Charles Nagel

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December 22, 2008

Radically Improve Your Business In Only The First 10 Minutes Of Each Day

Business Intelligence (BI) simply means using technologies, applications and practices to analyze business information. The purpose of BI is to foster better decision making.

Does all the jargon make your head spin? Don't let it. Applying technologies that makes sense for your business is a smart business decision.

As a business consultant in my former life, I saw many companies that didn't know what they didn't know. That is, you must have accurate and timely information to make good decisions. Otherwise, you are guessing. Often, things can "feel" right but turn out to be disasters. Don't get me wrong. Your "gut feel" counts for a lot when running a business, but you must have much more than a "flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants" plan to capitalize on opportunities and avoid making big mistakes.

So how do you use this BI without breaking the bank? Just as important, how do you find a tool that isn't overly complicated or functionally impossible to use - and that as the practical and operational solutions you want and need? Most small businesses do not have the IT staff or the business expertise in house to create or implement tools internally, and the cost of many third-party solutions are ridiculously high.

Let's quickly explore the small-and-medium business(SMB) paradigm from the owner's or manager's perspective:

Your time is typically in very short supply and you are pulled many directions. As the day goes on, this condition only gets worse.
You generally don't like using accounting systems.
You may have a bookkeeper, but most of the financial reports that you generate or receive don't mean much. What do you really do with those reports? How can you actually improve your business by looking at a monthly P & L or balance sheet printout?

You probably identify with most or all of the above SMB paradigm.

In a perfect world, you want to come to the office in the morning, click a few times and browse though the current state of the company. You of course want to identify critical items that need immediate attention, but you would also like to quickly see if what you are expecting to happen financially and operationally with your company is in fact happening.

You want to avoid looking at a pile of numbers that cause your eyes to glaze over. What if you could see a picture of exactly what is going on with your company instead? And what if this was actually an enjoyable experience over morning coffee? If something looks out of sync, what if you could simply click on the anomaly and immediately see the underlying data and the reason for the blip?
What if you could easily share this technology (with as much or as little of the underlying information as desired) with your staff, so that your team is unified, informed, and motivated?

And finally, what if such a solution was inexpensive and easy to use?

We've created just such a solution here at Qvinci Software - www.qvinci.com – let me tell you how.

Many SMBs run QuickBooks® from Intuit for their accounting system. So we built an intelligent dashboard called Qvinci™ that takes many of the reports from QuickBooks® and turns them into charts, graphs and tables. These charts, graphs and tables give the user a visual representation of the actual numbers - a major step forward.

But we took it a step beyond. Frequency and trending of data graphically are hugely-valuable tools to the business manager. You can see relationships between different elements and do head-to-head comparisons between months, quarters, or years. This is incredibly useful for trending.

Imagine doing these kinds of things for all the important data from fuel costs to electricity to cost of goods to project costs. Once you create these charts, they will be there every time you open Qvinci™ - and the data will automatically freshen as your company moves through the month or year.

You obviously want to see what has happened with your company to date. Equally or more important is knowing whether you are going to stay on or under your expenses budget and hit or exceed your revenue targets, based on where you are today. Qvinci™ makes it easy by incorporating a tool called "triggers".

Triggers are displayed as a table of financial data that you select and for which you want an early warning if your numbers to date indicate that a revenue target will be missed or an expense threshold will be exceeded.
You simply select an item to track from the P&L, balance sheet or other report, then set a target (a desired amount to achieve) or a threshold (an amount not to cross over). Qvinci™ pulls the actual data from QuickBooks® and linearly estimates the projected value for the month or year. If the projection indicates that the target or threshold will not be met, the item turns red. So if you pick 10 important items and set the triggers based on historical metrics, Qvinci™ draws your attention - via color coding on the main screen - to those items needing action.

Using Qvinci™, you might have 15 to 20 QuickBooks dashboard pages of your company’s most important operational data, all up-to-the-minute-current, and you can navigate through the visuals in about 10 minutes with a high degree of understanding. The items needing attention on any given day can be drilled down and isolated for further action by the manager or staff member.

Knowing your company's actual data points and projected trends are the keys to making the best management decisions. You've seen how Qvinci™ lets you see your data, rather than read it, and how it keeps you ahead of the curve by trending and trigger tools. But we again went a step beyond. In our Qvinci™ Pro version, we added a powerful Proforma tool.

Proformas give you detailed projections based on what your company has actually been doing. You have been performing in a certain manner, so the Proforma simply scales that forward. You can then go through the Proforma, make your "what-if" adjustments, and manage accordingly to hit the levels indicated by your adjustments. Using this tool, the manager is able to provide staff with measurable goals and objectives. If you hold to the levels projected, you will attain the expected results. And since Qvinci™ makes the data visible and easily digestible, you can fine tune and correct your course on a daily or weekly basis.

The goal of dashboards and management tools should be to provide the manager with measurable data points and a road map to success, in an easy-to-use, pleasing interface.

