Have you noticed that running a business can be tedious? I am, of course, speaking to the creatives among us who spend more time balancing their books, running their websites and corresponding with vendors than they do actually making creative product.
Managing your business requires a consistent approach to operations, especially in the way that you organize information. Do you sometime feel that you are up to your eyeballs in data with no clear way of using it? Forget Big Data – like many small business owners, you would probably be happy just to understand what all those numbers on your Google Analytics dashboard mean!
Information is only helpful to the decision-making process when it is structured for clarity. A key first step is to determine the urgency of a decision and the frequency that information is needed. Take this recent example: A group of brand representatives needed to relay information about which products were most popular with stylists. Except product requests from stylists were kept in separate daily logs and the brand reps had to pull the information from multiple sources to create their reports. The solution was to keep monthly product request logs. While obvious in hindsight, this change that I recommended in how the information was organized, saved tens of people-hours each month.
To begin the process of organizing information, here are a few questions for you: What are you trying to learn? Who needs to know what? Do you know the answers? Begin with the questions, and be clear about the decisions that need to be made, before scrutinizing the information.
Information does not have to be complex to be useful. Indeed, properly structured, it could free you to spend more time doing the things that matter and the things you love.
What do you do with all the information you get from your business? Please let me know on my blog, or give me a call to talk it over.