- Hey there, Pete Moriarty here.
In this video I'm gonna be sharing with you
why your spreadsheets are holding you back
if you're using them for your KPIs
and your database management of your team.
So if this is interesting to you,
buckle up, we're gonna be going through some cool stuff.
Now, I started IT consulting at 15 years of age,
and since then, I've grown not only my business
but helped support the businesses of many of our customers
who have gone from small businesses
to growth mode to then scale mode,
and really build amazing organizations.
And one of the things that becomes really important
as the business grows and scales
is your KPIs,
is your actual, your data based management of the business.
And for most businesses as they're growing and scaling,
you know, it starts with just kind of like
looking at the P&L
and then you start to maybe move into some things like your
spreadsheets, and your kind of like more formal reporting.
And then at one point you may be
at the point where you've got some apps or some software
that you're using to manage or run the business,
and that's giving you data on how people are performing.
And that might be something like billable hours,
it might be something like number of jobs delivered,
it might be something like number of units sold
if you're selling a product,
and so we start to track and develop KPIs,
and these might be
something that's based on an individual's performance,
like maybe a sales target,
it may be a team performance metric
or it might be like, I don't know, maybe
a ratio or something in the business.
Now, KPIs are really important in a business
because they are gonna help a scale business
to know how the business is going
and where it's healthy and where you maybe need help.
It's also going to outline
if you've got any individuals that are
needing additional support or mentoring
or care from the team or
maybe someone's got something going on outside of work
and it's gonna immediately show up in the numbers.
Now, I'm not a fan of running
everything in the business in terms of
people management through the numbers,
because I think you've gotta find a place where
you're managing and you're using the numbers as guideposts,
but then you're still managing using a human element
and working to empower your team to work really well,
empower your team to be
intrinsically motivated rather than extrinsically motivated
for them to perform well inside the business
and for the business to achieve the goals.
But your KPIs are really important.
Let's say milestones or guideposts for you to know
okay, where's the business going,
what areas of performing
and what areas maybe need attention.
For me as the CEO of a business,
I look at KPIs as just kind of like warning lights.
This is an area that needs attention in a business.
It's not about, oops, someone's missed their target
and they need to be punished,
it's about, okay, what area needs some love
and what area needs some attention inside the business,
and that's how I approach KPIs.
Now, if you're a business and your listening to this video,
this is most appropriate to companies
that are in the scale mode,
businesses that have got through the early stages of startup
and now they're reaching scale mode,
and what we mean by scale mode is,
in our team technology adoption guide
and our growth roadmap,
scale businesses are ones that have
typically more than 20 employees
and they've got business model proven,
now it's just time to basically expand.
And it might be expanding into new markets,
it might be just hiring more people
and kind of growing out the model,
it might be investing in marketing
and really ramping up on how the business is going,
but scale businesses start to run into the challenges
around compliance, performance,
making sure that people are on the same page.
The CEO of a scale business starts to
completely get off the tools
and focus all of their time on culture and innovation
and things like managing the strategy of the business
and less about the day to day doing the business.
And so if you're a CEO and you're in a scale business
or you're running a scale business,
then you need to make sure that you're
managing by the numbers and you're aware of these numbers,
and I'm gonna show you some of the ways where
if you're still using spreadsheets for that,
you may be holding yourself back.
So first up let's talk about
the actual accuracy of your data.
Obviously, when you're a business and you're
doing your first couple of KPIs,
you're probably gonna be running reports manually.
Maybe you're pulling data out and profit numbers from your
accounting platform
or maybe you're taking things like the number of hours
that different people are billing
and you're running into an app and you're running a report,
and as you do your data analysis
you're probably pumping those into a spreadsheet
and maybe you're creating some graphs.
If you're using something like Google Sheets,
that's really easy to do because you can
drop the data in via a form
and ensure that the data comes into your sheet
in a uniform way,
or maybe you're manually entering data into a Google Sheet,
and that's okay as well,
and generating a live updating chart inside the Google Sheet
which is basically showing
what the data is and manipulating that for you in real time.
That all works fine until
you delegate that task onto someone else.
Because if you're the business owner
you're probably not gonna wanna to be spending
all the time working with your data yourself manually,
this is the kind of thing that
you should have someone else prepare for you,
and you just kind of see what the data is at.
