The right dashboard can revolutionize both your success and enjoyment in running your business.
Most specifically, the right dashboard will give you six key benefits as follows:
1. Total Visibility into Your Business
With your dashboard, you will know exactly what’s going on in your business at all times. You know what’s working and what’s not working. For instance, your dashboard could show you exactly how your last email blast to your customers went. How many people opened the email? How much sales did it bring in? Such answers should automatically appear on your dashboard. Compare this to most business owners who have to login to their email system, or ask someone else to do it.
2. Big Time Savings
How much time do you or your staff spend creating reports in Excel or other spreadsheet programs? Any report that you create more than once should go in your dashboard. And once in your dashboard, the report can be programmed to update every hour.
3. Improved Results
Bob Parson’s, the founder of GoDaddy, said it best when he quipped, “Measure everything of significance. Anything that is measured and watched, improves.” The fact is that when you see your key metrics in your dashboard, you intuitively start improving your results. To this end, the best dashboards automatically show success indicators, such as a green arrow facing up when you’re doing well and a red arrow facing down when you’re not. When you see the red arrows, you naturally want to fix those areas so they become green. And you do, and sales and profits soar as a result.
4. Reduced Stress
Every day I receive an email from my small business dashboard. The email includes a one-page summary of my business. It starts with my Profits, then shows my sales, then email results, advertising results, customer service results, etc.
For each of these key metrics I see my results month-to-date and how it compares to the previous month and previous year (color coded with green arrows facing up when I’m doing better than the last periods and red arrows facing down when I’m not). I can thus quickly scan every aspect of my business to see how I’m doing. And if there’s a problem (e.g., revenue from email marketing is down), I know precisely who in my company to contact to fix the problem.
So even if I’m not in the office, I can rest easy, since I know exactly how my business is performing, and exactly which areas need improvement.
5. Increased Productivity
Dashboards allow you to measure performance numerically. For instance, your customer service manager could see metrics such as the return rate, the average speed of answering phone calls, etc. Importantly, when they see their performance numerically, particularly if you use the green and red arrows mentioned above, they’ll naturally work harder to improve their performance and results.
6. Increased Profits: As discussed, your dashboard shows you exactly which areas of your business are performing poorly. When you know this, you know exactly where to focus your time to increase results. Conversely, your competitors probably don’t know this, and thus spend their time in the wrong areas. By knowing precisely what’s working in your business and what’s not, it’s simple to increase both sales and profits.
What are your thoughts? Please leave your comments below.
