Data driven thinking for your business

Data-driven thinking continues to provide significant advantages for businesses by utilising the power of numbers, data and metrics to guide decision making and strategic planning. Data needs to become a fundamental element of your business and valued and understood by employees at all levels of the business.

What is a data-driven business?

A data-driven business utilises data to make decisions within the business. The intricacy of managing the day-to-day operations of a small business requires owners to view performance in several areas all on one page. To help you make smarter decisions, you need to have a thorough grasp of the key drivers of your business, using your real-time business data.

What is the importance of data in business?

Most businesses are already collecting a huge amount of data. It can usually be found in an under-utilised CRM, other cloud based systems, spreadsheets, or even on local servers. But, what is the importance of all this data and information? What, as a business owner, should you do with all this data? Data can provide key insights, highlight trends, assist with future planning, help you to improve systems and processes and provide you with opportunities to make key decisions in your business. As a business owner, you can utilise the power of data to improve or grow your business and empower your employees to look for opportunities to use the data in multiple ways in your business.

Business metrics and data

Business metrics can be broken down into a number of key areas including financial metrics, marketing metrics, sales metrics, customer engagement metrics and other metrics relative to the industry that your business operates in. The most common metrics that businesses review is generally focused on financial metrics and financial data.

When reviewing your financial and business data, is it possible that this information can be cleaned and organised, extracted and transformed into something highly useful? What if you had something that would help you make business decisions a lot more quickly and prior to when you actually need to make these decisions?

A visible dashboard is an important part of any high performing business. You can make smarter decisions using real time business data with the YBM business dashboard. It’s like a google map for small to medium businesses.

The Google Map
for your Business

We can help you make smart business decisions and get to your destination faster with:

real-time business navigation update
dynamic business imagery/snapshot
live view of your key drivers

How to choose the right business metrics to track and measure

There are many ways that data can be used in your business. When considering the right business metrics to use for your business, consider the following best practices for identifying and monitoring your business metrics.

Choose the right metrics for your key performance indicators (KPIs).
Make sure that your KPIs are measurable.
Make sure your KPIs and metrics are accurate.
KPIs and metrics need to be actionable.

For example, when people keep score, they’re more likely to be driven towards a goal and they work or act differently. As Franklin Covey’s 4DX explains, by keeping a compelling scoreboard, your team works together and is more invested because it is up to them. It’s important to note that the emphasis here is on your team keeping score - not you. If it’s not up to them, then they won’t feel compelled to work for the best result possible, as they don’t feel responsible for the outcome or reaching the goal. Given this, it’s important to ensure that you support your team, but empower them to be able to keep score of their own KPIs and explore and analyse their own data.

Data-driven decision making

Data-driven decision making focuses on using data to support decisions, rather than relying solely on observations, knowledge or intuition alone. Using data as a basis to make informed decisions continues to grow in popularity due to the success business owners achieve by implementing and actioning data-driven decisions in their businesses.

One important area of using data to drive business decisions is through your numbers, or your financial data. Many business owners don’t know what numbers they should be measuring. There are 3 key financial reports that you should review in your business - your profit and loss, your cash flow and your balance sheet. These three financial reports can play a big role in helping you to make informed decisions in your business.

How to make a data-driven decision for your business

To make a data-driven decision for your business, you should follow the following key steps:

Identify and understand your business objectives
Review what data is available to you within your business
Collect the relevant data
Analyse and explore the data against relevant metrics
Develop a strategy or plan using the insights gained
Take action and work towards your business objectives using the strategy or plan developed.

Are you ready to make smarter decisions using real-time business data? Then you need the ultimate business dashboard where you can connect data from all your business applications.

A Business Dashboard
for Small and Medium Businesses

The intricacy of managing a small business requires owners to keep a finger on the pulse on many areas of the business.

To help you make smarter decisions fast, you need to have a thorough grasp of the key drivers of your business, using your real-time business data

We can help you make smart, data-driven business decisions and achieve your business goals with

Real-time business update

Visual performance at a business and team level

Live view of your key drivers

As you now know, there’s a story behind your numbers and we can help you bring them to life. As business consultants, we know the business fundamentals really well, understand the drivers of a good business, and can help you make smart business decisions to scale and grow your business. Take the first step and get in touch with our business experts who can help you bring your business data to life.