People are fascinated by numbers and statistics
Watch any sport on TV and notice how many scorecards and statistics you’re provided with to enhance the experience.
For elite sports men and women of course, understanding exactly what they do right and wrong is critical to whether they win or lose and measurements are made not just during the course of a contest, but throughout the year in training – and even when not training, for example when measuring and adjusting nutrition.
With the recent coronavirus outbreak, like many I’ve been awaiting (not without trepidation!) the daily published figures on infection rates in my area. These numbers literally save lives, by alerting people to the risk and allowing our health services to plan and predict demand as best as they can to put resources where they will be needed.
Numbers matter
Numbers matter, and they matter in your business too
What’s the most important number in your business?
Sometimes this isn’t that clear, there are so many things that you could measure. The approach I like to take with this is to ask this:
If you were only able to measure one thing in your business, the one thing that allows you to understand better than anything else how your business is performing, what would it be?
For us our ‘one thing’ is billable time. In order to cover our costs, I need to make sure our staff are working on projects that bring in revenue.
There are a few other measurements that are important too – how much time is spent on fulfilling our support agreements, for example, or what proportion of time is spent on R&D.
But from a day to day perspective, billable time is the one thing that allows me to understand how our business is performing. It’s a great early warning system for ensuring that we’re going to bill each month what we need to keep things running – it’s no good finding out at the end of the month that we didn’t do enough work, that’s too late by then. So we measure and report on it daily.
As a minimum then in your business you need to
- Decide what your most important number is
- Find a way of measuring it
- Set some targets to compare against
- Get the results visible to everyone in your business who can affect them
There are plenty of automated systems you can use to do all this for you, but that shouldn’t be the priority – keep it simple initially, and road test. In that way you can fine tune exactly what you need before committing to something more involved later on.
An Excel spreadsheet is often one of the simplest ways – ask your staff once a day to record the numbers (whatever they are) in the sheet, and task one person with collating and passing the results out.
Get the results out there – not just buried in an email somewhere, but on a wall that everyone can see. If you want people to help you hit the numbers you’re looking for, you’ll engage them more if they’re on display.
As regards presenting results, the simpler the better – you don’t need fancy graphics, dials and pie charts nice though they are. At it’s simplest you could just write 2 figures on a whiteboard – the actual number you hit, and the target number you hoped to hit. If you’re below your target, circle it red. And that’s it!
It’s quite extraordinary how doing that one thing can improve your business performance, almost overnight.
Of course as time goes on you will likely find that you do need a more sophisticated solution, and that will take a bit of time, effort and expense to implement. But don’t let that put you off starting to measure what matters to you now – do it today!
Need any help?
I hope this article on the importance of keeping score is of use. If you’d like to discuss any of the points raised, we’d love to hear from you – leave us a comment below.
Or if you need anything specific, we’d be happy to help with some free advice. Give us a call on 01992 466877 or send us a message
