Small business owners today are overworked and overwhelmed with all of the stuff they need to manage to unlock the success they are looking for. The key to unlocking this success lies in embracing data-driven strategies. In this post, I am going to share actionable insights that will take your client experience to the next level.
Knowing the data behind your business is no longer nice to know, it’s a must-know if you are going to make decisions that will gain you a competitive edge. In this week’s blog, I’m going to explore not only why you need to know this but also share some statistics from my own business that help me determine how I manage the team and tasks in a manner that my clients’ have become accustomed to. So if you want to improve your business efficiency, customer satisfaction and keep ahead of your competition then keep reading.
The 5 key data values that are growing my business
1. Making Informed Decisions – Your business data (it will all depend on what you are measuring) will provide you important insights into your customer behaviour, and operational efficiency.
The data that I measure on a daily basis provides me with the information I need in order to scale my team’s hours up or down based on the work trends for the month. What I decide here then has not only time management implications but also financial implications.
2. Competitive Advantage – Understanding your customer preferences helps you to determine and optimise your pricing strategies, and gives you an insight into identifying niche markets.
At JMJ – EA for a Day we offer a whole suite of Virtual Assistant services that covers a full end to end spectrum of virtual assistance. By measuring where our hours are spent helps me to determine what areas of my business need more exposure or identifies any gaps that I have so I can fill them by improving on our range of services. Something new is coming by the way!
3. Cost Effectiveness – By collecting and analysing your business data, you can determine what tech to keep and what you no longer need. Keeping a handle on this type of data will help you to reduce or allocate resources more effectively. Who doesn’t want to improve their operational efficiency and put more money in the bank.
Tech to help us in business is coming faster than we can keep up and we often jump on a bandwagon, it’s only 30 USD a month, no big deal, then we stop using it after a while and before we know it. 12 months have gone by and you’ve paid for a service you stopped using months before. Sound familiar?
Every 6 months I undertake a review of all the tech in my business. If I haven’t used it or it no longer serves a purpose, it’s gone. In the past month alone, I’ve cancelled 1k worth of tech that simply no longer serves its purpose. That is money I can invest back into the business. Agree?
4. Scalability – Can you scale your business? It’s a fair question. No one stays in business to plod along. I personally went into business to change the lives of others, that simple. Whether I’m empowering other virtual assistants to build a business or working with clients who are so stressed and overwhelmed with their business. My role is to be the solutions architect and to do that, I have to be able to scale my business. I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to do that if I wasn’t measuring the operational data in my business.
5. Risk Management – It’s better to know if you’re heading for a fall than to put your head in the sand and hope it doesn’t. Collecting and analysing data will highlight any issues that your business may be facing. Knowing what’s coming up so you can have a plan in place to mitigate it makes perfect sense. This year on the 11 May I will celebrate my 13th year in business and I didn’t get here by putting my head in the sand.
The data that drives JMJ
Every day, I spend time reviewing my dashboards in Monday.com
I want to review the type of tasks we’ve spent time working on in the current month. I can also review history by month to see any trends.
Keeping track of where team members are spending the majority of their time allows me to reallocate tasks to team members based on current workload. It’s important to me and our team culture that team members are doing the work they love to do and are passionate about.
Equally important is viewing the status of work from completed, to currently being worked on and any tasks that are stuck. This highlights what I need to take a closer look at.
Tracking the hours by month for clients is a great way to see who you are spending your time on. It might not be who you think. This type of data also shows where I need to add more team members to ensure the client is adequately supported.
Viewing workload by priority shows me how many critical, high, medium and low priority tasks for clients are being undertaken over the month. Measuring this type of data for me is about customer satisfaction. Hitting the priority deadlines is super important to our deliverables. Walk the walk, talk the talk stuff!
By measuring where my clients sit on the tasks as a percentage highlights where I have room to undertake more work for them and can scale up the team to deliver the goods for them.
One of my favourite statistics in my business since November 2023 (that’s how long I’ve been using Monday.com) is the cumulative data per task. As an example here is a birds eye view of the top 10 task categories I measure.
- Travel – 427 hours
- Website – 358 hours
- Social Media – 296 hours
- Admin – 241 hours
- Digital Marketing – 124 hours
- Weekly calls – 153 hours
- Podcasts – 118 hours
- High level OBM – 88 hours
- Scheduling – 68 hours
- Automations – 52 hours
That’s a total of 1,925 hours over a 25-week period and that works out to 77 hours per week. It’s actually more than that as we were closed for 3 weeks over Christmas/New Year so if I’m being pedantic that’s 87.5 hours a week.
So from this information, I can determine the type of team members I need with specific skill sets and how many I need to grow the business. With current team members, we have the capacity to do 100 hours per week so with this exercise I’m going to need a bigger team! So using my calculations the business can take on another client at 10 hours a week before we would need to scale again.
Isn’t’ the power of data amazing? There is so much more I could go into but I’m sure this post has given you some food for thought.
