Doing So Can Build and Protect Company Value
We often find that business owners and CEO’s aren’t leveraging their customer, financial and operational data their company’s possess and it’s holding back their ability to build new company value, or worth as we refer to it. This is a perfect time of year to invest time thinking about what data you and your team are reviewing to help you with new strategic insights about your business and to think about how you are looking at the data.
First ask yourself, what strategic questions you have about your business and have you looked to see if you already have, or could get, from your company data the information needed to answer them? Questions like:
- What is my customer tiering and which tier of customer is growing, flat or declining?
- What percentage of my customers buy 2 or more products or services from my company?
- Is there a geographic or demographic element to my business that has changed over time?
- Are we measuring Customer Experience effectively (ie: on time performance to their requirements, credits/returns, customer attrition, response time to queries, etc, etc)?
- Are we measuring our efficiency and productivity in how we enter orders, process invoices, process and schedule orders for fulfillment, make/deliver our products and services – are we doing these more efficiently year over year?
Next question to ask yourself is “how” is my team looking at the data and has this become stale? Ask these additional questions:
- When we review our performance data (financial or non-financial metrics), do we look at our performance in relation to updated targets/goals and prior period results so we compare to something?
- Are we looking at a long enough period to see trends in our performance? Are we looking at 12 month, 24 or even 36 month trends in performance of key metrics or are we looking at more narrow time frames which may not be facilitating insightful dialog?
- Are we graphing performance of key metrics, which will more effectively help us visually see and discuss performance trends, or are we looking at one dimensional spreadsheets and could be missing strategic insights that could jump out from graphical representations?
Our goal as executives is to build long term worth in our business. Rethink whether you are asking the right strategic questions about your business. Rethink the data you are capturing and leveraging within your business. Rethink how your team is viewing and discussing the data. All of these will add up to new insights that could help you avoid dangerous comfort zones and help build incremental company worth.
