I was on a call recently with a company that uses a goal-setting methodology to define their KPIs every quarter. Detailed goals. Three-year targets. Quarterly milestones. Impressive stuff on paper.
Then I asked what systems they use to actually track those KPIs.
"We pull it together manually. From HubSpot. From ClickUp. It works for now, but it's not going to scale."
That's the version of this problem I hear most often. Not "we don't have data." It's "we have the data somewhere, we just can't see it in one place."
But here's what I've learned: the tool is almost never the real problem.
I'm working with a portfolio company right now that runs the same ERP across multiple locations. The corporate team exports a stack of reports manually from each one, every week. They have dashboards. But when I asked the team what "retention" means, I got a different answer from every department.
Same word. Same dashboard. Completely different definitions.
That's the gap. A dashboard shows you what happened. A metric tells you whether you're on track. One displays data. The other requires you to answer three questions first: What are we trying to change? What number tracks that? And what does good look like for that number in 90 days?
Most teams skip those questions because they feel obvious. Everyone assumes someone else already answered them. In a company that just changed hands, nobody has.
I talked to an operator running a manufacturing portfolio who said something that stuck with me. He told me most of his companies only use about 15% of their ERP's capabilities. They have the system. They have the data inside it. But nobody defined what to actually measure. So the tool sits there, doing a fraction of what it could.
The cost isn't bad data. It's a team that meets every Monday, looks at a dashboard, and leaves without knowing what to do differently.
Metric misalignment no longer surprises me. "Successful" businesses, sharp operators and shrewd investors can all succumb to it.
Related reading: What "good" looks like in PE portfolio operations — https://analytics-cc.com/blog/what-good-looks-like/
— Alex