The problem with relying on human input
in making sure that the KPIs are tracked in an accurate way,
is that well, sometimes people might get things wrong.
Maybe they don't show up on the right day to work
because they're sick or they're on holiday,
and the data doesn't get entered at the right time
or on the right day,
or maybe you have the problem where
you enter the data and you accidentally typo
and you're dropping the wrong number or
you get an extra zero in there.
And I've had some weird things happen on my
dashboard here behind me where
the numbers have just been completely wrong
and there's been a big spike in the graph.
Now, when you're using human intervention
there is the possibility for human error.
And so that's one of the biggest risks of
doing KPIs on a spreadsheet or doing it manually,
is because
that actual human element there
is just always gonna be a potential risk area for you.
Next up, let's talk about actually getting your data
on time.
Now, if right now you're getting your data
and you're collecting it from different apps and systems,
because most businesses
have a few different apps that they need to use,
your accounting is in one platform,
your delivery management is in another platform,
and you've gotta
draw in from all these data sources to the one place.
The challenge that you can find
is that it takes time to actually bring that data in,
someone has to go and manually run some kind of report,
and if that's not automated,
then the challenges with that is
you may be a week or two weeks or even longer
out of date with
what's actually happening inside the business.
And so you could
completely miss critical changes that are happening
if you're not on the ball and actually getting
real time data.
Now, an example of this is cashflow.
If you're in a business
and you need to regularly collect from your customers, which
cashflow is important to all of us,
unless you're completely funded
like a crazy Silicon Valley startup
and have $50 million in the bank account,
but for most because cashflow
is the absolute heart of our business,
particularly when we're in a fast growth mode
and we need to make sure that we're actually
funding hiring staff,
funding our marketing campaigns,
and they're making sure that we're getting
return on investment for our dollars.
Now, imagine if you had a 30 day delay
on knowing where your cashflow was,
imagine if in 30 days you would know
whether or not you collected the cash
from the invoices that you sent out,
you didn't know right now.
Now, imagine trying to run a business like that,
if you had a 30 day delay on that.
Imagine trying to budget,
imagine trying to make strategic decisions,
imagine if something went wrong
and your invoices didn't go out for a month
and you didn't find out till 30 days later.
That kind of cashflow impact
could completely kill a business,
particularly small businesses who often don't have more
than a whole months expenses sitting in the bank accounts,
that's just not how small businesses tend to run,
you could run into real challenges there.
And so I'm always a fan of real time data,
making sure that you have data immediately available to you,
so you're never waiting and wondering.
So when it's time to actually
turn the ship a little bit if you need to make some changes
based on the data that you're seeing inside the business,
you can do that quickly
without having to wait till the end of the month.
I wanna start to move away from some of the problems and
move to some of the advantages of using something
other than a spreadsheet.
And what I'm getting at here is using a dashboard,
like the one that I've got right here on my TV,
and using a business dashboard instead of a spreadsheet
for your KPIs gives you some very unique advantages.
Let's first talk about data analysis and manipulation.
Now, when you're a business owner and you're
looking at the numbers,
we wanna put our data scientist hat on
and go into analysis mode.
And what that is gonna allow us to do do
is actually look into the data,
but try and get insights from the data.
Ideally, we wanna be asking questions
and having the data give us answers.
And with that, if we just have spreadsheet
for us to manually manipulate that data we're gonna have to
dig around with pivot tables
and moving stuff around and doing that manually,
that can be a bit of a pain.
With a database dashboard,
what we can do is use pickers or modifiers or filters
within the dashboard to bring up different kinds of data
and manipulate the data that we have in front of us,
with no risk of breaking a formula
or messing around with a cell
or guessing how to set things up in a spreadsheet.
Something like Google Data Studio
has some great tools to be able to manipulate data
while you're actually working with your business data.
For example, being able to filter records
so you can drill down
into certain records and certain data types
to give you insights on more specific areas in the business.
Another one that I love is the Date Picker,
which means that I can actually
change between different ranges of data,
so I don't have to run a different report
or completely from scratch or
have one long report which has multiple years, and I have to
drill down into where it's relevant to me.
Having something like a modifier on the date
allows me to drill down just to the time period
that's relevant to the question that I'm looking to answer.
