Can you imagine if your car didn’t have a dashboard?
Picture yourself in your car right now, and all you have in front of you is the steering wheel. And you’re about to go out for a long drive.
How could you tell if you had enough fuel? You’d have to get out of the car, open up the fuel cap, shove the car, listen to the sloshing and have a guess about how much there was left. Or simply wait until your engine started spluttering, stalling and finally stopping altogether.
How could you tell if you were doing the right speed? You could go super slow to be safe. You could copy what everyone around you is doing. Or you could just drive at the speed you felt comfortable doing and wait until the police let you know for sure.
How could you tell if your engine temperature was too high? The first convincing sign would be steam erupting from the engine bay, and then it would be too late.
Gauges on our car’s dashboard are there for a reason: to give us information we can act on, before our journey gets sabotaged and it takes us heaps longer to get where we intended to go.
Yes, this is a metaphor. The exact same things happen in business: we run out of money, we make choices either too quickly or too slowly, and we don’t see the early warning signs of things about to go haywire. When we don’t have a dashboard, we don’t have real-time information and we can’t act before it’s too late.
The gauges on a business dashboard are performance measures, or metrics, or KPIs. There are several names for them, but they mean the same thing: quantitative indicators of how well your business and its processes are really doing.
And when you know where your business is not doing so well, you know you’ll always be focusing on what matters most to boost your business to the next level. You’ll spend money more wisely, you’ll make the choices that are best for your business more often, you’ll see the warning signs before the damage they can cause.
Which gauges or measures you have on your business dashboard will depend on a few things:
- the results you want your business to create, like profit, free time, outrageously loyal customers
- the design of your business model, such as whether it’s online, retail, service based or manufacturing (for example)
- the maturity of your business and its strengths and weaknesses
But irrespective, you don’t need dozens of measures to make a huge difference in your business success. Just like your car’s dashboard, you only need the gauges that tell you what you need to know, now. And that means that usually, you’re only tracking 3 to 5 measures that keep you focused on your current business priorities.
How fantastic is that? A business dashboard that puts the destiny of your business firmly into your own hands.
Isn’t that better than guessing, hoping and settling for less than your full potential?
