Entry & Exit #66 The Business Metrics We Wish We Tracked Sooner

If you’re not tracking the right numbers, you’re leaving money on the table.

In this episode of Entry & Exit, Stephen Olmon and Collin Trimble break down the key performance indicators (KPIs) every service business owner should be tracking to improve efficiency, increase revenue, and scale operations.

Using real examples from Alarm Masters, they explain how technician utilization, sales pipeline conversion, and customer retention directly impact profitability. They also share the overlooked metrics that helped them identify problems, set better goals, and make smarter business decisions.

In this episode:

• The most important KPIs for growing a service business
• Tracking technician utilization, service revenue, and return trips
• Measuring sales pipeline generation and conversion rates
• Setting revenue goals and quotas across your team
• Why customer retention and first-call resolution matter
• Using data to identify inefficiencies and missed revenue
• How to start tracking KPIs without expensive software

Connect:

Stephen Olmon — https://x.com/stephenolmon

Collin Trimble — https://x.com/TXAlarmGuy

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Doot doot doo doot doot welcome back to entry and exit. Um today we're talking about the metrics that matter most or like the metrics that we didn't necessarily know we needed and then we found out oh that's helpful or like critical. Yeah, I actually want to back up.

Why do we care about measuring these things?

If you don't measure it, it is impossible to know your baseline, thus you cannot improve, said the dictionary. Get that number to move up. The underpinning of that is efficiency. We have limited resources.

You're ultimately gonna probably think you're I'll get to that. So I'm just gonna throw the I'm gonna throw up the yellow flag right now and say if your brain goes to that, this is probably the one you need to spend the most other time on.

Welcome back to entry and exit. My name is Steven, and that's Colin. And if you're not watching this video, you should come join us on YouTube. We're we're a good time, and uh we like to we like to have fun. Um today we're talking about the metrics that matter most, or like the metrics that we didn't necessarily know we needed to care about when we bought the business originally, and then we found out oh, that's helpful or like critical, um, or or really moves the needle. So um three different buckets uh that we're gonna talk about, and uh the first of those buckets is kind of all things service.

Yeah, I actually want to back up. Why do we care about measuring these things?

If you don't measure it, it is impossible to know your baseline, thus you cannot improve, said the dictionary. Exactly right.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So we say that all the time. You hear this on this podcast if you listen um frequently. And by the way, if if you if you don't subscribe, uh you could click this button and subscribe, and you could like it, and your friends and family will see it, and we would appreciate that. Um, but anyway, uh if if you can't measure it, you can't improve it. And it's it's a really

it's like a funny thing. We had a conversation um with our director customer success, and there's a specific group that's doing this project as it relates to contract renewals. And I I was he was reporting some stats of like, hey, here's where we are in these given um numbers. So he was reporting um KPIs, but there was no goal associated with those KPIs. And so I was like, hey, it's not improving. And I was like, wait a second, why is it not improving? And like maybe we should talk about that. And so um anyway, I think that if I think that managing these KPIs is really important and you should set goals. And if you want to hit a better goal, you got to improve. And so we're gonna go through a couple different KPIs or really groups of KPIs that we focus on and why we focus on them. And like, by the way, as like a as a baseline, you got to get your data in in a single place. Like if you don't have your data, or at least your data needs to be connected in such a way that it's like all connected to to Claude or whatever. And so for us, like uh we do use almost everything is in Salesforce, but the stuff that's not in Salesforce is connected in some way. And for us, that ends up being Claude, and uh we have connectors there, and the data is all synced up and it's great. So, but all of our customer master data exists in

