Maybe your time was during Covid, when it felt impossible just to keep up. Or maybe your struggles are hitting today, when uncertainty has stripped the feeling of being in control.
Too often, however, it’s not just the highs or the lows of the business cycle that make you feel you’re on a roller coaster. It’s also a feeling of having lost the reins in the everyday rhythm of the business.
Maybe that means your formula for success has taken you to new heights, and now you’re navigating an all-new host of challenges, obstacles and opportunities. Or maybe you lost a key employee, and you don’t know where to start in replacing the knowledge that left with them. Losing the feeling of control may mean sales aren’t keeping up with expectations. Or maybe some new state regulation caught you off guard. Or perhaps you can’t figure out how to find one new technician to get your shop operating at peak performance.
Feeling a lack of control proves frustrating, and even paralyzing, when it comes to operating your business. It chips away at your confidence — the very strength that brought you to this point in your career. Aspirations can feel suddenly unattainable, yet it’s confidence that is required to drive your business forward.
Making sound business decisions, pursuing the right strategy and implementing the best tactics can feel so subjective, particularly for entrepreneurs who started the business, put in the hard work and made the business what it is today. But it’s the objective part of the business — the metrics and key performance indicators — that so many entrepreneurs and business leaders overlook as they seek answers in how to best run their business.
Yes, you understand the numbers, and your bank account tells a clear and important story about sales, cash flow and profitability. But those are lagging metrics. Once you have access to those numbers, there’s no way to affect the trajectory of your business.
What you need are leading metrics and key performance indicators, numbers you can use to help you succeed before the month-end financials are in.
In the sales department, for example, if you want to sell 10 boats this month, then you can’t wait until the end of the month and hope you hit the number. You need to manage your team with activity-based metrics that will lead you to sell those 10 boats.
Those activities may include on-water demos, in-dealership sales presentations, or the number of calls your team makes to prospects. The numbers tell the story: If you have a 50% closing ratio on all boat-demo prospects, then in order to sell 10 boats, your team needs to conduct 20 boat demos. If 50% of your showroom sales presentations move on to demos, then in order to get 20 prospects on the water, you’ll need 40 showroom presentations. If 25% of your phone connections make their way to the dealership to see your inventory, well, are you holding your sales team accountable to the right number of phone connections?
Managing your business through data and metrics removes the guessing game from operations. It gives your team clarity around what’s expected, and it gives you the confidence that your team is producing in a way that will drive results.
There are so many ways that managing metrics and KPIs can drive business success. Take the online marketing and lead-generation conversation that’s been so prevalent around the industry in the past couple years. Without understanding your metrics, how do you know the number of leads you need to develop each month? How do you know the value of a lead? How do you know if the cost is delivering the right ROI?
Based on the example above, if you understand how many sales presentations you need to make, then you can work backwards from there. What percentage of leads are you able to connect with over the phone? What constitutes a quality lead? How do you best capture a quality lead? And so forth.
Metrics that matter are different for every business. Certainly, there are similarities across dealerships, but you should determine which KPIs you need to manage your business effectively.
In a service department, for example, most dealerships seek to manage technician efficiency. But what activities can help make a technician more efficient? It’s not just about turning the wrench faster. Maybe you need 100% of the boats staged and ready to go. Maybe you need 100% of the parts pulled the night before. Or, maybe you want to manage to a different number — the number of line items on a repair order, for example. What would that mean for the metrics?
In the coming months, managing your business by metrics should be a critical area of focus, as it can determine a great deal of your success in the year ahead. It can help you regain or maintain that sense of control.
Take a look at your budgeted expectations for this year. Compare that to your actuals, and create a forecast for year-end financial performance. Use the knowledge gleaned from that process to create a budget for 2026 so you can enter the coming inventory-commitment conversations from a place of strength and confidence.
Use your budget to set goals in every area of your business, and then work backwards from those goals to establish activity-based metrics that you and your team will operate by moving forward.
No matter if your business is growing, maintaining or shrinking, in order to lead with confidence, you and your team must know the metrics to manage. And whatever you do, make your metrics visible so your entire team knows the path to success. Actionable initiatives will build your confidence and help you achieve your goals.
Matt Gruhn is president of the Marine Retailers Association of the Americas.
