In the Consultancy Growth Club, we talk a lot about building personal brand systems. But here's the thing, it’s way too easy to get caught out tracking the wrong bloody numbers.

"That post got 50 likes!"

"My impressions are up 25% this week!"

"I hit 2,000 followers!"

Great. But did any of that pay your mortgage?

Look, vanity metrics feel good. They're like getting a pat on the head from the internet. But they're not the numbers that matter when you're trying to build a proper consultancy.

You need to track two types of metrics:

The "Am I getting noticed?" numbers

• Profile views

• Connection requests

• Post engagement

• Event registrations

These tell you if people are paying attention. Think of them as your early warning system - if these are flat, nothing else will work.

The "Am I making money?" numbers

• Inbound leads in the last 30 days

• Win rate on proposals

• Average fee increases

• How fast deals close

• Percentage of business that comes to you vs you chasing it

These are the ones that actually matter. They tell you if your personal brand is doing its job or just making you feel popular.

Here's the thing people get wrong: they obsess over the first set and ignore the second.

I had a client last week who was celebrating 10,000 LinkedIn followers. Brilliant. But when I asked how many paying clients that had generated in the past quarter, he went quiet. Turns out, zero.

That's like being proud of how many people walked past your shop window while your till stays empty.

The right way to think about this

Start with the "getting noticed" numbers. If nobody's seeing your content, connecting with you, or signing up for your stuff, you've got a visibility problem. Fix that first.

But once people are paying attention, shift your focus to the money metrics. Because that's where you find out if your personal brand actually works or if you're just running an expensive hobby.

The best consultants I know track both sets of numbers religiously. But they make decisions based on the second set. That's where the revenue lives.

This week's reality check

Take five minutes and answer these:

1. How many people contacted you directly about working together in the last 30 days?

2. How many of those turned into actual opportunities?

3. What percentage of your proposals are you winning?

If you don't know these numbers off the top of your head, you're flying blind.

And if the answers are "not many" or “none”, then all those likes and follows aren't delivering what you need, and you need to work on changing that.

Over to you

Which of these "money metrics" would give you the biggest wake-up call if you started tracking it properly?