Are dashboards useful?
How and when?
They serve one very specific purpose. As your understanding of your business grows, you will naturally move on from the dashboard.
A dashboard is your gateway to greater confidence, understanding of your business, and empowerment.
It can also be a ball and chain.
It depends on the situation you're in right now.
It can be helpful or distracting – it depends on how you use it.
You decide what it will be.
I'm going to walk you through the lifecycle of a dashboard. By the end of this, you will know whether having a business dashboard right now is right for you.
Lifecycle Stage # 1: A Dashboard is Born
Every business needs one.
A dashboard is the best way to gather all crucial information and survey it with one look. It's the fastest way to check how your business is doing.
I wrote "crucial" for a reason. For a quick method on how to put only crucial information on it, read this previous issue.
Say you've been in business for a while now. Things are going well, but you're starting to feel a bit lost in the day-to-day. Has everything you are doing been useful? What's the most useful? Can you free up some of your time?
You start asking yourself questions. You need answers, so you start looking at your business numbers.
Your company's numbers are just row data. You need information and eventually insights. You will extract them by working on the row numbers and perhaps doing some visualisation until you understand what is going on.
You do it once.
Things are clearer.
You keep going.
After a while, you need to do it again. Time passes, things change, you gain more clients. Your company's numbers might have a different answer for you now.
Since you are looking at some of your company's numbers over and over, why not make the procedure fixed.
Why not put all relevant insights and visualizations on a digital board?
Why not make a dashoard you can look at whenever you want?
Congratulation, you got your first dashboard!
Lifecycle Stage # 2. Evolution. Why do I Always Need Adjustments?
What worked once might not work all the time.
Your business is growing.
It's time for new insights.
You really need to ask yourself whether it's still relevant to keep KPIs on that project you're not going to offer anymore.
It's completely normal to run multiple iterations of a dashboard until you identify the optimal combination of KPIs. The thing about data is… Once you find the answer to your questions, you'll have more questions.
Once you've done your research, you'll see that the first insight is not as relevant as the other one you've just identified as being crucial.
Or the initial insight was time-specific, while the subsequent one was more generalisable.
Or the opposite.
It's a rabbit hole. The more you dig, the more interesting it gets.
Just be sure to stop at some point.
Your perspective will undoubtedly evolve.
Your needs will change.
Your dashboard must change.
If you never update your dashboard, you'll reach a point where you stop looking at it.
The first one will no longer be relevant and won't meet your needs.
It's evolution. It's survival of the fittest.
Your most useful dashboard will survive.
Lifecycle stage # 3. Stability. This is exactly what I want. Isn't it?
This is the turning point.
This is when your dashboard becomes a ball and chain.
The surviving dashboard is "Your Dashboard".
This dashboard will be the result of your business growth and your better understanding of its inner workings and flows. Usually at this point you won't have many changes in your offers; it will be your business growing phase. So you will have a fixed dashboard with growing numbers. You will want to check and see your client count go up and your earnings grow.
You will have a fixed dashboard with growing numbers.
Who wouldn't want to see their client count go up?
Who doesn't want to see their earnings grow?
Rise of hands.
No one?
I didn't think so.
You'll be looking at this colourful mesh of figures and visualisations a lot more than you should. You'll start worrying about every detail. It's easy to think, "Today in the last hour, there was a slight lowering of likes." "Am I right to be worried?"
Don't.
Stay away from your dashboard. Check it monthly or weekly, according to your previous schedule.
It's time to move on.
Don't even think about checking the insights.
Kill the dashboard.
Let the insights come to you.
Hello, automation.
Lifecycle Stage # 4: Goodbye dashboard. It's time to take off and fly away
This is the start of your new life.
This is the moment you fly off the nest. You stop looking at the insights daily and are free again.
Not all insights are created equal. And not all at the same time.
Some insights will be mature and stable, and you should focus on automate these.
Once you have added a new offer, the insights for that offer will change as you decide what is best to check. These are the insights you need a dashboard.
The mature insights you know you can use should be automated.
I'd like to know which option sounds better.
You should look at the insight every so often. It's like watching water boil.
Or you could set up a notification to alert you when something goes wrong. For example, if the value drops below a certain point, you'll know about it.
With the first option, you'll always be looking.
With the second, you'll know everything's fine unless you're notified. You can get on with your day.
You can also schedule different notifications. For instance, you can set one for when there's a slight downward change and another for when there's a real cause for concern.
You can get on with other work or go out with friends, safe in the knowledge your computer will work for you.
Automation will free up your time. If you know how to wield it
You must have work-life balance.
As solopreneurs or small business owners, we sometimes find it difficult to stop running to put fires out.
You need a dashboard to understand your company better and make knowledgeable decisions about what to focus on.
After that, automation will help you keep clarity on what's going on without spending time checking.
Your business will let you know by itself how it's going.
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