A typical morning might look like this: grab a cup of coffee, check your email, and then click through your business dashboard. From here, with all vital information about your company available to you, making the right decisions to manage your business is easy.

Posted by Charles Nagel at 1:00 PM | Comments (0)

The 1 Secret Small Businesses Must Know In Order To Survive And Prosper

Succeeding in business doesn't happen by accident. It is hard work and perseverance that produce success. We often forget that it takes a LOT of effort to make a company successful. It also takes some luck and good timing. It's been said that luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity (George Allen - NFL football coach). If that is true then luck is nothing more than hard work (strong effort and accurate preparation) while waiting for an opportunity to present itself.

You've probably also heard that if you fail to plan then you plan to fail. This cliche is actually pretty accurate when it comes to business. But why do so many business owners and managers hate preparation and planning? Maybe hate is too strong. Let's try "avoid". Well, planning usually involves a lot of detail work and many managers don't like that kind of effort.

But planning is not the secret referred to in the title of this article. Planning is a necessary part of running a business. You have to do it. It's not negotiable. If you won't do it then you put your business in the VERY HIGH RISK category. I'm assuming you are reading this article because want to find a tool that will help you run your company better, make better decisions or improve some aspect regarding your company. What you read below will do just that but you have to take action or what you read cannot help you. That is where planning, perseverance and effort are needed as noted previously.

Are you ready? The great secret is: You don't know what you don't know. Failing to realize this fact and make adjustments is a very good way to ensure you make mistakes. If this is true then what does it mean in practical terms?

Let me offer an actual example. When I was working as a business consultant, I specialized in turn-around consulting. I was hired by a company that was a fabricator of metal devices. The first meeting with the owner was typical. I asked a lot of questions to uncover details. When I asked about the team, he said they were skilled but were very inefficient and should be producing a lot more. I asked, "How do you know that to be true?" His answer: "I just know it."

The company had repeatedly missed the estimated budget and deadline for each project. They routinely used over-time hours (often over 30% of payroll) to bring projects to completion by the deadline. Obviously there was some gap in information or communication that resulted in missed deadlines and a large number of over-time hours, and I had a feeling that the reason was not inefficiency of the team.

This is where I prove my point. The company had the estimate budget and deadlines for all projects in one database. They had the actual time for every hour worked by every employee on every project in completely different database. They did not have a consolidated report that merged labor, resources, and deadlines into one format. The result was the managers could not make informed decisions or view all projects holistically.

To correct this, I created a single page (it was a big E-size print out) that showed what they budgeted, current status, and remaining days and resources for all projects. With this single page they were able to move resources as needed to meet deadlines without overtime. Then they could reallocate resources to ensure future projects were performed timely. The result? Overtime was taken to 0, that's ZERO, in less than 4 weeks and they made their deadlines moving forward.

The managers of this company didn't know what they didn't know. Practically, the manager of a company needs accurate and timely information with which to make decisions. It is imperative to have whatever information is necessary, whether it is cost data, project data, time data, sales data or any other information that is critical to good decision-making.

Technology, software and hardware, can provide frameworks that facilitate collecting, sorting and displaying mission critical data. How is it possible to plan and prepare as discussed earlier if accurate and timely data is not available? Well, it's not really possible. I submit that you cannot plan with any accuracy if data is faulty or missing. Remember, failing to plan is planning to fail.
All too often managers make decisions primarily based on "gut feel" without good metrics to substantiate the "gut feel." You want your business to improve and your decisions to be better? Decide what data points you really need to know to make an informed decision and seek out technologies and methods to provide it to you in a reliable and repeatable manner.

Try to use the many-to-one concept for collecting data. For example, let's say you have 5 salespersons and you would like to know "how things are going". You could take several approaches from having meetings several times a week to talking with each salesperson frequently to waiting to see how things turn out at the end of the month, etc. Most of these methods take a lot of time and are usually subjective. They also take the salesperson away from selling.

But imagine you build an Excel spreadsheet that contains daily activity for leads, calls, prospects, targets, etc. This spreadsheet has the same format for all salespersons. Imagine you put it together so that each salesperson entered their daily activity on their sheet. It would be very easy to pull the data from each sheet and aggregate it to a top sheet for your viewing. You could easily see where each salesperson stood on targets you defined for them. And the benefits of this approach are fantastic. Taking just a few minutes, the salesperson enters data before her or she leaves for the day leaving more time for selling. You do not need to have a meeting to gather the data, the data is automatically aggregated for you and you get to see the individual as well as the team totals. With that kind of ammo, you can make informed decisions because you know the details and you know them early in the game. If a particular salesperson isn't hitting target you know it immediately and have time to make a decision or adjustment.

In short, you must know what you don't know. Put processes in place that spread data entry across many resources to keep the burden light. Apply technology to give you the data reliably and daily. It costs less than you think and is worth its weight in gold.

To see more from Charles, please http://qvinci.wordpress.com/

Posted by Charles Nagel at 12:45 PM | Comments (0)