How Visibility Into Your Business Data Drives Priorities & Accountability

I want to share an example of how visibility into your business data can:

• Create clarity around decisions and priorities, and

• Drive accountability and ownership from your team

Why Visibility Is So Important

Why is this important? 

I’ll give you two reasons:

1. I’ve noticed that many business owners new to using data don’t fully grasp its power until they experience it first-hand

2. Some of the biggest challenges service businesses face, especially at scale, are people problems. So growth requires creating a culture of accountability and ownership

Okay, let’s dive in.

How A Single Dashboard Led to Significant Course Correction

First, a little context:

Before we built any dashboards for one of our clients, they were focused solely on volume:

• Get more leads

• Book more appointments

• Do more jobs

• Collect more cash

But something I’ve learned from working with a lot of businesses is that, more often than not, efficiency is just as big of a bottleneck as volume – if not an even bigger one.

Basically these companies are not maximizing their outputs based on their inputs. They have big holes in their operations and are leaking dollars left and right.

A simple example of this is failing to collect payment from a portion of your customers – the lower your payment rate, the less efficient your business.

So the key to scale is not simply bringing in more volume, but rather plugging the holes in your business and reducing waste.

Why am I telling you this?

Because this client, like so many other businesses, struggled to grasp the magnitude of these inefficiencies in their business and were therefore not prioritizing fixing them.

And this is exactly where visibility into their data helped.

One of the first things we surfaced was their cancellation and no-show rate, which combined were over 30%.

They already knew they had a lot of cancelations and no-shows, but never knew the actual numbers.

Then we created a Lost Revenue dashboard, which tied this waste to dollars so they could see exactly when and how much money was being left on the table:

Two things tend happen when you get this level of visibility:

1. The problems worth fixing become crystal clear. A high lost appointment rate doesn’t mean a whole lot until you see that it’s leaving almost $200k on the table

2. It’s far easier to set expectations for your team and hold them accountable when you have objective data. If Tom knows that $65k worth of appointments that he’s booked and that are directly tied to his compensation were lost, there’s going to be a bit more incentive for him to find solutions

This is exactly how it played out with our client.

Immediately after seeing these numbers, they were brainstorming solutions and within a week had implemented new strategies for collecting deposits and sending appointment reminders.

So if you have ambitious plans for growth this year, you should be asking yourself: Do I have visibility into the biggest bottlenecks and their impact on my business?

If you’re not happy with your answer and ready for better visibility, grab a time on my calendar here.

Thanks for reading!
Josh

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