Stay on track with a dashboard

If your pipeline of work is running out and you’re close to hitting the panic button, a dashboard might be just what you need to help you sleep easy at night

Recently, one of my clients went through a prolonged period with no major sales. It was a rather alarming situation. Where others may have panicked or reacted in a knee-jerk fashion, he didn’t. Instead, he stuck to his marketing and sales process.

Six months later, he signed up several large jobs worth more than three million dollars – all in the course of a few days!

What was it that gave him such confidence to persist? It was the dashboard he had set up some time earlier.

What’s a dashboard?

A dashboard is a set of numbers and/or ratios that reflect the state of a business at any point in time. It may be you measure the number of hours invoiced each month, then compare that against the number of hours worked, giving an indication of labour efficiency.

When numbers for one period are compared with the numbers from a previous period (eg, month on month), it is possible to identify trends within your business and how you can change these for a positive outcome.

How it helped

The dashboard allowed him to monitor the overall health of his business, which showed it was actually tracking well. He had enough work to keep his team busy, so he had no need to panic and, barring an external national or international catastrophe, his business was in good shape.

Rather than being concerned by the lack of sales, he was able to keep his emotions in check by assessing all the activities that lead to sales.

If you don’t have a dashboard for your business and would like to set one up, here are some things to consider.

1. Identify your key activities

Decide on three to five key activities that have the most influence on the profit line of your business, then measure them regularly and consistently – and do it for a long time.

Track these activities for long enough to be able to clearly see how their outcomes are affected by any changes you make.

For example, another client of mine changed his Google AdWords based on the results of a market survey he conducted. Within just one week, the number of phone calls his company received increased fivefold.

Had he not been keeping careful records of changes and results, he may have missed the connection between the changes to the AdWords and the spike in calls. Now he can test other changes to his marketing strategies.

In building, there are several key indicators you could include in your dashboard:

• The number of enquiries you receive (and a means of measuring how many of these are turned into sales).
• The channels your enquiries are generated through.
• Operational gross profit as a percentage of income.
• Work in progress (the amount of work sold, but not yet built).
• The rate of change of the above.

2. Delegate daily tasks

Keeping careful records is something many business owners neglect. Sometimes, it’s just not in their personality profile – they would rather get out there and make things happen.

If this is you, then it may be in your best interests to delegate the keeping of records to an assistant.

3. Love the detail

Dashboarding gives you the ability to make small changes to your business and then assess the effects. It also gives you the ability to test a strategy before committing large amounts of resource to it.

Most actions by themselves may only have a small impact on profitability, but the cumulative effect can be devastating, or exciting. Being able to read these small changes early gives you time to take the necessary actions to prevent bad results or, on the other hand, to increase investment in those activities that yield good results.

You can’t rely solely on your annual accounts to give you useful management information, because they only provide you with a retrospective view of your business. Careful dashboarding gives you objective information on your company’s performance in real time.

Another client of mine was sure his business was going backwards, as there was almost no money in the bank! However, his dashboard revealed this was caused by actions (or lack of) several months back and that he was now tracking out of the hole. Once again, good dashboarding prevented knee-jerk decision-making.

4. Steer clear of emotions

It’s easy to get enthusiastic when things look as though they are going well, and conversely be pessimistic when it looks as though they are not. This can lead to poorly thought-out and hasty interventions. Dashboarding enables you to put your emotions aside and act logically.

Long-term success comes when you keep doing the right things – for a long time. It’s when we feel things are going bad that we make poor decisions.

Graeme Owen is a builders’ business coach at thesuccessfulbuilder.com. Since 2006, he has helped builders throughout New Zealand get off the tools, make decent money, and get more time in their lives.  Grab a copy of his free book: The 15 Minute Sales Call Guaranteed To Increase Your Conversion Rate: http://thesuccessfulbuilder.com/book-15-min-sales-call/ or join Trademates and connect with builders who are scaling too: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1832794793692377/