data speed, boring but big

Summary

data speed is the boring, unsexy reason some businesses scale and others stall. when you’re small, looking at numbers once a quarter is fine. when you’re bigger, that lag will quietly destroy you. think of it as the difference between riding a bike at 5 mph and riding one at 80 mph downhill. same small turn, very different consequence.

1. build a CEO dashboard. a single sheet, looked at weekly. revenue, cash collected, and profit are the top three. revenue is what you earned. cash collected is what hit the account. they aren’t the same number and they drive different decisions.

2. top of funnel. new leads or subscribers per week. meetings booked, meetings completed. no-show and cancel rates matter as you scale.

3. product side. customer satisfaction or NPS score weekly. customer wins collected. net change in members or customers, especially on continuity programs.

4. marketing. ad spend, new subscribers from spend, meetings booked from spend. separates word-of-mouth growth from paid growth so you actually know what’s working.

5. sales. new deals, average deal size, close rate. the spread between them tells you whether to fix lead quality, pricing, or the close itself.

6. customer support and success. refund rate, response time. tools like HelpScout or HubSpot will auto-collect a lot of this if you turn it on.

if your NPS slides from 10 to 7 and you don’t see it for six months, you’ve already lost a wave of customers. data speed is what catches it on week one. try harder.

Transcript

the owner’s dashboard

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. Welcome to the Better Human Business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon and today I’m talking about data and speed of data. So I’ve been putting off this podcast because I didn’t, I didn’t know how to best talk to a broad audience about business.

If you’re listening to this podcast, the chances are you are running a better human business, right? Typically coaches, physical therapists, chiropractors, those are the type of people who are listening to this podcast. It’s still hard for me to talk about specific data. Each one of you should be collecting versus what I’m doing, which is helping these businesses and I have garage gym athlete and PT biz.

Like every business is a little bit different on the data. So I’m going to, I’m going to try to dive into things that you should be tracking to help you put together what we could talk about, call an owner’s dashboard, a CEO dashboard, something that you should be looking at on a weekly basis because here’s one thing I’ve learned in scaling companies and also like hard lesson learned or like when companies won’t scale.

And the big thing is it’s normally data driven, but it’s also data speed. So how quickly are we pulling the metrics to be able to adjust strategy and make decisions? Because when you’re smaller, you really just need more customers, right? You need a good product or service and you just need more customers.

the bike going 80 mph downhill

But then as you start to scale, that’s not going to be the only thing that you need. You’re going to need a lot more than that. And I’m about to dive into some specific things that you should be looking at, okay? But ultimately the speed of data is really important. Also when you’re smaller, it might be okay to just pause every one, once every three to six months and be like, okay, let me pull a bunch of data or have somebody on my team pull a bunch of data and let’s look retroactively at what’s been happening.

And then you can notice some trends, you can make some adjustments for your next quarter, your next six months, your next year, and you’ll keep growing. You can do that for a while. But eventually data speed is going to be very important because it’s almost like you start riding this bike and you slowly get going.

But eventually this bike, when you have a company doing a lot of revenue and a bigger team, it’s more like you’re on a bike going straight downhill at 80 miles per hour. And the slightest turn, the slightest tweak can have significant impacts on what happens to you on this ride. And so data speed is very important.

So let’s dive into some data you should be looking at. So just some basic stuff. First thing is going to be revenue. So just looking at how much revenue is generated on a weekly basis. And if you are, whether or not you are collecting that cash up front, so revenue and cash collected. So actually cash collected because if you sign someone to a bigger program in which they’re going to be paid monthly, you could count the revenue this month, but you may have only collected the cash for a one monthly payment.

And those are different because the actual cash you have in your hand, cash collected, is what can affect some of the decisions you make versus how much revenue is going to be collected. So those are two things that you’re going to want to look at. Another thing is definitely going to just be profit.

the top-of-funnel metrics

So how much profit is in the company. I would keep an eye on that weekly, monthly, at least if someone’s doing your books and it’s probably going to be monthly. So those are the big three metrics. Now we’re going to dive in a little bit more. So now things that you should be looking at are how many new leads or subscribers, whatever you call it, how many new leads are coming to the business.

So anyone that you can contact, how many are coming in on a weekly basis. So that’s something you’re going to want to track week to week. Is it getting better, worse, same? And then from next would be meetings booked and meetings completed. So how many meetings do I have booked or evaluations or if you have a sales call, whatever, how many meetings are booked, how many appointments are booked versus how many actually got completed because people can no-show, they can cancel.

