My wife and I had a relatively young business that, in 2019, was open for its first full year.
One of the things that we were happy about was the fact that this business was making money. One of the things that we really screwed up was we didn’t know how much money it was making and how much money was owed.
Luckily, our accountant recommended to us to set up a dashboard.
All that we wanted to see was how much money is owed and from who, and how long has it been since we were billed.
Strangely, I figured that we were owed about 12,000 to 16,000 in late payments.
Well, imagine my surprise when I learned that we were owed over 60,000 from late payments, and I had no idea that some of them were over six months old.
Through analyzing this, I would tell you that building this real-time dashboard was the single biggest change in our business in 2019.
No other factor changed our business as much as that one.
It gave us a new way to look at our problems, look at our business and see if we even want to move forward.
One thing we realized is there were certain clients who were not worth doing business with because every time we did business with them, we had to wait and wait and wait for payment.
So instead of just waiting for one large payment from them, we had actually undergone three large projects for them and still waiting on payment for all three.
This meant that it was more expensive for us to engage in new business with them than it was to not do anything.
In fact, we had engaged in new business and we’re waiting to get paid, and as I write this email, I still haven’t gotten paid from them.
Oh well, you live and learn.
But I would tell you that one of the biggest things that can help any business is a real-time dashboard.
This is confirmed by my friend, Jared Morris.
Jared Morris owns a software company called Graphly and their business is really all about displaying data to business owners.
Jared was saying that in every business that builds a dashboard and starts looking at it daily, he sees dramatic improvement within 90 days.
90 days, he’ll see businesses go from profiting a 100,000 to profiting 400,000 for the year.
That means you’re quadrupling your take-home income, that’s pretty incredible, and certainly something I wish I could do.
But I talked with Jared quite a few times, and he has the same mindset as does Warren Buffett.
Both of them say, “That which gets measured, improves.”
I think that which gets measured and displayed improves is probably an even better sentiment.
Jared said that after the clients build their dashboard, they’re not overly surprised by some of the numbers on there.
I have felt the same way, and I really was surprised that we were owed so much money and that it was so late.
So are you interested in having a great year next year?
Then, I think it might be important to set up a marketing dashboard.
A marketing dashboard tells you,
- What are you doing currently for marketing?
- What’s working and what’s not?
The great news is that with Clinic Gym Connect, you can digitize almost all of your marketing efforts and get them displayed on your dashboard.
You can also set timers to let you know that certain tasks should happen again, or how long it’s been since certain tasks have occurred.
- Do you want to know how many patients are calling your office every day? We can put that number on there.
- Do you want to see how many outbound phone calls your office is making every day? No problem, we can check that.
- You want to know how many text messages you’re receiving from clients? That number is easy to put up on your dashboard.
- Perhaps you want to build a campaign and see how many days or how many months you consistently meet with your referral partners. Not a problem.
All of that can be digitized and shown in real time and then you can search it through what’s happening today, this week, last month, last year.
All of that’s possible, and I promise you, when you build a dashboard for your company, amazing things will happen.
If you’re interested in getting started building a dashboard, then check out Clinic Gym Connect. We can build a dashboard that digitizes all of your marketing and communication efforts.
Once it can be digitized, it can be grown and automated.
So start with just knowing what you’re going after, and that knowledge comes from a dashboard.