(Good) Data Isn't Optional

I want to share something I see all the time: business owners who don’t realize the value of data until they experience it firsthand.

Why Data Feels Optional…

Many business owners in service industries operate on intuition.

They rely on experience and gut feelings to prioritize and make decisions.

They think they run a tight ship, because after all, their business is growing.

But the truth is they’ve never really measured performance across their business objectively using data.

…Until It Doesn’t

As your business scales, intuition becomes a less reliable gauge of performance.

Your team grows, operations become more complex, and it’s hard to keep tabs on everything happening in your business.

Now it’s less clear exactly what to prioritize and where to invest your resources.

At JS Analytics, we often start working with business owners at the beginning of this transition.

Much of the time, they’re new to using data. They understand they need visibility into their data, but struggle to see the full extent of value it will provide ahead of time.

It’s only when they start seeing dashboards that they realize what they’ve been missing.

Suddenly, they have clarity into the magnitude of bottlenecks, leading to faster and more informed decisions.

Still not convinced?

Let me leave you with an example from a recent client engagement (a client who wasn’t initially sold on data but heed the advice of an external consultant and brought us on):

Prior to delivering any dashboards, this client was focused solely on volume - get more leads, do more jobs.

Then, we surfaced their cancelation/no-show rates:

It became quite clear there were some pretty big holes to plug and their bottleneck wasn’t simply volume. A cancellation/no-show rate over 30% highlighted the magnitude of lost revenue and wasted resources.

Now the question became, what levers can we pull to improve these rates?

Well, the sales team was already getting deposits when booking appointments, so why would anyone not show when they had money on the line…

…except this wasn’t true. In fact, the data showed sales reps were only sending the deposit link 25% of the time.

And unsurprisingly, there was a massive difference in show rates between those who paid a deposit versus those who did not:

The Key Takeaway

You may think every business owner should be on top of something as simple as this.

But at scale, these things are easy to miss or brush off. Data is just another tool to help you catch and prioritize the most impactful issues.

If you aren’t using data to prevent things from slipping through the cracks, there’s never been a better time to start.

See you next week,
Josh

P.S. To learn more about JS Analytics and what we do, check out our website here.

If you’re interested in becoming a client of JS Analytics, feel free to grab time on my calendar here.