Are Industry Standards Actually Slowing Down Your Business Growth? with Amy Traugh
- Amy Traugh
- 2 days ago
- 12 min read
🎧 The Metrics Maven: Data Driven Business Growth Strategy for Solopreneurs is streaming on all platforms. Listen here. Also streaming on YouTube.
Are Industry Standards Actually Slowing Down Your Business Growth?
Why chasing averages might be costing you confidence, clarity, and cash flow
Have you ever asked something like “What’s a good conversion rate?” or “Where should my revenue be by now?” and instantly felt either a rush of relief or a knot in your stomach?
One number pops up, and suddenly you’re convinced you’re failing… or falsely comforted into thinking everything’s fine.
And the wild part?Nothing in your business actually changed.
That emotional swing happens in seconds. And today, we’re unpacking exactly why.
Industry standards are not the villain.But they’re also not your business bestie.
Used the wrong way, they quietly mess with your confidence, your decisions, and your momentum. Let’s talk about what they’re really good for, where they go wrong, and how to use them without letting them run your business.
Why Industry Standards Feel So Comforting
When you look at your metrics, you’re not really asking technical questions.
You’re asking emotional ones.
Am I doing this right?Is this working?Is this normal?
Industry standards feel reassuring because they give you one simple answer in a world that feels chaotic. They create the illusion of certainty.
And when you’ve tried strategies that didn’t work, invested time and money, or questioned yourself more than once, benchmarks start to feel like a shortcut.
Something to hold on to.
But comfort doesn’t always mean accuracy.
When a benchmark stops being context and starts being a grade, that’s when it becomes a problem.
The Real Issue With Benchmarks
Here’s what most people forget.
Industry standards usually come from:
Big companies with big budgets
Different business models
Different audiences
Different economic conditions
Yet we’re expected to look at these numbers and decide instantly if we’re ahead or behind.
That’s like comparing your income to a celebrity’s paycheck or your health results to a stranger’s lab report.
It’s data without context.
And it creates emotional whiplash.
If your numbers are lower, you assume something is wrong.If they’re higher, you assume everything is fine.
But neither assumption is guaranteed to be true.
I’ve seen business owners panic while they were actively growing.And I’ve seen others feel confident while their profit margins were quietly slipping.
Because when you focus on comparison instead of direction, you lose sight of what actually matters.
Your business doesn’t live inside an average.It lives inside your pricing, your offer, your audience, your capacity, and your season of life.
Benchmarks can’t see any of that.
Vanity Metrics Make This Worse
Then there’s the problem of vanity metrics.
Follower counts.Likes.Views.Traffic.
They’re loud.They’re visible.They’re easy to celebrate.
But they measure attention, not stability.
A growing audience doesn’t guarantee income.Engagement doesn’t guarantee profit.Open rates don’t guarantee sales.
You can look successful on the outside and still feel stressed about money behind the scenes.
And because these numbers are public, comparison hits harder than ever.
You’re seeing highlight reels, not expenses, burnout, or cash flow issues.
Vanity metrics don’t usually lie.They just don’t tell the whole story.
Worse, they delay you from fixing real problems.
Everything looks fine… until it isn’t.
Where Industry Standards Are Helpful
Industry standards aren’t bad.
They’re just not meant to run your business.
They’re useful for perspective.
For example, let’s say the average launch conversion rate is 3%.
If you had 200 leads and 16 people joined your program, that’s an 8% conversion rate.
That’s not a weak launch.That’s well above average.
But most business owners don’t do that math.
They just look at the number of people and assume it was “small.”
This is where benchmarks help.
They reset your expectations and stop you from burning down something that’s actually working.
They help interpret your data.
They should never be the final verdict.
What to Focus on Instead
Instead of asking:“Is this good compared to everyone else?”
Try:“Is this improving for me?”
Your numbers don’t need to be perfect.They need to be trending in the right direction.
Consistency matters.Progress matters.Sustainability matters.
If your data is improving over time, your business is working.Even if you don’t look like the internet.
And if you technically hit a benchmark but your income still feels stressful, that matters too.
Industry standards point general direction.Your own metrics tell you the truth.
The Bottom Line
Industry standards are a compass, not a map.
They can point you in a direction.But they can’t tell you:
Where you actually are
What’s working for you
What’s draining your energy
What needs adjusting
Only your data can do that.
Your business isn’t meant to look average.It’s meant to work for you.
So take a breath.
You’re not behind.You’re building something that fits your life and your goals.
And that’s what leads to business growth that lasts.
If you're ready to finally ditch the data drama and create a simple, repeatable process for growth, this is exactly what we do inside Metrics Mastery.
Get started for free at amytraugh.com and let’s build a business that’s backed by strategy, not stress.
