Business by feeling
In my daily work, I regularly visit entrepreneurs, and I am often surprised by the paucity of management information available to him or her. I see entrepreneurs taking numerous risks based on their gut feeling. And sometimes literally says: "I undertake by feeling." But if, for example, you buy too much stock based on your gut feeling and your sales drop, you can have problems with your cash flow. And end up not paying your purchase invoices within payment terms.
What are you earning from?
What I also often see is that different types of assortments are sold but the entrepreneur does not actually know which assortment he or she makes the good margin on and thus makes the money. Or actually makes up for the loss of another assortment and still earns nothing at the bottom of the line. I also see this with platform marketing (online marketing places). The assortment is sold on numerous other platforms such as Bol, Amazon, Marktplaats, Beslist, etc. in addition to your own store and webshop. But what does that actually get you at the bottom of the line per platform? Is the product you sell on Bol or Amazon suitable in terms of margin? Or are you actually paying too much commission, packaging, shipping and return costs and keeping virtually no margin? Or worse, is it costing you money?
Essential steering information
In the above examples, steering information is essential and, in my view, cannot be missing in order to do business effectively. Basically, this actually applies to everything you do in your business. You need to know what is happening and playing inside and outside your organization. How are things going financially? How are my employees and customers doing? How are my processes running (well)? An organizational cockpit or dashboard containing the most important management information can absolutely help you with that!
Practical roadmap
Not having clear and measurable KPIs can lead to risky guesses and unforeseen problems such as cash flow issues and ineffective marketing strategies. Prevent these risks by understanding control information: read and discover a practical roadmap.