one place. So the first group I think we should talk about is service, and I don't think anybody really focuses on that. So we're gonna start there. And uh a basic one, just fundamentally, you should be tracking how much revenue you're doing per service call. Um, then you've you kind of have to def, we were actually talking to Kevin, our business partner in DFW, and he was like, you know, in the past we've never really um measured or like defined rather what the uh what it what we consider a service call. And that's actually a really good point. It had me thinking like you should be able to define exactly what a service call is. For us, it's not a hard and uh fast rule of a dollar amount. It there is a little bit of that. It's it's more about where the demand originated, is more of how we define that. So just to say that, like you should have that dialed in before you can really say what is service revenue, because you don't really get to drop that same sale into project revenue too. Like you got to pick. Right. So service revenue would be the first one, right? So you've got to you at a basic level, let's track. If we want to do $100,000 of service revenue every month, then we need to be able to track that and be able to see how much revenue we're actually pulling in. And I think most people could probably figure that out and identify that today, that's listening to this call. Probably pretty easy. But in order for you to be able to get to the number you want to get to, so let's just say our goal is $280,000 per month of service revenue, and we're at $150,000 this year, whatever per month. Well, then how am I gonna do the things and what impact am I gonna make to be able to get that number to move up? And so we look at a lot of things that influence that number. So here's a couple statistics that would, or KPIs that influence that. Number one, most importantly, would be utilization rate. Um, utilization rate is simply billable time divided by hours paid to your technician. So if you're paying your guys eight hours a day and they're only working four hours of billable time, um, because you have drive time, then you're at 50% utilization. That's not enough, right? So we need to have more utilization per guy. A good rule of thumb is 75% utilization. That includes drive time. A lot of companies don't include drive time, and you should. Just my hot take. You should, because it's gonna show you. Yeah. Um, another one that I think is really important to measure is return trips. So, what percentage of your work orders require a return trip? Not every return trip is created equal. Sometimes you go out and it's like, dang, this is not just a keypad issue, this whole system needs to be replaced. Well, that's great, that's a good return trip. But just from an aggregate perspective, you want to understand how many return trips are needed and then why, so that you can identify the ones that's like, oh, if I would have had that part of my truck, I wouldn't have to be there. Or if I had the right technician who had the right skill set to manage that, I wouldn't have had to go back. So those are really important things. So those are some example KPIs that influence, so you kind of have to drill down. If you're like, hey, my top level is a hundred thousand dollars of service every month. Well, then what are the KPIs that actually impact that?

Yeah. The the utilization rate uh as well as returns, like that, the underpinning of that is efficiency and even like financial efficiency. We have limited resources, people and time, and so we're trying to maximize like as much as we can, um, ultimately to drive towards whatever goal that you've set. Um I feel like we tend to set aggressive but attainable goals. Um like I think that the service department is a good example. And one thing also just as kind of like a side side quest uh on the podcast today, is uh setting quotas in your service department. I think that is unorthodox. Uh we don't have a lot of friends that do that necessarily. Um we don't have to go too deep into that, but what's your what's your spicy hot take on that?

Yeah, I think I think everybody should be aligned with revenue. Everybody should be aligned with revenue. There should be quotas and goals for everybody. I think this industry is operationally led, technology led, solution led um for the most part. And I think that that's actually good in a lot of ways, but in one way it limits growth because not everybody's aligned with I want growth. Now, if you're not doing this to grow, then I think that that's okay. But um, most of us are. So um additional

KPIs. So let's jump into sales really quickly. So at a basic level, closed one sales. That should be easy to track. Another one should be pipe generation, so pipeline generation. So that's how much opportunities did you source? Uh that doesn't necessarily mean how many quotes did you do. That's interesting. A lot of people say, well, how many quotes did you give out this week? Uh that's good, but I actually want to know how much, and and so a lot of people say, well, how do I know if it's a 20-camera system? How do I know if we're reusing some cameras, we're not reusing other cameras, whatever? We use anchor pricing. So we'll just say a thousand bucks a camera, 20 cameras, 20 grand. Maybe that ends up being only 10 grand, whatever. That's pipe gin, and I'm pushing my guys to, hey, I want you to do $50,000 per week of pipe gen. Some weeks they do $200,000, some weeks they do $20,000, um, but they generally are landing around $200,000 per month. Um, and and so that's that's one thing that we're really hyper-focused on. But then you got to look even layer down below that, right? So it's like, okay, well, if we're not getting pipe gen, then you need to be looking at number of appointments per week, number of sales cycle appointments per week. And then here's the next even layer below that. And this is the one that a lot of people in the industry don't think about, which is conversion rates on sales plays. And so in order to like scale up your math, right? It's like, okay, for every X number of calls equals this amount of meetings, this many meetings equals this amount of pipe gen, this many pipe gen equals a closed sale. There's a conversion rate for each of those. You should be tracking that and know what those are. Um, and then uh aside from that, um we are doing it down to the specific sales play. So we just sent out a huge uh email campaign to a bunch of multifamily providers to run a specific sales play with a specific call to action. So we send it out to first thing we did, we send it out to a test batch of 150 properties with four emails per person. And we are tracking opens, response rates, appointment set, and pipe gen. And then what we do is we say, okay, well, if we send out, you know, we targeted 150 people and we got five opportunities out of that, and two of them closed, well, then is it reasonable that we could actually 10x that? You know, so if we wanted 20 opportunities, could we 10x the number of people we reached out to? And it doesn't perfectly track, it doesn't track perfectly linearly like that, but it does pretty close. It gets pretty close, especially if your sample size is really big. So I would encourage you to, if it's a spreadsheet, it doesn't have to be set up in your CRM, but if it's a spreadsheet, like you should be able to see that.

