For those of you running, or hoping to run, or trying to run, growing and profitable businesses, there are only six metrics that you should be looking at:

Customer retention – What percentage of your best customers are you retaining? Thriving organizations retain more than 85% of their best customers every year.

Employee retention – What percentage of your top people are you retaining? You should be well above 90%.

Revenue per customer – Are your customers spending more with you each year? This metric should be increasing every year.

Profitability – Is your profitability increasing even if your revenues are not? This metric should be increasing every year.

Customer base – Is your customer base growing (meaning you have more customers this year than you did last year)? This metric should be increasing every year.

Vitality index – What percentage of your revenues come from products or services created in the last three years? World-class organizations have a Vitality index of greater than 30%.

How are you performing against these metrics?