A mentee once asked me, "Sir Butz, mas malakas po ba kami kesa sa kompetisyon namin?" I asked him a simple question back: "Anong sukatan ginamit mo?" He paused. He had been comparing his follower count to his competitor's engagement rate — two completely different things, treated like they meant the same.

There's No Standard Formula for Comparison

This happens more often than most business owners realize, and it's one of the most quietly damaging habits I see in 35 years of mentoring entrepreneurs. There is no universal formula for measuring business performance online. Every platform, every tool, every agency calculates reach, engagement, and value differently. A follower count on one platform isn't comparable to an engagement rate on another.

The Same Confusion Shows Up in Philippine PR

A reach figure from one campaign isn't the same as a conversion number from a different one. Yet founders compare these mismatched numbers constantly, drawing conclusions that were never valid to begin with.

The same confusion shows up in how Philippine brands evaluate their media coverage. Two agencies can report wildly different "value" figures for the same campaign, using different benchmarks and different multipliers — and no one in the room can explain why the numbers don't match, because the formula was never standardized in the first place. If you can't explain the method behind a number, the number isn't telling you anything real.

What This Looks Like in Franchising

I see this trap most often when franchise owners compare themselves to competitors using whatever number happens to be visible — a follower count, a like count, a review score — without asking whether that number is actually comparable to anything. A brand with fewer followers but strong repeat customers is often healthier than one with more followers and no return business. The follower count told them nothing about which business was actually winning.

Build Your Own Benchmark Instead

Here's the discipline I push every entrepreneur I mentor toward: stop measuring yourself against numbers you can't fully explain. Build your own benchmark instead — your own sales trend, your own repeat customer rate, your own cost to bring in a new customer, tracked consistently over time.

That's a number you understand completely, because you know exactly how it was calculated and what it reflects about your actual business.

Comparison isn't useless — but it only works when you're comparing the same thing, measured the same way. Before you size yourself up against a competitor, ask the obvious question: are we even measuring the same metric? If the answer is no, the comparison was never real to begin with.

If you're building a business you eventually want to franchise, build it on numbers that are actually yours — consistent, explainable, and tied to what genuinely grows your bottom line. That's the only benchmark worth trusting.

Visit https://butzbartolome.com for more franchise insights, and if you're ready to build a franchise system measured by what actually matters, GMB Franchise Developers has been doing exactly that since 1991.