Market Your Business without Breaking the Bank - Series Two

This is the Second in a Series of entries on Marketing Your Business without Breaking the Bank. The information is from a talk I presented at the Womens' Business Center Breakfast Table entitled Marketing without Breaking the Bank. Read part one if you haven't yet.

Onto the Series

Another strategy to help you improve your business is by creating a Dashboard. Think about every time you get into your automobile and turn the key. The Instrument panel on your dashboard gives you many indicators of the way your car or truck is performing, whether your safety belt is connected, how many miles you have traveled, whether you have enough fuel and the list continues. Well, to run your business you should have a dashboard with many indicators that you check often.

There are many Dashboard software programs on the market, but if you are a small or micro business you can utilize a spreadsheet to build your own customized dashboard.

3 Keys that Turn Your Dashboard On

1. Measure Efforts. A dashboard allows you to measure the efforts you are making throughout your business. What you measure will depend on your business plan and what is critical to your business. Here are a few:

a. You should include cash flow, accounts payable and receivables and any other day-to-day financial activities that your business incurs.

b. You should measure your marketing efforts. One example may be your search engine optimization efforts. If you are spending money whether it is internal or external to increase your ranking in search engines ask yourself if you are getting the return on this investment you expected.

c. You should measure sales leads in relation to the efforts you are putting towards generating new business.

d. Other ideas may be your customer satisfaction, your product margins, or your capacity utilization.

2. Create Metrics. Measurement for the sake of measuring is a waste of time unless you have some metrics established. As in the example above, set some weekly or monthly metrics to determine if the path towards your annual financial goals is moving forward. Some of the metrics may be determined based on what you have laid out for your business plan or annual plan while others you may be benchmarking against an industry standard or leader, a competitor or a historical data point. What matters most is that you have one and if you don't have one begin to measure the effort then set develop some goals based on the data.

3. Evaluate Programs or Projects. You have likely started some special program or project in your business and this needs to be part of your dashboard. Here is where you tie in the measuring and metrics, but make them specific to your special efforts. For example, I worked with a customer that ran a variety of workshops, but never measured the returns of the workshops in relation to any specific goal for the business. I asked them what they expected the workshops to do for their business, was it to generate new customers, increase overall sales, or promote new products? We discussed their specific expectations which they definitely had but were not doing any evaluations of the workshops. We then explored all the current workshops they had underway and went through the list to determine if any of them should be eliminated, improved or utilized in other ways that would benefit their customers and their business.

When You Should Look at The Instrument Panel

When you look at your dashboard will depend on the size and nature of your business. I look at my dashboard weekly and for the majority of my customers weekly seems to be the best way to keep on top of their business and to gets them into a routine. I recommend setting one specific day and time each week to pull the data together and review it and take any action that may be necessary to rectify an issue or celebrate a success.

Share the Information You should share the Dashboard with your employees either as often as you look at it or at some designated time each month or quarter. It is just as valuable to them as it is to you and keeping them informed would help you with challenges, changes and celebrations.

Go ahead and start a dashboard with just a few of the criteria I've mentioned. It does not have to be elaborate or perfect. Allow it to evolve and let me know how it goes.

Thanks for reading.