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The Basic Questions
Albert Einstein once said, “Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.” While Steven Hawking reported, “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.” So, think about actually seeing the problems of your business and situate yourself in a position to adapt!
A good dashboard should give you key insight into your business, and should fulfill goals that you have set for your business. But, a dashboard should also give you the at-a-glance, real-time data concerning the basics of your business.
There are two basic questions in business:
1. What product or service makes me money?
2. How do I sell it?
Now we can get pretty complicated answering those questions, but start out by building the basics. Collect the information you need to build off of and make it easy on yourself to look at this data whenever you want. The rest of your analysis can be added in later to support those goals that you and your business are currently developing.
I put together a list of questions that you should be able to answer at a glance with the proper software and hardware.
1. What product or service makes me money?
Product
- How do you make that product?
- How much can you make of it?
- How expensive is it to make?
- How long does it to make?
- Which products are you making right now? Where are they in development?
- How much is currently in stock? What does that cost the company?
- How do you price this product?
Service
- What are the services?
- How do you provide that service? Does it involve travel? Does it involve phone calls? What kind of resources and software do you need?
- How often do you provide this service?
- What are the services?
- How efficient are the services? How long does it take to provide?
- What does it cost you to provide that service?
- What service is performing the best financially? The worst?
- What is the lag time between providing each of these services at request?
- How do you price this service?
2. How do I sell it?
Product
- What are the features of each of the product?
- What problem do those features solve for the potential client?
- What amount are you spending to present those products to a potential client?
- What does that client look like? How many of those potentials are in your pipeline?
- How many clients currently purchase each product? How much are they paying for it?
- What product sells the best? What product sells the worse?
- How long is your sales process for each product?
Service
- What are the features of each service?
- What problem do those features solve for the potential client?
- What amount are you spending to put those services in front of your potential clients?
- What does a client look like? How many of those potential clients are in your pipeline?
- How many clients enjoy each of your services? What do they not know about?
- How much do they pay for your services?
- How long is your sales process for each service?
Once you can access and trust this kind of data, setting goals for your business becomes second nature. Adaptation is based on situational awareness and your genius for tracking will reflect your business intelligence.
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