Yeah, and if you're if you're going to pursue that, like you've got to be disciplined to update it, like just the rigor and the discipline and holding your team accountable because what happens really quickly is you have a bad week or two of like hygiene on that, and then now that data's totally wonky and unhelpful. So yeah, if you're going to do that, you really gotta go all in. Yep, agreed.

The last bucket of KPIs is probably the most ignored, and probably the one that you need to be focused on the most. And you're gonna and like you're ultimately gonna probably think right, ah, I'll get to that. So I'm just gonna throw the I'm gonna throw up the yellow flag right now and say if your brain goes to that, this is probably the one you need to spend the most amount of time on. And this is customer success statistics. So this would be we track every time a customer calls us for anything as a case because we want to know what is going on, what did we do to you know to solve it, how could we prevent it from happening in the future? Uh, even if it's I want to pay my invoice, send me a copy of my invoice. Okay, why do you need a copy? You're already getting emailed. The cop is are you not the right person to be set up for the invoice? Like we need to be thinking like that in order to be able to solve our cases. So, A, just raw case count. So, how many cases do you have that are open? How fast are you closing cases? What is your first call resolution? Meaning, I my team is so well trained that it doesn't take multiple calls to solve the case. I can literally open and close it on one phone call. That would be another one. Uh, and then another one is specific to attrition. And this would be we're really passionate about tracking attrition very tightly, like very, very tightly. It's an incredibly important statistic to us. Again, if you if you don't measure it, you can't approve it. But we're actually looking at little things like, hey, if a customer comes in with a cancellation request, how long does it take us to get a member of the management team in contact with that customer? And not just first contact, meaning they call and they put a cancellation request, a leadership team member is not available, they call an hour later. Okay, well, that's an hour, but maybe the customer doesn't pick up. Well, then it takes us 24 hours to get a hold of them. So now our average time is 24 hours, you know, and so we are looking at those statistics. And the reason why that's so important is that is you taking care of your existing customers, and the highest percent of your existing revenue or new future revenue is gonna come from your existing customers today. So you've got to take care of those existing customers. It is your lowest acquisition cost, um, it's your lowest cost per lead, is your existing customer base. So you've got to take care of them and deliver a Chick-fil-A experience so that you can drive more revenue and growth and have happy

customers.

If I'm someone who is not tracking any of this today, that all feels really overwhelming. Um, even though I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, totally sounds awesome, but like, man, it sounds like a I'm gonna have to climb a mountain. Um getting data in one place, like we've talked about that a ton. Like I think that's getting to a point where you actually can even get at that data is the first step. But if you had to pick out of those three buckets to just focus on one category, which category would you focus on first?

Uh I'm gonna sidestep your question and I'm gonna say go hire an international employee and pay them fifteen hundred dollars a month, that's really quality, and give them a subscription to Google Sheets and have your sales team, your customer success team, and your field service team talk to them, and all they do is open a spreadsheet and track these statistics for you, and that's their full-time job. And that equivalent is worth, you know, you're gonna pay whatever, a thousand, two thousand bucks a month for that individual, which is 24K a year, but the value that you're gonna get out of that is gonna be many, many, many, many multiples more than that. And honestly, it's gonna help you figure out how to find technology, and that person may even be able to investigate that for you to say, hey, here's a piece of technology we could use to track this more efficiently and easier, etc. So I'm gonna sidestep that and say they're all important. You should open a spreadsheet, you should set it up, hire a person, and let them track it. Every one of those stats that we just talked about. Because they can all be tracked in a spreadsheet. You don't have to have technology to track any of those stats.

I I accept your sideset.

All right, perfect. Uh, what can people do if they want to hear more about this stuff? Any tips?

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