The Right Answer To The Wrong Question

By: Jeff Heybruck

In our experience, all business owners track something. Revenue, website visits, leads, maybe a production number or two. The dashboards look organized. The numbers move up and down. It feels like progress is being measured.

But tracking a number and knowing what it means are two different things.

A lot of the KPIs businesses rely on were never actually chosen. They were inherited from a software default, borrowed from a template, or picked because they were easy to pull from an existing report. The best one we heard was someone “told me I should be tracking this,” but the business owner didn’t know why or what it meant. Nobody sat down and asked whether any of these numbers actually reflects what’s happening in the business, or whether it’s just a number that happened to be available.

That’s the problem with unvetted KPIs. They feel like measurement, but they might be measuring the wrong thing.

They feel like measurement, but they might be measuring the wrong thing.

Easy to Track Isn’t the Same as Worth Tracking

Software makes certain numbers effortless to see. Website traffic, social engagement, total sales, average order value. These show up automatically on a dashboard, so they get treated as important simply because they’re visible. Our favorite is cash in the bank; it’s such a meaningless number in its simple form unless it’s translated into something more relevant, like months of cash on hand, forecasted cash balance at year-end, or a working capital/reserve metric.

Meanwhile, the metrics that actually explain profitability or operational health, like true job costing, customer acquisition cost by channel, or gross margin trends by service line, often require more setup. They don’t show up by default. So they get skipped, even though they’re usually the numbers that matter more.

The result is a business that looks measured but is actually just watching whatever happened to be convenient.

A Metric Can Be Accurate and Still Be Misleading

This is the part that catches owners off guard. A KPI doesn’t have to be wrong to be a problem. It can be calculated correctly and still point you in the wrong direction.

Total revenue can climb while margins quietly shrink. Lead volume can look healthy while lead quality drops. Website traffic can grow while conversion falls. Each individual number is technically true, but taken together, they can tell a story that isn’t.

Unvetted KPIs create a false sense of clarity. The owner feels informed because there’s a number on the screen. But a number without context, or without the right number sitting next to it, can be more dangerous than no number at all. It replaces a genuine question with a false sense of certainty.

Go back to the cash example: a business with $250,000 in cash might be sitting pretty or close to broke. It all depends on other factors, like their reserve needs, balances in A/R and A/P, timing of A/R collections and A/P payments, seasonality of the business, and so on. $250K could represent 6 months of working capital or 6 days; what the number means is more important than the number itself.

How This Shows Up in Real Businesses

• A service business celebrates rising revenue while a key client segment quietly becomes unprofitable.
• A retailer tracks total sales but never breaks out margin by product line, missing that their bestseller is barely breaking even.
• A company watches website traffic climb, but nobody is tracking which traffic actually converts into paying customers.
• Leadership reviews a monthly sales number without ever connecting it to cost of delivery, so growth and profitability get treated as the same thing.

None of these are cases of bad intent or carelessness. They’re cases of measuring what was easy to see instead of what was actually true.

Choosing Better KPIs Starts With a Different Question

The fix isn’t to track more numbers. It’s to ask a better question before choosing which ones matter: what decision does this number actually help me make?

If a metric doesn’t connect to a real decision, pricing, staffing, marketing spend, service mix, it might be worth tracking casually, but it shouldn’t be treated as a core indicator of business health. The KPIs that matter most are usually the ones that take a bit more effort to build, because they require pulling together information that doesn’t live in one convenient place.

What decision does this number actually help me make?

This is where a lot of business owners get stuck. Not because they don’t care about their numbers, but because building the right numbers takes more structure than their current systems provide. Or, simply put, they don’t know what to track.

If your dashboards look busy but you’re still not sure whether you’re measuring the right things, that’s worth a second look. Lucrum can help you sort out which numbers actually reflect what’s happening in your business, so the KPIs on your screen give you real Confidence in the Numbers instead of just the illusion of it.