Taking Control Of Your Business 101

3-Part Series, Part 1 of 3

Whether you have a new business and you’re just learning how to keep track of all of the moving parts or you have a well-established business that’s gotten a bit out of control, this article will help you focus on what is most important for gaining control over the business.

I’m going to share with you a proven system for always knowing what’s going on in your business. It’s going to get a bit lengthy so I’ve split it up into 3 parts, with a separate blog post for each part.

In this post I’ll outline the entire system but only go deeper into part one since the other two parts will be covered in subsequent blog posts.

The 3-Part TMI System consists of:

Part 1: Track – track your key performance indicators to gain insight into what’s going on with your business. Key performance indicators or KPIs, are key data points or statistics used to show a bigger picture over time.

For example, the number of patients you saw in a given month is a key performance indicator and when measured against the same number from pervious months, you begin to see a pattern or trend developing.

If all of a sudden you saw a 75% drop in patients seen one month, you’d know something was wrong.

This is a very simplistic example, and if you’re the one seeing the patients, it’s going to be obvious to you that there’s a significantly lighter patient-load, without needing a number in a spreadsheet to tell you so.

But the thing is, there are so many of these numbers that should be tracked in your business, because when you do you get to see a ‘big picture’ view and gain a lot of valuable insights into the health of your business and the next steps you should take or not take.

Starting out with a simple spreadsheet is a great way to begin tracking your numbers. Before long, you will think of more statistics to track, but here are a few to get you started:

Revenue In (income)
Revenue Out (expenses)
Number of customers or patients seen (or if you sell products number of products sold)
Number of new customers/patients added
Where new customers/patients came from
How many new leads collected
How many new leads converted to customers

Bottom Line: Numbers mean a lot in business and it’s important to track them just for the sole purpose of comparing them to previous numbers and using them as a basis for projecting future numbers.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward, You can only connect them looking backward.”
Steve Jobs

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In the next article, I’ll go more in depth on Step II: Measure.