The other biggest advantage of using a dashboard is that
because the data is pulled in automatically via an API,
it's always gonna be up to date
and it's always gonna be available.
You reduce the risk of any human intervention and
any potential human error
by having someone manually putting data into a spreadsheet,
and instead it's all done by software via a connector
to whatever apps you're currently using.
The other great thing I love about using an online dashboard
is you can actually connect your data
to your accounting program,
to your job management program,
to your HR program,
any software that has an API
can have a connector built, which will actually
bring down that data automatically via a software program
and automatically place it into the dashboard.
Now, of course, you do need to get the formula right
to calculate and visualize your data,
but it only has to be done once,
and then you can trust that the data
is always gonna be accurate based on the computer program
downloading the data and completely removing
the need for any human intervention
therefore eliminating the risk of human error.
Now, there's plenty of dashboarding tools
available on the marketplace.
Google Data Studio is our favorite but there's also
Tableau, Looker,
even Klipfolio is another popular one,
and Microsoft have their own solution
which is called Power BI.
There's plenty of applications
out there on the marketplace
and for you to make a decision on which is best for you,
I'd look at well,
what software provider are you working with,
what business ecosystem are you using,
what's the cost of these,
and what's the cost gonna look like
if you scale dashboards to
multiple team members inside your organization?
The other thing is,
what's your internal capability
and what's the capability of the
consultant that you're working with,
if you're working with someone outside your organization
to actually build those dashboards
and deliver business insights to you?
There are plenty of options out there,
and we would recommend anything other than
trying to do it on a spreadsheet,
because when you're just using a spreadsheet for your data
well, you're gonna introduce a lot of potential problems.
Some of the reasons we chose Google Data Studio
is because it's free,
it's part of the Google family,
we're able to automatically connect a number of Google tools
like Google Analytics, Google Ads, YouTube,
and so a lot of the data just
simply and easily automatically flows into Data Studio.
Like everything, Google Data Studio is scalable,
it runs on the cloud, completely in the browser,
and that means that it's really nice and easy to use,
and there's amazing resources, support,
keynotes and all kinds of labs
and the whole library of community driven content
for Google Data Studio.
Because it's such a popular app and
it's used with so many businesses,
the Google ecosystem really
gives it that extra fuel behind it,
whereas other commercial options need to
make that up by either charging more or
supporting the community themselves.
Google have a great community around Google Data Studio,
and we love using that
of course, being a preferred Google cloud provider.
So if you're still using spreadsheets right now,
it may be time to consider upgrading to a dashboard
rather than keeping your data on a spreadsheet,
which has a number of risks that can pop up.
If you're interested in mapping out your own dashboard
or getting some help on
planning out your own business intelligence journey,
why not have it out to our team?
We are a expert team of Google consultants
and we can help businesses right from the smaller scale,
if you're in early stages of growth mode,
right up to large organizations with hundreds of employees.
If you're interested in building out
custom connectors between different apps,
so your data can be visualized inside of Google Data Studio,
we can help you build those connectors
between the different apps and APIs,
and we can also completely create
a custom dashboard for your business
so that you and your team can get access to your data
when you need it,
and we'll help you to grow and run
a more successful organization.
If you're a scale business,
you would know that
the challenges you had when you were a small company
and just a couple of people sitting around an office,
getting things going,
are very different as you grow
and turn into an organization that needs to create
IT policy, IT systems,
and have your team running with you onboard
with great database management
and great database decision making.
If this is one of your challenges
you're probably gonna have other challenges as well,
like maybe getting your team on board
with all the applications you're using,
getting the business on and off the tools
and making sure that your team
have the right tools in their hands,
and even things like change management
and making sure that your team are
trained on using the tools that you've given to them
and making sure that everything is running smoothly
and in operational flow
across your business on the technology side of things.
If you're interested in more support, more handholding,
or just want to have a chat,
you can schedule a free consultation with our team
where we will take you through a complimentary review
of your IT systems, your IT strategy,
and see if there's any way that we may be able to help you.
But at a minimum
we'll be able to give you some great advice
on leading and growing your business
with a technology strategy
foundational to the success of your organization.
If you're interested in that,
jump on the link below,
check out our website, and our team will be happy
to schedule a call with you.
Until the next time, I'll catch you later.
Cheers.
(soft rock music)