I attended a weekly breakfast business meeting this morning, and was reminded of the importance of recording statistics, so that you take all the guess work out of management, and base your management decisions solely on statistics.
I’m afraid I’ve been a bit lax lately on such recordings, with the excuse that I’ve been very busy. Not true in fact. Yes, I always have something to do, but that doesn’t mean that all my actions are necessarily productive actions! Ha ha.
It was also very useful to be reminded of the fact that being lax usually means that you’re not facing something – something that would be brought to your attention when doing a statistics analysis, and you’d then have to deal with it.
So, I’ve now faced my own situations, brought my statistics up to date, did my analysis and made a plan for the coming week. I feel much more at cause now!
Right, statistics. As I am in business for myself, I also am the owner, and manager of my business, and need to manage all that a business normally entails. For this reason, I need to know what’s going on in any other part of the business, and not just the production/bookkeeping side of my business. Statistics are the way to do this. At the end of each week, I calculate my statistics, and then analyse them to see what is happening in the business, either good or bad. This then gives me the data I need to plan the next week/month and year.
Any area of any business can and should be reporting statistics. Statistics are numerical values of production: examples: how many pieces of promotion have been distributed, how much income, the value of production delivery, how many lines of news articles, how many staff, etc.. Any such statistics should be reported and graphed for any given period. If you do it weekly, this gives you a tighter grip on your company and you can change things faster. If you do it monthly, then any changes might have already had a destructive result that might take time to turn around. And yearly is useless for day-to-day management of a business.
It might take you a while to figure out which statistics to record, but this would be time well spent for the success of your business.
Once you have the statistics recorded and graphed, then you can analyse them on a regular basis, for either going up or going down. If it’s going up, you’ll want to know why so that you can strengthen these actions to ensure that it keeps going up. If it’s going down, you’ll want to know why so that you can fix it. You analyse the statistics by comparing them against each other, and also to discover WHEN a change occurred. This WHEN will then help you find WHAT/WHY. Once you know these, you can decide what the next actions should be.
Statistics give you FACTUAL DATA with which to manage your business.
Try it!
As always, keep it simple and… Flourish and Prosper 🙂
Lisa
Leave a Reply