When your team can easily wrap their heads around the numbers critical to their department, it’ll change their behavior.

 By MARK RIFFEY for the Flathead Beacon

As a business owner, you have so many numbers to keep track of and take action on. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by them and find yourself at a point where the forest and the trees blend together into a big, green, meaningless smoothie. When all you have is a “pile” of numbers on a spreadsheet, it’s far more difficult to communicate to others what your numbers mean, where they are going, and how they’re related to one another.

If you use open-book management, it’s even more important to be able to convey your numbers in a clear, simple manner so that you and your team can start to see the engagement and ownership that OBM promises.

A dashboard is a simple, visual way to bring clarity to your numbers.

What info belongs on a dashboard?

That’s up to you, because you decide what’s important enough to display on your dashboard. Like the indicators on the dash of a car, the things you most want to be aware of on a daily basis should be on your business dashboard.

What numbers represent those things? Sales YTD? Sales YTD vs last year’s sales YTD? Number of leads this month? Revenue this month? Percentage of budget for sales, specific expenses, and/or raw materials?

You might find that each department has a number that’s most important to them.

Marketing might want to see average cost per lead, cost per new customer, churn rate or new leads this month vs last month. Sales might monitor some aspect of their pipeline, or new customers so far this month vs last month, or vs this month last year.

Manufacturing or programming departments may want to display backlog size, cycle times, days till a big milestone, and/or defects over a specific period of time. Shipping may wish to monitor mis-ships, damage claims, and/or returns.

Accounting will want to monitor things like total accounts receivable, the average age of receivables, or at a startup, the number of days of cash flow on hand. They may change their mind on that last one if things aren’t going well.

There will likely be some numbers of broad, across-the-company interest, such as monthly recurring revenue (MRR), number of customers, and sales YTD vs this time last year.

Having different departments “suddenly” seeing what’s most important might provoke some conversations that make everyone take more ownership.

It’s not critical that all of this comes together on day one. Your dashboard might start as a weekly email until you figure out all the pieces and parts to include and how to get that data into a tool that will help you display it for the entire company.

Dashboards don’t have to be difficult

While you can get plenty “sexy” when it comes to dashboards and technology, it isn’t necessary. The data is what’s important, not the tool used to convey it.

A whiteboard and dry erase markers is a good next step after a weekly email.

Once sunlight is shining on this data, provoking people to ask questions and talking about the data and their impact on the company’s numbers, you may wish to ratchet up your game a bit with a real-time dashboard.

Getting fancy with dashboards

If you want a dashboard that’s connected to your company’s data, there are a lot of tools out there to help with this effort. I suggest checking out the paid-for and open-source dashboards before building your own.

If you have software people or skills, you may want to check out open-source dashboard tools like Re:Dash, Dashing or Freeboard, as well as dashboard / data collection APIs like Keen, Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Segment.  Paid dashboard systems include Geckoboard, Datadog, sassmetrics, and Klipfolio.

Most of these systems have built in features to make it easier to present the data on a large screen digital monitor or TV. This can be useful in the common areas of a shop or office – making sure the data is available no matter what an employee’s job duties involve. When you consider
placing these displays in a common area, keep in mind who might visit that area from outside your company. Open-book management doesn’t mean showing your numbers to anyone who stops by.

When your team can easily wrap their heads around the numbers critical to their department, it’ll change their behavior. A dashboard can help you get there.

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Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a strategic, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site, contact him on Twitter, or email him at mriffey@flatheadbeacon.com.  Check out the Flathead Beacon archive of all of Mark’s blogs.