What Top Founders Know That Most Don’t

Most entrepreneurs are drowning in dashboards.

Revenue, reach, leads, churn, impressions, followers, engagement, the list never ends. Every number looks important and feels urgent.

But when you try to move everything at once, nothing really moves.

Founders who break through don’t scatter their focus across ten different priorities. They pick one number and drive it relentlessly until it shifts.

Jim Collins, in his bestselling book Good to Great, found that companies who locked onto a single “economic denominator,” one core metric to guide decisions, outperformed the stock market by 6.9x over fifteen years.

That’s the simple rule behind 7x market outperformance.

Jeff Bezos anchored Amazon on one thing: customer obsession. Every decision and every metric rolled up into that focus. And Y Combinator tells founders: pick one metric that matters and grow it 5–7% each week, because focus compounds.

Here’s how you can apply it:

1- Choose your season

Decide what matters most in the next 90 days, audience growth, revenue, or service delivery. Commit and don’t second-guess.

2- Define the number

Pick the metric that reflects that outcome best. For growth it might be qualified followers. For revenue, booked calls. For delivery, client retention or results.

3- Track it daily

Don’t bury it in a spreadsheet. Put it somewhere you see every day (a whiteboard, sticky note, or phone wallpaper).

4- Take one action a day to move it

Ask yourself each morning: What’s the one thing I can do today to push this number forward? Those nudges stack faster than big bursts of effort.

5- Stick with it long enough

Two weeks won’t cut it. 90 days of focus is where the compounding shows.

McKinsey also found that companies who concentrate resources on a narrow set of priorities are up to 70% more likely to outperform peers in growth and profitability.

The same applies to you. So what’s your one number?

Pick it, write it down, and keep pushing until it moves.

Until next time, stay focused.

Omara

P.S. If you’re tracking 10 KPIs daily, you’re not focused. You’re basically the human version of 37 Chrome tabs, with one of them playing music and another running a stand-up comedy show.