The 7 Step Guide to Developing Powerful KPIs for your Growing Coworking Business

As every business owner knows, having a clear strategy for analyzing data, distilling insights, and implementing changes is vital to success. Losing sight of these metrics can spell failure, especially for a small business—and the same is true when you’re running a coworking operation.

It’s always exciting to see when a coworking brand gets this right and how setting strong key performance indicators (KPIs) can effectively elevate a coworking business.

The most successful coworking spaces all have a set of razor-sharp KPIs that are directly linked to their overall growth strategy. These businesses get their whole teams involved, ensuring that everyone is involved in analyzing the data, fine-tuning the insights and putting improvements into place.

It’s vital to ensure that your team is measuring the right strategies, analyzing the correct data, and focussing upon seamlessly transforming their results into actions. Here are seven steps to help you and your team to get the very most out your coworking KPIs.

1. Keep it simple

When it comes to developing useful KPIs for your business, avoid two things: being too generic and being too complex. Your KPIs should be simple, focused and achievable—anything else will be overwhelming for your team.

The best way to fine-tune your KPIs it to get your team invested in the idea. They are on the frontlines and they may see ways to simplify and calibrate your KPIs that you don’t initially see. With a clear vision of the strategies that need to be prioritized, you and your team will have a solid starting point for developing meaningful indicators that you can measure with confidence.

2. Test your ideas

You’ve brainstormed with your team and the ideas are flowing. It’s time to put them to the test. For example, if your team believes that increasing the frequency of contact with your ideal customer base will increase the number of coworking space tours booked—put that hypothesis to the test.

Test, test, and test again, and when the results are in, you’ll have a clear idea of what hypothesis are relevant and worth monitoring. Then you can prioritize them. This step is essential if you want to determine that each of your KPIs supports your overall growth strategy.

3. Start tracking today

Don’t be surprised if you find yourself in the position where you realize that you have not been monitoring the correct data in the past. Ask yourself what data you need to be collecting in order to get clear insights about the theories you’ve already tested—and start tracking it today.

Even if you introduce just one new data point each month—be it monitoring the success of your Google campaigns or tracking the number of tours you have booked each month—your KPIs will slowly start to become more powerful.

4. Take action

Now it’s time to put your carefully crafted and tested KPIs into action. Who is going to collect the data? Where is the data going to be stored? Who is going to review it? The answer is simple: assign an owner to each KPI. Your team will appreciate owning KPIs in their own specialized fields, as it will give them a real opportunity to make valuable changes and improve the area of your business that is their domain.

5. Get the broader team involved

To make the most of your KPIs, they need to be an open book. Even those team members who are not involved in the data collection and analyzing process need to know your vision—because even though they may not be directly involved with tracking, their day-to-day actions can have an enormous impact upon the success of your KPIs.

Welcome their questions and ask for feedback. This not only improves team motivation and collaboration, it increases efficiency and provides you with fresh ideas.

6. Dive into the numbers

Dedicate some real time to explore the insights in the data. Consider the original business growth hypothesis that you established and ask yourself if the data you’ve collected provides insight. If it doesn’t, evaluate whether you want to continue tracking the KPI.

If the data does reveal some genuine insights, what actions can you put into place to make the suggestions in the data a reality? And when you’ve considered the numbers, get together as a team and brainstorm what changes you can implement to take your coworking business to the next level.

7. Make the right changes for the right reasons

With the right KPIs, you can make the right changes for the right reasons. And because you’ve involved your entire team in this process, you can bet they’ll be on board to make these changes a reality. Create a list of relevant projects for each team member and check in with them every few months to ensure they’re hitting their KPI goals.

KPIs can be incredibly valuable for improving the performance of your coworking business. Taking a strategic step-by-step approach to developing and implementing your KPIs will help you and your team hit your growth objectives.

It’s said that knowledge is power, and with some crystal-clear data and razor-focused KPIs, you’ll have all the knowledge you need to grow your business the right way, at the right time.