Is hitting your KPIs or Goals the thing keeping you from success?

In partnership with

The Health Growth Letters is a weekly publication of tips, frameworks, and lessons to help you build a more balanced life based on faith, health, and wellness. If you’ve been forwarded this email, you can subscribe here.

What’s on the agenda:

• A Verse

• A Lesson

• A Puzzle

• A Optimization

A verse:

I’ve been on a Micah kick lately. I’ve read it a couple of times in the past few weeks. I believe it is really relevant to our current day and age.

The book alternates between judgment of the elites and the wealthy and hope for the poor and downtrodden, warning against the dangers of corrupt leadership and condemning social injustice, while promoting the need for genuine worship and ethical living.

It concludes with an urge to put hope in God’s promise of deliverance.

Faithfully carrying our burdens

I want to start by saying, my intention is not to encourage you to bottle things up. Things need to be shared. We are not called to do life alone. We need people to share our burden with, co-journers, and people to pray for us.

But can it be taken too far? And if so, what is “too far”?

Here are my 3 observations and thoughts on this verse:

1. "Why do you cry aloud?"
   The tone this is written feels like it’s written with surprise. For context, the nation is in great distress, and Micah is calling them out for lamenting in the streets. I think the key here isn’t that they are crying, it’s that they are crying “aloud” in a place where anyone can hear. 
   
   I think we need to be careful about how and where we share our pain and struggles. We shouldn’t be doing it to draw attention or gain compassion.
   

   Takeaway:
   Don’t put your pain on display for attention or personal gain.

   
   

2. "Is there no king in you?"
   This is a piercing question. Israel is in chaos, and Micah asks if it's because they lack leadership. It implies either that their king is powerless or absent. It infers that they’ve lost confidence in him, but more importantly, it points to a deeper loss: trust in God as their true King.
   
   The Bible says to let your request be known unto God.
   
   Takeaway:
   Before we share with anyone, we should be sharing with God. That’s because the only person who can actually do anything about our suffering is Jesus. 
   
   When God is lord of our hearts, our requests & lament can be made in the quiet pace.

   
   

3. "Has your counselor perished?"
   “Counselor” can refer to human leadership, but also prophetically to God Himself. In Isaiah 9:6, the Messiah is called “Wonderful Counselor”.
   
   The people here are not trusting of their leaders, and they are not trusting of God. This lack of trust is not only the source of their despair in this situation, but it also amplifies the pain by removing a source of guidance and direction.
   
   Takeaway:
   When in pain, where are we going for direction and comfort? Are we going to God, or are we making a spectacle of ourselves saying “Woe is me”?

A lesson: Are your KPIs meaningless?

I lead growth for Direct-to-Consumer brands (DTC) at Common Thread Collective. Each month, I build a forecast, and that sets an expectation around revenue, efficiency, and how much advertising spend should be invested.

Investment in platforms like Meta/Instagram ads, Google search, Connected TV, etc.

As I do this, I set ROAS or “Return on Ad Spend” targets for each channel and tactic. One of the biggest questions I get, and the place I get the most pushback, is regarding what those targets should be.

But here’s the truth. It’s the wrong question.

It doesn’t matter what the effectiveness of a given channel is, it matters what the effectiveness of all my initiatives is.

Let me give you an example:

If I am training to become a better athlete, I must eat a healthy diet. This promotes a healthy weight, muscle mass, and recovery.

But if my goal was to lose weight, and eating a perfect, calorie-restricted diet leaves me without enough energy to exercise effectively, the high return on a good diet wouldn’t give me the results I wanted. In fact, if I put a few more carbs into my diet during exercise, even though my diet might be less “clean”, it would likely help me out overall.

That’s the problem with ROAS, and many of our Goals. They don’t capture the full picture of what we are trying to accomplish.

