Management thought leader and author Peter Drucker once wrote, “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” Recent research has suggested that many entrepreneurs chose the path they did because they desired one thing—meaning. How can we lead our businesses in measurable and meaningful ways, without getting lost in measuring and focusing on things that don’t really matter?

Check out these 20 ideas we’ve put together to help you assess your growth as a business owner and freelancer.

1. Meeting real needs.
You can be growing, but you can also be growing in a direction that no longer meets the needs of the clients you serve. One way to measure your business growth is to compare it to actual needs of your community and customers through regular needs assessments.

2. Benchmarking.
Are you growing relative to similar businesses in your field? What other businesses out there provide services like yours, and how are you different or the same?

3. Leads and referrals.
Tracking the number of new leads and referrals you have each month can give you helpful insights into patterns. Asking these leads how they heard about you is another opportunity to learn what’s working well and possibly whom to thank for referrals.

4. Ratings and recognition.
Higher customer ratings are correlated with increased business. Regularly review your ratings, whether on Google, Yelp, or any other online customer reviews. Looking at ratings and reviews over time can indicate whether you’re growing in a positive direction in the eyes of your customers. Another way to measure growth is being recognized as a leading business in your community or industry, such as applying for and achieving a widely known business recognition, distinction, or seal of integrity that you can display in your marketing.

5. New clients.
If people are knocking on your proverbial door to do business with you, chances are you’re doing something right by offering a needed service and having positive word-of-mouth marketing from your existing customers. Learn more about them and what brought them to your business.

6. Loyalty.
Repeat business and contract renewals are an important aspect of sustainable business. What percentage of your customers would you consider loyal or repeat customers? These are important relationships to nurture, as loyal clients make great (free) marketers who will often happily test-drive new products and services and can even provide the most helpful insights to improve your overall business strategy.

7. New hires.
New team members can be an indicator that you’re ramping up to meet increased demand or growing services and that your company is perceived as a desirable place to work.

8. Retention and engagement.
Measure the average length of time team members stay on board with your business. Retained team members are usually a good indicator of employee satisfaction, a great culture, and successful leadership.

9. Employee growth and development.
One sign of business growth can be found in a measure of your employees’ growth, which is now a well-known factor in employee engagement. If your team members are gaining desirable skills, that development along with their high engagement level can tremendously benefit the growth of your business.

10. Profit.
One sure measure of growth is reflected in your business’s bottom line. If work is plentiful, you should ideally see a reflection of that in your profits.

11. Diversification.
One way to gauge your growth is in terms of sustainability. For example, your efforts in strategic diversification of products, services, or geographical areas served can help you avoid localized impacts. You may also have identified opportunities for growth work or add-on services that will help further solidify your income.

12. Online reach and engagement.
Reviewing your website analytics can give you a picture of your customer reach and engagement over time and relative to certain marketing campaigns. Using trackable links is another great way to see ongoing performance of marketing efforts. If you manage social media pages, you can measure followers, post engagements, and shares. (Here’s an article with great ideas for engaging your social media followers.)

13. New partnerships.
Partnerships are a great measure of business growth because together you are working to provide more or better services to clients or to better streamline the services you provide by cross-referring customers. Tracking the number of business partnerships you have this year over last year could be a good measure of growth.

14. Shareholders.
New investors, funders, active board members, and increased employee giving or board-member giving are great ways to measure others’ confidence in your company or cause and to track growth in that confidence level over time.

15. Expanded services.
Reflect on the number of ways you successfully expanded products, programs, or services in the past year(s) to meet customer needs.

16. Focus and efficiency.
You’re experiencing a kind of growth when you’re seeing better productivity and efficiency along with a more streamlined focus—where there is decreased effort in combination with increased output.

17. Reduced costs.
If you are proactively identifying ways to reduce overhead costs or leaks from ineffective practices, that’s a measure of growth. Effective planning can also help reduce costs, and your strategic planning activities are another aspect of your business you can capture and measure over time.

18. Customer satisfaction and issues resolution.
It directly impacts your bottom line, so you’ll want to ensure systems are in place to measure customer satisfaction and seek feedback often, resolving any issues quickly. Issues resolution is another activity you can track and measure over time to look for indications of growth and improvement in that area.

19. Increased demand.
An increase in demand for your products or services may be a positive indicator that you’re meeting customer needs well and that you have effective marketing efforts in place. Taking steps to understand where the new demand is coming from can help you with future performance.

20. Charitable giving.
A positive, meaningful way to measure your business growth is in how much you are able to give back to the community through charitable acts of giving or volunteering by you and your team.

If you’re looking for ways to take your business to the next level, we have a Powerhouse resource devoted entirely to helping you achieve that. To check out all of our “20 Tips” resources, check out our Powerhouse Resources page and follow us on Facebook.

Shannon Toft is a freelance graphic designer and a proud, dedicated Coast Guard spouse of 10 years. As a recent graduate of California State University, East Bay with a B.S. in computer science and minor in mathematics, she is proud to use her degree toward pursuing her passion and love of computers and graphic design. She looks forward to sharing and growing her talents with Powerhouse Planning, helping create and bring to life the ideas of others. In addition to coding and creating designs, Shannon enjoys crafting, traveling, and working on home improvement projects. She is grateful and excited for the opportunity to be a part of the Powerhouse Planning team and have the best of both worlds.

