By Bryce Davis
It’s funny, we used to be able to make all of our decisions by ourselves with the knowledge we’ve learned along the way — hard knocks and learning the hard way, as they say. But in today’s world, the trend seems to be more data driven, and then more data, and then even more data on top of that … then we’ll make that final decision. And there seems to be no shortage of companies out there now that can or will help you capture all this data if you’d like help. Data is the future of every industry, even ours.
If we knew now what your data is telling you, would we all still make the same decision? I don’t think so, that’s why it’s growing on the business side of every operation. It’s a challenge to quantify, to capture and to categorize everything. And when I say “everything,” let’s just take a look at what we can collect data on at most everyone’s company these days.
Sales – number of leads, number of follow ups, closing percentage, call back after the sale, up sale opportunities, repeat customer business, lost sales, sales history.
Field – job locations, job size, crew size, weather, equipment costs, rental equipment costs, job over runs, job call backs, material costs, jobs in backlog, quality control, safety.
Business – number of jobs in a year, dollar volume per job in a year, profit per job and/or per crew, overhead, ranking your customers and/or jobs for the year, labor cost, marketing costs, outside vendor costs, taxes.
Note: this is just a quick list to get started with, more items can always be added at any time once you start the process.
All this data when and if collected is “real value” in our business world today, in helping guide us and make the right decisions for our organization. Just think about it … this is like helping us in predicting our future in many ways. If you can measure, track and capture all your data to get this valuable information for your business, it will just make you more eager or hungry for even more data moving forward. Of course, this doesn’t remove all risks in business, but it will help you significantly cut the overall risks for your future decision-making process. Plus, once you have all this data, it’ll help drive you to be better, become more profitable and grow in a faster and more informed way.
If you’re company is already doing this, congratulations. You’re ahead of the curve. If you’re still thinking about it, now’s the year to start. This will not happen overnight; it takes time to set it up and to start collecting all the data before it’ll even give you any directions for a future decision. But once you have it, you’ll wonder how you made it without all this data before. If you have a friend or colleague in a different industry, ask them if you could look at their data so you can see what type of direction it’s giving them. This will help you in your thought process on setting up the best system for your business to begin data collection.
Make 2025 the year for data, your data.
Bryce Davis is the Director of Sales for LeeBoy. He can be reached at Bryce.Davis@Leeboy.com