And this is again more like front-end people, right, like people coming into the business. So that’s your next set of three. Now we get down into product metrics. So you’re going to be collecting some sort of customer satisfaction score or NPS and so that needs to be looked at on a weekly basis. What is the average score that people are rating you?

And hey, you might be listening to this and be like, I don’t get customer feedback surveys. Okay, go do that. So start implementing customer feedback surveys and see how many, not everyone’s going to reply to these or answer them, that’s fine, you’re just trying to collect as much data as you can. What is that week to week or is this number improving, is it going down, is it staying the same, how can we make it better?

Then how many customer wins have you collected? So I think it’s good for every company to have a process for collecting testimonials and just getting feedback from customers. So how many did you collect this week? And then how many new members or customers do you have, especially if you have any kind of like continuity plan, monthly membership plan, anything like that, how many new or what’s the net gain of this number of people?

product and customer metrics

So if you did have a continuity program, which people are paying monthly to do and you lost five this month, but you gained six, so it had net one. That’s what you’d want to know. Next, get into marketing. If you spent any money on advertising, again, how much money did you spend on the advertising?

How many subscribers you added from that and then how many meetings are booked from that? This is the same as the main three metrics I was talking about, new leads, meetings booked, meetings completed, but this is more attributed to your marketing efforts because sometimes you could just have word of mouth or like something, they’re coming in, but if you’re not like actually doing anything to get those new leads and new subscribers, then that’s not a fun place to be in a business either.

It might be nice just to have people randomly show up and become customers, but that’s not a scalable process. Marketing is scalable. So if you’re tracking your marketing dollars and how many subscribers come from your specific marketing efforts and how many meetings or evals are booked from your specific efforts, now you can start to develop strategy of what you can do to make it better.

So that’s the marketing side. Then sales, how many new deals did you have? So deal is like the potential of someone to join, doesn’t necessarily mean a new customer. What’s the average package or deal size? So what are they signing up for on average? Is it a $1,000 thing, $5,000 thing, $30,000 thing?

What is it? What is the average deal size when you average all the new deals that you got over the past week or past month? And what is your percentage of closed? So if I talk to 20 people, 10 of them closed, my close rate is 50%. So that’s what you’d want to track and see. Another thing, especially as you get bigger, is customer support and success.

So tracking how many refunds are issued, if any, what is your response time to customers is something I think that you could track. There are a lot of softwares that do this too. HelpScout is one of those, HubSpot does this. If you want to start tracking customer success metrics, you can say, it’ll give you all sorts of data like how long it took you to respond or team members to respond, and then it’ll automatically send the people who respond to you a feedback survey so it can start to collect some of that data for you automatically.

marketing, sales, support

So those things are good too, get a lot of that good feedback. And that’s going to be about where I stop before I think that you have to do anything else. I think those are good metrics. So if you just, again, I like to give you things that you can take action on. So if you were to go sit down and just build a spreadsheet that had just a column for everything that I just mentioned, and then you had a column tracking that week to week or month to month, and you just listed it down row by row, just going over each one, what’s my revenue, cash collected, how many leads did I get, meetings booked, all the marketing stuff, all that, you’d have a pretty powerful spreadsheet.

Something I wish I had, I don’t know, forever ago. Something I wish I would have been more organized in tracking and all that kind of stuff. Like I said, data speed becomes really important. And I’m not talking about, you have to be this massive company for data speed. In the beginning, like I said, it’s fine just to look every three to six months, how did we do, what kind of adjustments we can look at.

But after about a year or two in business, data speed starts to become more important because it’s not that you’re, you might still be growing, but you could be growing faster if you would have noticed some trends in something like, oh, my NPS score, my customer satisfaction surveys are going down.

They used to be all 10s, now they’re eights. What’s happened? What did I change? What did I do? If you notice that week to week, boom, immediate change, right? Immediate change. Hey, this is going down. What did we have to change? What’s the feedback we’re getting? If you wait six months to look back, you’d be like, ooh, six months ago, I was getting 10s and this six months, I’m getting sevens on my customer feedback surveys.

Damn, you waited way too long. You know what I mean? Like you probably lost a lot of people, that’s probably affecting your net gain of new customers, everything. That’s where data speed in your action of implementation to fix problems becomes really important. And I know it’s a lot of work. You got to put together a spreadsheet and you have to track all this crap and maybe even dedicate team member to helping you with these things, but ultimately it’s going to be worth it.

But if you’re in the camp where it’s just too much and you’re not going to do it because you don’t think that you need to, all I have for you is two words and one solution, try harder.