A great skill to sharpen is your ability to recognize what is important for your business in the long term. As you cultivate this ability, it becomes easier to actively prioritize the things that are truly significant over the things that simply feel urgent. In this Powerhouse resource, we will navigate you through 20 essential focus areas that prove worthy of your time and investment.

Relationships

1. Build a culture that values people. A secret of successful businesses is that they’ve mastered developing a great culture centered around their people. Large organizations the world over measure and work to improve their employee engagement because it directly affects their bottom line. And engagement comes down to a few simple things, such as feeling valued and supported, doing meaningful work, and having a leadership culture that fosters trust and empowerment.

2. Learn what matters most to your customers. Your ultimate success can usually be determined by the intersection of two key points: how well you harness your strengths to do what you’re good at doing, and how well this meets your customers’ needs. You can only get so far on that first one, so you’re surely going to need some input on the second.

3. Develop great partnerships. Building strong, healthy, reciprocal relationships with other businesses can really work to propel both of your operations forward. Increasing networking opportunities, pooling resources and client bases, streamlining processes, and finding positive new ways of doing business together are just a few of the potential benefits.

4. Find sources of support that strengthen you. Mentors can come in many forms and need not even be senior to you. Take notice when you are in the company of someone who inspires and motivates you, affirms you, and gives you the courage to reach higher in your goals. Spend more time with these everyday mentors, and you’ll feel the positive effects in other aspects of your life and business.

Perspective

5. Keep reflecting on the values and standards that guide you. If you have a personal dedication to keep all communications positive and uplifting, for example, this principle can help you navigate conversations, marketing plans, or even conflict resolution. Lean on your moral foundations to guide you through circumstances both large and small.

6. Take the long-term view. When you’re faced with either a great challenge or an awesome potential opportunity, hold it up against your big picture, your long-term plan. Seeking this perspective can help you avoid lots of twists and turns that might otherwise slow down your progress toward your big, long-term goals.

7. Give yourself permission to flex in the short term. Sometimes, despite our best efforts to stay the course, we are dealt an untimely pothole or a fork in the road. It’s okay to make swift calls to action to keep yourself afloat when things get tough. Sometimes making changes is safer than the alternative of being eventually rendered obsolete.

8. Do a few things really, really well. Success is more often a product of doing less than doing more. Just focus on doing what you’re good at, doing what is worthwhile, and doing these things exquisitely.

Communication

9. Share good news. Foster confidence and establish credibility by regularly sharing what’s going well, celebrating successful outcomes, and talking about goals and future plans you’re excited about.

10. Encourage trust by being transparent. Share openly about what you’ve learned and about your future plans—and involve people in them—and watch your relationships deepen. For more ways to establish credibility, check out our Powerhouse resource with 20 tips devoted entirely to this topic.

11. Be dependable; it’s a powerful form of respect. Be on time for appointments, start and end all phone calls or meetings on time, and by all means deliver what you said you would. The underlying messages of these simple actions say, “You matter to me,” “I value our relationship,” and “I respect your time.”

12. Accept feedback graciously. If someone is brave enough to tell you that something went wrong, welcome the feedback with open arms. Most customers won’t take the time to complain; they’ll simply take their business elsewhere and never return. That’s not a scenario that helps you learn and improve, so ask for feedback and thank customers who are willing to tell you the truth.

13. Be a familiar face. There’s a simple psychological phenomenon called the “mere-exposure effect,” which suggests the more we see someone, the more we come to like them. Have you ever loved going to a restaurant where the owner always came by your table to say hello and engage in small talk? It’s a simple gesture that leaves a great impression.

14. Make communications meaningful. We have all experienced “spam” and overcommunication. When you send out communications, make every effort to be clear, concise, and relevant to your recipients.

Growth

15. Remember that you’re growing. Much of running a business requires you to focus outwardly on others. It’s equally vital that you invest in your own growth and development. The more we learn and begin to become an expert in our field, the more our enjoyment of our work can grow.

16. Strive to stay relevant. You rocked this starting a business thing! Now comes the fun part—keeping your business strong through changes in the market, technology, and other unknowns that lie ahead. In addition to learning continuously from your customers, identify other opportunities to keep your business ahead of the curve.

17. Learn from mistakes, when you can. Not one of us is immune to making mistakes. Fortunately, it’s a proven way to learn—even more effective than being told the right way to do something from the start. Don’t worry about perfection. It’s okay to take risks and experience some failures, especially when you commit to learn from them.

18. Focus on your strengths. There is an old proverb that says, “If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.” A good strategy in business is to pay really close attention to what you love doing and what your personal strengths are. When you know the answers to those questions, you can intensely focus on the one thing you can do really well.

19. Give back. You should be tremendously proud of yourself if you’ve deemed “giving back” a measure of your business success. Benefitting others and creating a positive impact in your community make your work feel more meaningful and have a positive effect on your overall sense of well-being.

20. Grow and reward loyalty. Loyalty is quite possibly the strongest determinant of business success. Loyal customers support your bottom line with repeat business and grow your reach through positive word-of-mouth marketing. Building loyalty in the first place takes great customer service and relationship-building. Look for ways to reward loyalty once it’s there, such as simple gifts of thanks and recognition, milestone discounts, and membership perks.