Until next time, stop guessing and start growing.
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Transcript for Episode 446. Are Industry Standards Actually Slowing Down Your Business Growth?
@0:05 - Amy Traugh (Amy Traugh)
Have you ever asked ChatGPT something like, what's a good conversion rate? Or what should my revenue be by now?
And then immediately felt either completely relieved or totally panicked. One random statistic pops up and suddenly that you were convinced that you're behind or you're feeling oddly confident when nothing in your business has actually changed.
And this emotional swing can happen in about three seconds flat. Today we are talking industry standards and why they're not the villain, but they're also not your business bestie.
Because while they can be super helpful, they can just as easily mess with your confidence, your decisions, and your momentum if you don't keep them in their proper place.
When you sit down to look at your metrics, what you really want to know isn't technical. It's emotional. You want to know, am I doing
Is this working? Is this normal? And industry standards can feel really comforting because they seem to answer these questions for you.
They're concrete, they sound official, and they give you something solid when everything else feels like it's moving underneath your feet.
You don't want 20 possibilities. You want one clear answer. One answer that makes it feel like you're back in control inside a business where so much feels unpredictable.
And industry standards seem to offer exactly that. They quietly suggest, this is what you should be seeing. This is what's typical.
This is what successful people get. So no wonder they feel reassuring. And when you've been second-guessing yourself or tried multiple strategies that didn't work or invested time and money into things that over-promised and under-delivered, it can feel like a relief.
And at that point, benchmarks don't feel. Just helpful. They feel like a shortcut. They take the pressure off of thinking and tell you what to believe.
But comfort doesn't always mean correct. And what feels grounding at first can quietly turn into pressure later. Industry standards are meant to give you context, not identity.
And most people don't use them as context. What happens is we end up using them as a grade. And once an industry benchmark becomes a scorecard, that's when things really start to go sideways in our business.
The real problem with these standards isn't that they exist. It's that they're misunderstood. You have to keep in mind that industry standards are typically pulled from big companies with big budgets, built around different kinds of offers for different kinds of audiences, and collected.
in completely different economic environments than the one you're operating in right now. Yet, we're expected to look at these numbers and instantly decide, okay, am I ahead or am I behind?
It's like comparing your income to a celebrity's paycheck or your lab results versus someone else's. It's data without context.
And this makes it confusing at best and very misleading at worst. And then comes the emotional whiplash, right? If your number is lower than the industry standard, we assume automatically that something's wrong.
On the flip side, if it's higher, we can assume that everything's okay. But at the end of the day, neither one of these conclusions is guaranteed or even valid.
I've seen business owners panic while they're actually growing and others getting really complacent. Well, their profit margins are slipping, some feeling discouraged, even though their numbers are improving, and others walking around way too confident while their business is leaking money behind the scenes.
All because their focus was on comparison, not direction. Your business does not live inside an industry average. It lives inside your pricing, your audience, your offer, your experience, your capacity, and your timing.
And none of these show up inside an industry standard. So what ends up happening is that we compare apples to oranges or our chapter one to someone else's chapter 20, and then we wonder why nothing makes sense.
And these industry standards also ignore the questions that actually matter. They don't tell us if our income is steady, if our workload makes sense, if our price
Profit is sustainable or if growth fits our life. You can hit a benchmark and still feel your stomach drop every single time that the bills are due.
You can beat an average and still feel like you're one bad month away from closing your doors. These industry standards measure what's common, but they're not actually measuring what's healthy and working for you.
Another thing they quietly encourage is fixing numbers in isolation. So what do I mean by this? This is doing things like, okay, you're adjusting your open rates without checking conversion rates.
You're raising your prices without checking acquisition. You're chasing growth without paying any attention to a retention. You try to improve pieces without ever looking at the big picture.
But your business does not work in pieces. Traffic turns. Leads turn to sales, sales turn to cash, and cash flow supports everything else.
When you start trying to look like an industry average, instead of building a business around your strengths, your life, your capacity, you stop running your business and start running someone else's version of it.
That's not strategy. That is outsourcing your decisions to a spreadsheet that you didn't even create. I once worked with a client who was so stressed when she came to me because her email rates were so far below industry standard.
She thought that she was failing. But when we looked at her actual sales data, something interesting happened. Her emails were driving high click-throughs, strong booking rates, and a steady flow of clients.
So even though her open rate wasn't hitting industry standards, which said something was wrong, her bank account was telling a complete...
I've also seen business owners who are above average in all the obvious ways, right? Great follower counts, strong engagement rates, great open rates, and yet they're still struggling to pay themselves consistently.
Individually, their metrics are great, but their business wasn't healthy overall. And this is why industry standards without context can be super misleading.
