Okay let’s be honest, we are in business to make money. Money allows us to pay our employees more, allows us to purchase items which help to improve our service quality and speed. Most importantly, money helps to ensure that our business has financial stability.
To ensure that we continue to make money we need fast and accurate reporting functions which allows you to see a snapshot of the business to build staff KPIs around. You need to find the right metrics to build around so that staff have targets to work towards.
I started Acceleration, my sports performance business back in the year 2000 without studying business. It took a long time to get to the point of smoothly running our progress measurement and knowing what to look for.
In this article, I'll show you just what progress I look for in my business's performance to ensure that we improve.
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There were 7 features of our business analysis overview that helped to regulate our business progress.
1. Tracking how many clients/customers you have per week
This is the area we use a lot at Acceleration for staff KPIs by using the information from this report on our MBO Charts. We build incentives around the number of clients in the calendar for a month compared to the previous year. This one simple metric is very powerful and visible for the staff to see.
By tracking how many clients/customers you have per week will:
- Show your progression over the course of a years/months.
- Help to motivate staff to get more clients by "keeping score".
2. Tracking your most regular appointments
This is where you get to understand when you are the busiest either via time of day or the day of the week so you can make decisions regarding the best day and time to hold a staff meeting or team building session. It also helps to paint a picture for new casual staff so you can tell them which days are the best for our business for them to be made available.
By tracking when you have your most regular appointments will help to:
Create efficiency in scheduling meetings.
Making business decisions about the best time of day or best day of the week to focus on.
This is a visual showing the amount of appointments we had during the week. Our company doesn't run on the weekend, making a slight bell curve.
3. How much are you spending on staff for a specific contract
This helps to work out what staff costs were involved in servicing each team or organisation. This is activated by businesses extensively at the end of a year to help determine how to write proposals for specific teams for the next year.
Other businesses could use this for things like organising the clients in their sports facility. You could show the money spent on hiring for the different sectors (eg. Karate and Basketball at a YMCA/PCYC).
Tracking how much you spend on training different sectors helps:
Keep track of your expenses so not too over staff for certain contracts.
Compare your involvement across teams to see which one is the best financially.
This data shows us how much we spend at each facility on our staff's wages. What we learned from this data, when compared to the profit made on that contract is that we might be spending more on funding our staff than we are making.
4. Track where your referrals are coming from
This information is compiled in my business report which is a month by month overview that shows you the referrals and the value of those referrals. It is a great indicator of where referrals are coming from so you can continue to develop those relationships which matter most. Also, it helps to indicate whether a specific marketing campaign is working or not.
Generating at your business report card will:
Show you whether a marketing strategy is working or not
Establish a good relationship with the customers who gave your business referrals. After all, customers are always going to trust the opinion of people they know above a marketing campaign.
Here we can see four examples of referrals that are helping us get clients. From this data we learned that putting money into our marketing strategy and website advertising has been well spent. The data that we blocked out shows the clients that told their friends about our company and this helped us be able to thank them individually or give them some of our business cards to reel in more referrals.
5. Referral to client conversion
A sales funnel shows the number of prospects through to conversions. It is an evaluation of your sales team and allows that sales team to see where each prospect is at in the system. There are a lot of automations in place in this sales funnel which certainly helps.
This is my staff’s favourite aspect of business analysis because they can see our progress of gaining new clients.
Using a sales funnel will:
Give a visual on where your client referrals are coming from (E.g. Facebook or Website).
Shows what aspect of your first-contact process that you need to work on to get more clients.
Here we can see the progression of a client accessing our website and contacting us, to our employee following it up with an email, all the way to them creating a contract with us. A great visual way of seeing your progress and where in the communication line you need to improve.
6. Client conversion (Staff Testing Conversion)
This is a more refined version of the sales funnel as it shows the best staff for converting testing clients into long term clients who continue to train at Acceleration. To make these appropriate for all types of businesses, you could link this metric to initial consultations for any service to see which staff do a good job of converting customers.
Keeping track of client conversion will:
Give good insight into how clients are converting from inquiries into clients
Creates staff incentive to increase their client engagement skills
You can see here that the work of coaches A, B and C have been measured by their client conversion rate. The data that is in green shows the clients that have decided to sign a contract with us after an initial consult.
7. How many enrolments you've had
This is a good way to summarise the number of large group session enrolments to help give the full picture along with the calendar appointment session count. This is a very blunt assessment of enrolments, but we used this to help give us a bigger picture of our business.
Keeping track of enrolments will help:
Your ability to see how many clients you had enrol for each month.
Tracking progress as you get to know which month you may need to increase your advertising or referral conversion.
When wanting to analyse the progress of your business, it's important to keep track of all your information. By keeping it all in one software, seeing improvements and creating staff incentives begins to run like clockwork.
From experience, the best way to keep your business up-to date and on top of things is to be consistent with your tracking and management of staff around those metrics. I hope that these 7 key factors that I use to asses my business will help you with your own endeavours.
Contact us if you have anymore questions.
Want to know about more features of Accelerware?
Check out our blog on How to Reach Your Clients From Anywhere | Online Mentoring
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