This week we are going to talk Key Performance Indicators.
What’s up Fish Fans! My name is Marcus. You’re watching Marketing Madness, the Blue Fish vlog!
Man, if you know me you know that I am not a math kind of person. We were recently at a college campus and they were talking about the Math Lab and that if you needed tutoring you could just walk in for anything up to Calculus 3. But if you needed assistance with anything higher than Calculus 3 you had to make an appointment. I found myself scratching my head as I did not realize there was a such a thing as Calculus 3.
But all that aside, as business owners we need to have some basic understanding of the financials of the businesses that we run. I am currently in Emerging LEaders and we have spent the better part of 40% of the class on Financials. Many of you might be familiar with a Profit & Loss statement, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow statement. If you aren’t then I highly recommend this book for you to come up to speed on some of the concepts and why you should be checking these on a regular basis.
But beyond the big three there is a need for business owners to define Key Performance Indicators or KPIs and track them on a regular basis. Some of these might be found in Quickbooks. Some might be found it outside systems. Some might be manual and require you to crunch numbers.
For instance, here at Blue Fish we are tracking 10 or so items. Everything from the number of monthly subscription websites we currently have, to our retained earnings, sales forecasting, cash on hand, employee utilization, and more.
For our marketing we also track downloads of our podcast. Which, by the way, if you are not listening then SHAME ON YOU! Open up spotify or the podcast app of your choice and search for Mobile Alabama Business Podcast and catch up! There are only a hundred episodes at the time of this recording!
So we track downloads of our podcast, we track traffic on our website, we track the number of people that like our pages, we track the number of plays our videos get, we even track how long people watch into the video. Yes you! Keep watching!
Never before has there been so many points of data available so easily for business owners. One of the reasons why we believe in digital marketing so much is that you have concrete proof when something is working or not. And you can change portions of whatever it is you are working with and see how that affects the performance.
So take a moment to jot down 4-5 Key Performance Indicators that you want to track over time. Commit to checking your Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow at least once a month. And start putting some formality to your business. Tracking this stuff will start to show you when things are good, and when they might not be so good. And it will enable you to make more informed decisions instead of getting yourself into trouble by flying by the seat of your pants.
Well, that’s a wrap for this week! I want to thank you for checking in. Make sure to hit that like button. And if you have any questions or comments leave them down below. If you want to talk about how Blue Fish can help you grow your business just send us a message and we’ll get the conversation started!