Are you a coach, consultant or professional service provider ready to take your business to the next level and watch some explosive growth unfold over the coming months? Great. Before you start to plot and plan what you want to do to make that happen, it’s important to stop and look at where you’re at right now.
Business planning for future success is all about data. You can work most efficiently and spend your time and money most effectively if you know exactly where you are starting from. By recording data, you can start to see what’s working, what isn’t, and what trends are starting to play out. And it all starts with recording where you’re at right now.
Let’s take a look at some of the things you want to record. First things first, decide how you want to record this information. You can write it down by hand in a notebook, open up a word or Google doc to do it digitally, or use a spreadsheet. I prefer a spreadsheet because I have the option to have it calculate fun additional information like weekly and monthly averages and even map it all out in graphics to help me get a clearer picture.
What to Record
Traffic – To grow you need to expand your reach. That means getting more traffic, but also engaging the people that come to your site by encouraging them to click around and read more. Good things to keep track of are:
total visitors
unique visitors
bounce rate
where the traffic is coming from
List / Subscribers – Your next goal is always to get these people on your list. Here you want to track:
total number of subscribers
conversion rates for each of your opt-in forms and pages
open rates for your emails
As you start to collect and review this data regularly, you’ll get a much better picture of your subscribers.
Clients – Subscribers are great, clients are better. Start by keeping track of how many:
total clients
purchases per month
Total lifetime value of your average customer/client
Client lifetime value is how much money a customer will bring your brand throughout their entire time as a paying client. This helps you to understand where you should focus your marketing efforts and how much should be spent on retaining clients vs acquiring new clients.
Income & Expenses – Last but not least, look at your bottom line. This is your typical accounting data. You want to keep track of:
your income
your expenses
your expenses by line item
With these sets of numbers, you can easily calculate your overall profit and quickly see where expenses might be increasing. I find it helpful to look at profit for the month, but track income on a daily basis and expenses on a monthly basis.
Yes, you can look at most of this data in various different places like Google Analytics, your shopping cart, and your autoresponder service for example, but it’s important to have it all in one place. This makes it much easier to connect the dots and see the relationships between the different sets of numbers. So having a Key Performance Indicator Dashboard is important.
Now that you have your initial data collection set up, make it a habit to update the numbers regularly so you can see what’s working, what isn’t, and how much you’re growing as you move through the coming months and years.
If you need some support and you’ve been looking for an online business manager to help you with quarterly planning, annual planning, or tracking metrics, click here and let’s connect.
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