At Women in Retail Leadership Circle’s On the Road event in Chicago last month, Jennifer DiMotta, founder and chief upriser of Uprisers Growth Partners, challenged the retail leaders in the room to rethink how they measure impact, make decisions, and position themselves for advancement.

“You can have a full calendar, a long list of priorities, and a team that’s executing against every deadline, but can you explain how all that work is affecting the bottom line?” That’s the question DiMotta posed to attendees.

Having spent much of her career in leadership roles at retail organizations, including Sports Authority, Office Depot, and Bluemercury, DiMotta now works exclusively with female founders to help scale their businesses profitably.

Her approach is rooted in a deceptively simple idea: Before deciding what needs to get done, determine what result you’re trying to achieve.

The Problem With Your Priority List

When DiMotta asks founders to identify their priorities, she often gets a familiar response: a list of projects, initiatives and tasks. Her follow-up question is where things get interesting.

“So what? If you did all of them, what would happen to your business? If you did none of them, what would happen to your business?”

According to DiMotta, many founders struggle to answer those questions.

It’s an important distinction. Launching a marketing campaign, improving customer retention, or hiring additional staff may all be legitimate priorities. However, without a clear understanding of the intended business impact, it’s difficult to determine which deserves the most (and quickest) attention.

DiMotta recommends working backward from a measurable outcome (e.g., revenue growth, improved profitability, reduced costs) before identifying the strategies and activities needed to achieve it.

For retail leaders balancing competing demands, the exercise raises a worthwhile question: Are you prioritizing the work that needs to get done or the work that will make the greatest difference?

Why Financial Fluency Matters Beyond the Finance Department

DiMotta was particularly candid about a challenge she’s observed among the female founders she advises: a lack of confidence or familiarity with their companies’ financials. She frequently encounters founders who defer financial questions to their accountants or CFOs. But as she pointed out, managing a budget, understanding a P&L, interpreting a balance sheet, and evaluating cash flow are different skills.

And you don’t need to work in finance to benefit from developing them.

Consider customer acquisition, for example. You may know how many new customers your latest marketing campaign brought in, but can you explain how that growth translates to revenue or profitability?

That connection is what DiMotta wants leaders to understand.

For women looking to move into the C-suite, the ability to evaluate decisions through a financial lens can help demonstrate readiness for responsibilities beyond a single department.

It’s about understanding the financial “storyline” of the business, advised DiMotta, including where you’re succeeding, where performance needs to improve, and what the numbers suggest you should do next.

Completing the Work Isn’t the Same as Delivering Results

One of DiMotta’s more revealing observations was how often organizations finish an initiative without returning to assess whether it accomplished anything.

A quarterly project gets completed, the team moves on, and months later no one knows whether the expected outcome materialized.

DiMotta’s recommendation is to establish the financial result you’re working toward at the outset and revisit it once there’s enough information to evaluate the impact. She also favors a more selective approach to priorities. Rather than the traditional 80/20 rule, DiMotta advocates focusing disproportionate attention on the small percentage of activities most likely to influence business performance.

To put that thinking into practice, she introduced a framework built around three questions:

  • Focus: What measurable outcome deserves the most attention, and what will receive less?
  • Influence: Who needs to be aligned, and what decisions or resources are required?
  • Results: How will you know whether the initiative achieved its intended impact?

It’s a useful exercise whether you’re managing a department, overseeing a major initiative, or considering your next career move.

DiMotta’s concluded her session by noting that leaders don’t necessarily need to accomplish more. Rather, they must be able to explain why the work they’re doing matters to the business, and have the results to support it.