A friend of mine shared a concept with me that reframed how I think about goal-setting. He called it “pre-success failure.”
Here’s the idea: when you set a target — close 10 deals, hit $500K in revenue — you’re technically in a state of failure until the moment you hit the number. Even if you’re doing everything right, every day before the milestone is a miss by definition. It’s an all-or-nothing frame that creates a lot of anxiety and very little useful feedback.
His alternative: track the activity that causes the outcome, not the outcome itself. Build short feedback loops. Find daily wins in the process. That way you’re succeeding every time you show up, not just when the deal closes.
I’ve been doing a version of this for about two and a half years now in my capital connector work, and I think it’s the most important thing I’ve figured out about building deal flow.
The Number I Actually Track
When I started focusing on making deals happen in Austin — connecting startups with investors, facilitating real estate rounds, making introductions across my network — I could have tracked a hundred things.
Deals closed. Revenue from advisory shares. Number of active opportunities. Follow-ups sent.
Instead, I started tracking one thing: how many lunches and dinners did I have this week?
That’s it.
My reasoning was pretty simple. I’m hyper-focused on Austin — deliberately so, because relationships deepen in person and geography matters for this kind of work. Deals come through relationships. Relationships deepen at meals. So the meal is the leading indicator, and everything else is downstream of it.
The goal every week wasn’t “close two deals.” It was “have enough meals with the right people.”
Why Leading Metrics Are Better
Most people in sales or business development track lagging indicators. Revenue. Deals closed. Clients signed. These are fine metrics to understand — they tell you how you’re doing. But they can’t tell you what to do next, because they’re measuring outcomes of actions you took weeks or months ago.
A leading indicator is something you can influence today that will show up in your results later. It’s predictive rather than reflective. And critically, it gives you something actionable: when results feel random, you can ask “did I have enough dinners this week?” instead of “why aren’t deals coming?”
The problem with lagging metrics is you don’t know they’re bad until it’s already too late to fix it. By the time revenue dips, the relationship window you needed to open six weeks ago has already closed.
What Happened When I Applied This
Two and a half years of tracking dinners. Nine deals closed in 2025.
I won’t pretend it was all linear or that the metric alone caused the outcomes. But I can say that consistency in the activity created consistency in the results. When I had a good stretch of meals, deal flow followed, usually with a lag of a few weeks to a few months. When I went quiet — didn’t prioritize the meals — the pipeline thinned.
The other thing I noticed: the group format is meaningfully different from the one-on-one meal, especially for anything involving capital.
I’ll invite 20 or 30 investors to a dinner where a founder pitches. The buffet-style, informal format does something that individual meetings never replicate — people see each other engaging. One investor starts asking sharp questions. Another leans in. Someone commits. And suddenly the social proof is doing the work that months of cold outreach couldn’t.
The one-on-one conversations that happen after that dinner move fast. People have already decided they’re interested. You’re just working out the details.
But whether it’s 2 people or 30, the underlying question is the same: am I having enough meals?
How to Find Your Version of This
The specific metric — dinners — works for me because of how my business model functions. Your version might be different.
If you’re building a consulting practice, your leading metric might be discovery calls. If you’re trying to grow a newsletter, it might be the number of original observations you record each week. If you’re trying to hire well, it might be the number of deep reference conversations you have per candidate.
The key question: what activity, done consistently, almost always produces the outcome I’m after? Not what outcome do I want — what input causes it?
That’s the number to track.
The Practical Test
Here’s a fast way to find your leading metric:
Look back at the last 5-10 times you got the outcome you wanted. What activity happened in the weeks before it? Is there a pattern?
If deals always seem to follow a stretch of active relationship-building, you’ve found your leading indicator. If new clients always come from referrals, the leading indicator is probably the quality of service you deliver to existing clients.
Most people spend a lot of energy optimizing lagging metrics. The faster path is to identify the leading one and do that, consistently, regardless of whether the lagging number feels satisfying yet.
The deal follows the dinner. Track the dinner.
For a structured approach to tracking what matters and designing the week around it, the weekly review is where I do this weekly — asking whether I moved on the things that actually cause results.
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