Hey there,

It's a reflective time of year and I'm in the process of planning what I'd like to achieve next year.

Today we’re going to talk about the flaw of benchmarks and averages in both personal and professional areas life.

1. On my mind: The flaw of benchmarks

I was on vacation in Hawaii this past summer and went on a morning run along Waikiki Beach toward Diamond Head volcano.

When I got to the visitor’s center, I asked how long a round trip hike to the top and back would take.

1.5 hours.

“1.5 hours? I’ve already ran for an hour and it’s going to get really hot soon… I’m not sure if I should keep running in this heat…”

Then a family came down the trail and were talking amongst themselves, “Hey how long was that hike?”

1.5 miles.

That was when I had a lightbulb moment.

I can run a mile in 8 minutes easy.

With elevation, let’s say I double that time. I could probably run up and back down in 40 minutes tops.

So I ran up, spent a few minutes at the top and took photos, and ran back down.

Round trip: 27 minutes.

I realized it would take 1.5 hours to hike up and down the volcano for the average person taking a casual stroll.

My context was different. I'm relatively fit and I was on a run. I was in Hawaii for a Spartan Beast race and had been training for it for the 6 months prior.

I heard an average benchmark and instinctively thought it applied to me when in reality, it didn’t.

If anything, the benchmark was a limiting factor. I almost decided not to hike up the volcano! That would've been a shame.

That gets us to the idea of benchmarks in our professional work.

I often get asked for benchmarks in growth, content, and SEO. “What does good look like? What should our goal be?”

These questions come with good intentions. The person is looking for a baseline for what their goal should be.

The problem is, benchmarks are based on other companies with different products, different business models, different teams, different strategies, etc.

I could tell you that the average conversion rate from blog visit to lead is 0.5%.

But that's so low. Would you really decide “Great we’re going to aim for that”?

If that was the goal, then you might hit that conversion rate thinking it’s “good” but not realize you can get a 6% conversion rate.

What they (and we) should be asking is, “What’s our baseline and how do we do better?”

Companies and people at the top of their game don’t compare themselves to the average. They focus on improving upon themselves. Kobe Bryant, Serena Williams, Uber, Facebook, etc.

Maybe for you it isn’t sports, or marketing, or building a business. Maybe it’s something else.

But be cautious of letting someone or something else’s benchmarks set your expectations for yourself.

If we use benchmarks as the bar, we might find that some of those benchmarks are too low for our standards.

I think we can expect more of ourselves.

2. Business update

We did our first official annual planning process with OKRs to boot. It feels a little heavy for a company of our size but I believe it will help keep the team aligned as we hire more people next year.

I didn’t understand why annual planning was such a stressful time for management when I was an employee. Now I do. You have to keep doing all the things you do on a day-to-day but now also carve out time to think about the next year.

So what's going on?

We're going aggressive with our marketing by publishing 100 blog posts in a month (I'll let you know how that goes) and doubling our podcast publishing cadence.

We're hiring a full-time writer to join our team and help scale up our content production for our clients.

We're fortunate that it's really busy for us right now in terms of sales so we're heads down and focused on closing some new clients.

I'm also thinking about what we need to do to scale next year.

Know someone great at any of these things who I could learn from? Please send me their LinkedIn profile.

• Building a hiring process to hire and onboard new employees efficiently and effectively
• Streamlining and automating agency processes (client-facing and internal)
• When to bring on an operations manager

3. Created

Things I’ve produced:

• Workshop: How to Model and Predict ROI from Content Marketing​
• Podcast: Product-Led Growth Benchmarks with Sam Richard, Head of Growth at ngrok
• Podcast: Product-Led Growth and Sales with Thomas Schiavone, CEO of Calixa
• Podcast: How to Grow Your Growth Marketing Career with Joe Lee, VP of Growth at Ontra
• Podcast: How to Build a High Performing Marketing Team with Andrew Davies, CMO at Paddle

4. Consumed

Things I’m enjoying:

🛍️ Purchased: Google Pixel 7. I’ve been a long-time Pixeler (don't know if that's a thing) and have had the Pixel 1, 3, and 5 before this. I hate that phones keep getting bigger each year but really happy with this phone nonetheless.

📚 Reading: I finally read The Road. If you’ve been keeping track, I was reading 3 books at once (Multipliers and Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order). It’s not efficient, but keeps me entertained.

🎧 Listening: I was in Baltimore and was recommended to check out the Bluebird Cocktail Room and I asked about the playlist they had on because I heard a Studio Ghibli remix. It was a Jinsang playlist. I'm hooked now.

👀 Watching: Young Rock. Sometimes cheesy. Always heartwarming. Really enjoying the show and learning more about one of my role models since childhood.

Cheers,
David

P.S. Find out what I'm up to on my blog and reading list and connect with me on Twitter.

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​​About me: David Ly Khim is a founder of Omniscient Digital, a content marketing and SEO agency helping B2B software companies turn content into a growth channel.