November - 2013 - issue > In My Opinion
The Metrics of an E-Commerce Success
Ajay Kumar
CEO-Monoprice
One of the toughest challenges facing a business leader is not only creating a successful, profitable company, but developing an open and thriving company culture to sustain it over time.
This is why the frequently-used business concepts of metrics, company vision, leadership, and teamwork are so important to not solely measure a company's success, but to foster it.
Taking over in 2011 as CEO of Monoprice, an emerging consumer electronics e-commerce company, my challenge was to figure out how to transition from a company where the owners made all the decisions and employees mainly executed them to one where the employees think like owners and have the freedom to make the best choices for our business.
When Monoprice was a small company, the owners could personally control every aspect of the business. Now that our company is generating about $140 million a year in revenue and growing quickly - traffic has increased 81 percent and revenue has surged 141 percent in the past three years - we needed to implement the appropriate organizational structure, accountability, metrics and incentive plan in order to maintain the proper controls over our business. This has been an ongoing process that we consistently maintain and calibrate to determine the efficacy of our business procedures and its success as a result. Consequently, our company's rapid growth can be tied directly to matching our people and their expertise with our ongoing metrics and overall company vision.
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