Run your business with a one-pager

I read a couple of blog posts from the guys at Leads360 (Noel Collins at LeadCritic and Jeff Solomon) this morning. The premise of Noel’s post was that looking at the right data matters — Jeff’s takes it farther by noting that customers want, and I paraphrase, “answers – not reports or data.” This is insightful – business people don’t want software or reports. They want easy solutions that make their business better, make their lives better, etc. Riffing on this theme, I think the magic formula for managing any business is simplicity + good data + consistency.

Simplicity – pick the metrics that matter to your business and pay attention, very close attention to those metrics. Never pick more than five key metrics.

Good data – understand completely how you are capturing and measuring data.

Consistency – look at the data each day when you get to the office. Look at the data each week at your staff meeting. Look at the data each month as you review performance. Good habits are hard to break.

All that leads to the title of the post, run your business with a one-pager. The best general managers that I have worked with have a one page dashboard that they use to run their business on a daily basis. This works for small businesses and for large ones. I used to work closely with the team of people who ran the Disney theme parks. At lunch one day with the CEO of the business, I saw him pull a piece of paper out of his breast pocket. It was his one page dashboard. His four key metrics:

- number of visits to the park in the previous day (volume measure for his business)

- avg. wait time at the rides

- avg. spend per park visitor

- hotel occupancy rate and average daily rate

Our advice – pick your metrics, make sure you can gather the data accurately, and pay attention! Your business will be better for it.