They tell you what looks good on the surface, but not the reality of what's actually happening. Because sometimes the danger isn't that your numbers look bad, it's that they look good.
And this happens in the form of vanity metrics. So what are vanity metrics? I like to call them the things that are like sparkly, the shiny objects.
They're the glitter of the metrics. Things like follower counts, likes, views, traffic. They're these things that are really super visible and easy to see.
Celebrate. They're easy for other people to see and they give our egos a boost and that little rush of, oh, I must be doing something right.
But vanity metrics measure attention, not traction. They show who noticed you, but they don't necessarily show who paid you.
A growing audience doesn't guarantee income. Engagement doesn't guarantee profit. Open rates don't guarantee conversion. You can have a five-figure following, beautiful content, great engagement, and have barely any stability behind the scenes.
Visibility and viability are not the same thing. It is so much easier to say, oh, my Instagram account's growing than it is to say my cash flow is consistent.
One sounds exciting, but the other sounds kind of boring. But boring is actually... Vanity metrics are also super alluring because they grow faster than actually building a business.
A post can go viral, a reel can change your follower count, traffic can spike, but sustainable business growth builds slower.
It's quieter. But what does our brain do? Our brain grabs on to whatever looks loud and impressive, even when it's not building anything solid.
Underneath. And because these numbers are public, comparison hits really hard. So if you're following a smaller, a lot of times you assume you're behind.
If you see everyone else out there getting all these likes, all this engagement, seeing their posts perform, you're assuming you're missing something.
But you're not getting the full story. You're not seeing their expenses, their churn rate, their stress, their burnout. You're just getting that highlight reel.
And while vanity metrics don't lie, they're just not telling us the whole story. But the scariest part is that they don't just hide problems.
They distract us and delay us from fixing them. Because when everything looks fine on the outside, we don't question what's actually happening.
We assume that things are working enough. And when income finally feels to that point where it's, like, super stressful and you're second-guessing yourself, it seems sudden.
But it's not ever sudden. The warning signs are there. They're just hiding inside your metrics. Now, as you're listening to this, you may think, like, ooh, I'm, like, anti-industry standards.
No, I'm not. I'm just anti-making them king. They can be so incredibly helpful. When it comes to setting realistic expectations, especially when you're first starting out in business.
So take something like a launch. A lot of coaches in the online space walk away from a launch feeling like they failed because only five people enrolled in my program.
But when you actually run the numbers, what you can see is that the picture looks completely different. So let's say the general benchmark for a launch conversion rate is around 3%.
If you had 200 warm leads in your audience and 16 joined your program, that's an 8% conversion rate. That is not a weak launch.
That's actually well above industry standards. But here's where people go wrong. They don't look at the data. They look at the headcount.
They hear 16 and assume it's small. But when you factor in the size of the audience, the story completely changes.
The number itself wasn't the problem. It's the interpretation. So this is where industry standards are helpful because they give you perspective.
They stop you from... I'm emotionally labeling something a failure when the data tells a different story. And that's important because when you think something flopped, your instinct's usually to burn the whole thing to the ground, change your offer, change your messaging, start over.
But when the reality is that the issue might not be a performance, it might just be perception. So that's why benchmarks need to be an interpreter, not the judge.
They're there to help guide you, but not give you that final say-so. And when you use them strategically, they can help you from making unnecessary changes to things that are already working, just because your expectations were based on comparison instead of context.
So it's important to use them as a loose reference starting point, not a diagnosis. What's more important is that you look at your...
Metrics, so that you see the patterns in your data, so you can start asking better questions and flag areas worth exploring.
Your metrics should be the decision maker, not industry standards. And if your numbers are becoming more consistent, improving over time, and trending upward, things are working.
Even if you don't match some generic industry standard. And if you technically hit a benchmark, but your income and cash flow is still stressful and unpredictable, that matters too.
Instead of asking, is this good to compare to everyone else? No. Try asking yourself, is this improving in my business?
Is this getting better than it was before? And if not, that's okay. That's data too. We can use that as an opportunity for growth.
Growth isn't about competing with the internet. It's about That's what builds stability. That's what creates confidence and leads to business growth.
At the end of the day, industry standards are compass, not a map. They can point you in a direction, but they don't tell you where you are, where you're headed, or what's standing in your way.
Only your metrics can do that. Your metrics are your GPS. So if you've been beating yourself up over numbers that were never built for your business, take a deep breath.
Your business is not supposed to look like an average. It's supposed to work for you. If this episode resonated with you, this is exactly what I love helping clients with one-on-one inside my signature program, Metrics Mastery.
You can get started for free at amytraugh.com. And until next time, stop guessing and start growing.
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