units). There is a strong focus on content marketing which supports activities like demand generation, social media, increase of awareness, etc.

The old way of reporting at Logicalis was too basic

“When I started at Logicalis, there were no fixed marketing KPIs. Only basic information was captured, mostly in Excel. There was a lack of a comprehensive overview that provided transparency and predictability. Today, data is crucial in marketing, especially in digital marketing. Without data, no conclusions can be drawn about successes or failures and foresight planning is made more difficult or rendered entirely impossible.”

It was time for a reporting facelift

Andreas already knew Klipfolio from his experience working with the software in the past. He had actually introduced it to his last company. So, his idea was to use it at Logicalis as well.

“Klipfolio is easy to use, easy to integrate, and easy to understand. Furthermore, the pricing model is attractive and scalable according to the growth of the company.”

The entire marketing team at Logicalis has access to Klipfolio. This keeps everybody aligned and on the same page with regards to what is happening in the company.

“We created dedicated Klipfolio dashboards for each marketing area like website performance, social media, and events. Each team member is responsible for his or her area and we have a dedicated team member who is responsible for the entire Klipfolio management, ensuring that all the data sources are connected and displaying data in real-time.”

The metrics that matter most at Logicalis

For Social Media:

For Marketing Automation in Pardot:

For Google Analytics:

“We use Google Analytics and Salesforce internally and have integrated several Google Klips that measure campaigns, UTM, Adwords, and traffic channels as well as various Salesforce/Pardot Klips.”

While Andreas and his team look at a number of different metrics on a regular basis he does have a favorite dashboard…

“My favorite dashboard is the website performance dashboard because it provides all the relevant information regarding visitors, referrals, campaigns, traffic channels, etc on just one page.”

One area where Klipfolio shines the most is in the data aggregation category. Klipfolio allows you to connect to as many different data sources as you like, and display the data from those multiple sources together in one single view.

React to data quicker and share results with ease

The old way of reporting was far too slow for Andreas and his team. Since implementing Klipfolio, data analysis has been sped up and streamlined.

“Previously our analysis of many spread-out data sources across multiple platforms took a lot of time. Today, with Klipfolio, it is up to 80% faster. With just one click, each team member has access to the most important information - anywhere, anytime.”

The entire team has access to the key metrics that can be accessed via URL. Additionally, they are regularly exporting data/snapshots for management reports and delivering them to the email inbox of every executive who needs eyes on the numbers. Internal reporting is a big part of the Logicalis culture so flexible data sharing options are crucial.

“I really appreciate Klipfolio’s easy to use interface along with our ability to easily integrate multiple popular software like LinkedIn and Google Analytics and connect them to pre-built Klips. We have also integrated deeper data sets in Excel which we use to track metrics like event visitors or webinar attendees.”

Andreas is also a fan of the Klipfolio API. And with the help of a Klipfolio Data Hero, he has been able to build campaign overviews using data from Pardot that was connected to Klipfolio using the API.

Andreas has a pro-tip for people who are new to Klipfolio:

“If your data source is not available as a pre-built quick connector, speak to the Klipfolio support team and they can help you get connected. Alternatively, if your system allows you to export data to Excel or .csv files then you can still get your data into Klipfolio. Simply, store your exported data in a cloud service, e.g. dropbox, and connect that storage tool with Klipfolio.”

19E was founded in 2017 by a group of engineers and data scientists who are focused on extracting information from analog engineering documentation. They do this by leveraging their cloud-based production management & automation system called “Pandora” combined with cutting-edge, AI-based technologies.

Meet Tomasz…

Tomasz Berezowski has been the CEO of 19E since the very beginning of the company. As the CEO, Tomasz is responsible for everything, from marketing and sales to execution and delivery.

Finding and launching a new dashboard solution

Tomasz and his team at 19E have been dashboarding for a while, now. Klipfolio was adopted by the company’s operations team almost as soon as they launched the company.

Before that, they were using Google Sheets for all of their reporting. Spreadsheet reporting can be time-consuming, tedious and there is a risk of human error associated with it. This forced Tomasz to only report on the most critical functions. Meanwhile, none of the company’s metrics tracking was being done in real-time.

“I analyzed the market of web-based dashboard apps and found out that Klipfolio perfectly matched our reporting requirements at a very reasonable cost.”

Reporting properly on three key areas of business

Tomasz started off as the only Klip builder at 19E. Today, they have another two people who are able to build in Klipfolio and have helped scale their company’s reporting processes.

“There are three key areas we are monitoring using Klipfolio: IT infrastructure, production progress, and billing.”

The top metrics his teams track the most are:

Number of processed documents (today, from the beginning of the project, etc.)

Average number of processed documents per person per hour (daily, weekly, etc.)

Hourly cost of IT infrastructure (current, 7-day avg., this month avg., etc.)

“My favorite Klip is one that shows production performance over time. This key metric demonstrates how tweaking of production schemes or tooling improves (or deteriorates) our profitability.”

Three great ways to share data insights

19E believes that sharing is caring. They take advantage of three great ways to share data with those who need to see it most in the company:

1) Assign roles to users to Klipfolio giving them access dashboards on-demand

Roles represent a collection of users that are assigned permissions by an administrator to perform similar actions or functions. A user can belong to one or more roles. If a user is a member of more than one role their access permissions are merged.

Klipfolio includes the following roles: Admin, Editor, View-Only, and View-Only.

2) Scheduled email data snapshots

With Klipfolio, you can set-up regular email reports based on individual data visualizations or entire dashboards. Schedule emails to go out to specific people, at specific times, and with any frequency.

3) TV Wallboards

You can set your dashboards to ‘full-screen TV mode’ within Klipfolio, and display them on office wallboards and monitors via Airtame, Chromecast or Rise Vision. Multiple dashboards can be set up to display on rotation. Using wallboards to highlight your metrics is a great way to keep your team data-driven and ensure that you never lose sight of your performance.

Check out these other ways to share data in Klipfolio.

Tomasz’s favorite thing about Klipfolio:

“I love to write formulas for data slicing and dicing. Why? Well, because I’m a nerd, and all nerds love an endless ocean of possibilities for handwritten commands. :)”

Celebrating the big wins

19E is headquartered on the Polytechnic campus in the city of Wroclaw in south-western Poland. Tomasz says that there are endless possibilities for partying in Wroclaw, especially in the summer months when temporary bars and relaxation zones open their doors to the public along by the Odra river.

“We celebrate the closing of each project in one of the thousands of clubs in the city.”

Some advice for new Klipfolio builders

“Don’t try and build your ‘Death Star’ at once. Start off by taking a few minutes to build a simple visualization, and then work on perfecting it until it answers exactly what your business needs it to.”