I used to be over zealous about monitoring and tracking EVERYTHING. Now I am just zealous. It took me a while, but I have learned that if you are not using the information, why are you spending time to track it? For a numbers junkie like me, that is a very difficult conclusion to reach. However, after years of tracking everything under the sun, I have found the power of a simple and focused management metric system to be an incredibly effective management tool. It allows you to focus your management time on what you have identified as the most important variables in your business and effectively communicate that information to your people.
Don’t get me wrong; it is vitally important to track information in your business, and critical that you collect the correct building blocks of an information management system. It is much easier to enter a few pieces of data once a day than to try and recreate 6 months worth of data, just because you didn’t think it would be useful. But there needs to be a balance. I have seen accounting setups for small businesses with 150 expense account codes and setups with 4 expense codes. It doesn’t matter if you are drowning in information or starving for information, either scenario is ineffective.
So where do you start with figuring out what data to collect? With the goals for your business.
Lesson Learned: Analyze what you have and what you need, then strike a balance a to make it happen.
