Business Performance Dashboard

Does your business plan have an effective dashboard to measure results?  If you can’t measure your results and compare them to your goals, your business will fail!

Here are three rules that will help you make an effective business plan dashboard.

Rule #1: Test and Track.

Start with your goals or you’ll never get there. These could be referrals, cost per lead, lead conversions, limiting waste, increasing quality, more sales, or whatever.  More below the fold about what your goals should be.

Once you have your goals, determine what resources you have available and create interactions for them to add value to your business.

At the end of any business interaction record the results and measure success based on the goals that were set in the beginning.

Rule #2: Your business plan should be as sophisticated as your business.

You need to know every factor that impacts the success of your enterprise.  You need to be able to measure how every interaction in your business affects your profitability.

Rule #3: Simplify your business.

This is rule three because it makes rule two more workable.  For your business dashboard to be be effective it must be simple.  If you have 500 areas where you can measure success, nobody will benefit from seeing those.  The purpose of a dashboard is to look in 20 seconds and see how good business performance is at any given moment.

What should your goals be?  The things you do most often.  That’s what you need to measure.  That’s what needs to be in your dashboard.  Choose 5 (or 10 at most) items that you can make into a visual display like a speedometer or pie chart or bar graph.  Having a quick visual measure allows anyone in the office to know how things are going.

Once the rest is done , the most important tip for the dashboard is for it to include things that your team knows how to impact.  If your team doesn’t see how their actions affect performance on the dashboard, they won’t be able to make the decisions that move your business forward.

Tags: Business Plan, Improvement, Leadership, Success Paterns, Team

This entry was posted on March 5, 2010 at 5:48 pm and is filed under Business Plan, Three Rules. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.