So today, I want to share the three issues with ROAS, or segmented goals, as a KPI that apply to your life as well:

1. Volume matters more than your ROAS or rate of efficiency.

If I spent $1000 of ad spend to get $5,000 in revenue, my ROAS would be 5.0. However, if I spent $1500 on ads and got $6,000 in return, my ROAS would be a 4.0. Conversely, if I only spent $500 to generate $3,000 in revenue, my ROA would be 6.0.

Now, we’d need to do more digging to see which one I actually best, but a you can see here, oftentimes less efficiency leads to higher returns.

Think about running.

If I ran 5 miles once a week, it might be the most efficient way to get faster and become a better runner, but bringing down efficiency and effort and running 20 miles a week would like make me a better runner overall.

More volume. Less Efficiency. Better results.

Practical application:

Is there something you know you should be doing, but you are doing slowly, or an insignificant amount of in the pursuit of better? I think about content production. 1,000 posts that are OK are often better than 10 that are great.

Don’t optimize for perfection before you reach the volume you need consistently first.

2. Not all return is created equal.

In growth marketing, we have a metric called incrementality. It’s used to answer the question of “how much revenue would you have gotten even if you didn’t spend those dollars?”.

It’s a hard question to answer, but it’s an important one because, as we know, certain channels provide WAY more value at the same ROAS as other channels.

For example, Meta Propecting usually has an Incrementality of around 120%. This means a ROAS of 5.0 is actually bringing in $600 (a 6 ROAS). Conversely, Branded search ads usually have a 30% incrementally, meaning that if my brand campaigns have a ROAS of 10, it’s only driving $300 in revenue on that $100s of spend.

Better ROAS. Less Incrementality. Worse Results

Practical Application:

We all want to grow and improve, but many times we abandon the tried and true route to success for exciting, new, and different optimizations. I think about getting fit and healthy. There seems to be a new product or protocol every week that you could be doing to improve your health

Yet 99% of the people trying to implement those would get more out of mastering the basics with really high returns: walking, going to bed on time, and eating healthy.

3. Time & Effort should be factored into your ROAS calculations

Less so now, but one of the big questions everyone asked for a long time was, “Can we spend more on TikTok?”. People asked this because they saw a better return here than they did on Meta ads.

At first glance, it makes sense to spend more here. I mean, if I spend $100 on Meta and it gives me $200, but if I spend the same $100 on TikTok and get $250 in revenue, I should right?

Maybe…

In this case, it depends on how much ad creative the brand has. TikTok needed a lot more assets than Meta, which takes time and effort to develop.

If you’re a lean team with limited resources, the “extra efficiency” might actually be costing you more time, resources, and money to get it.

If that’s the case, it’s not worth it.

Practical Application:

One of my favorite startup quotes is “Startups don’t starve, they drown”. I often think of my personal life as a start-up - still trying to find product market fit, focused on growth at the same time I’m trying to become better… etc..

This is the topic for another letter.

But the takeaway is that there is an endless amount of this we “can” do, and almost as many we are told we “should” do, but time is limited and we can’t do it all… nor should we.

Find the things you enjoy. The things that have a high return. Do them a lot. Forget the rest.

A Puzzle:

A rebus is a puzzle that uses pictures, symbols, and/or letters to represent words or parts of words. The challenge of the puzzle is to decipher the hidden meaning behind the symbols and solve the puzzle.

Here’s this week’s puzzle:

The answer will be given in next week’s letter.

The answer to last week’s puzzle was “Love at First Sight”.

An Optimization:

Your home for politically-neutral, Christ-first news

Tired of feeling like you have to pick a side just to stay informed? The Pour Over makes it easy to engage with the news––without the bias, outrage, or anxiety.

Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, they deliver quick, entertaining news summaries paired with short biblical reminders to keep you rooted in Christ, not the chaos. Instead of fueling division, the news becomes a tool to strengthen your faith and spark loving action in response.

Over 1 million readers have already found a better way to stay informed: Christ-first, anger-free, and even kinda funny.

Try it for free and check out their welcome email that’ll make you glad you did!

Sign up for free today!