If you’re a small business owner who’s feeling like you’re stuck in the mud, it’s a good assumption that understanding your metrics – financial, marketing, and client-centred – is probably not something you feel confident about.

It’s OK – you’re not alone. This is probably one of the most common pitfalls in most of the conversations I have with small business owners. Ask them about their revenue, most will have an approximate estimation. Ask them about their marketing metrics however – it’s like reading a different language they don’t understand.

It’s important to understand the vital health markers of your business so you can make proactive decisions and build growth into your company. However, too many small business owners ignore them, get frustrated by them, and just don’t care enough about them.

I want to make that easier for you. Here’s why not knowing your numbers can be crushing your business (and not in the good way).

Operating By Feelings Instead of Data

If you’ve been reading my blogs or my emails for a while now, you know I’m big on – “There’s no room for emotions in business.” Not only do small business owners confuse emotions when it comes to dealing with problematic employees or clients, they use their emotions to base their business growth on, also.

Where this goes wrong is they will tend to operate in areas of their comfort, instead of potentially tackling the thing that actually needs attention, but they may not necessarily like to do. It’s easier to procrastinate or avoid something when your attention is drawn to the tasks and roles that you enjoy doing. But this may not be what your business needs, and that’s more important than how you feel about performing a particular task on a particular day.

Being Reactionary Instead of Proactive

Not knowing or understanding what’s going on in the health of your business will leave you operating from a superficial level. This means that when you start to feel financial stress, you might automatically resort to the thought of, “Well, I need more clients, I better get to marketing,” when really the problem is actually a big retention problem. It’s hard to know what is going awry in your business if you don’t know what numbers are lagging behind.

Without knowing your numbers and the health of the company, you’ll always be caught backing up and working from a reactionary state. If you have a roll of clients all leave at the same time, you might think you have a retention problem, so you go hard on that thing. If you have some staff complaints all at the same time, you’ll be backing up to work on your staff development.

When you understand what is going on inside your business on a monthly/weekly/daily basis, you’re set up to make proactive decisions and get out in front of the problems that present themselves.

Focusing on the Wrong Things

Lastly, without a better understanding of what’s happening inside of your business, you’ll always tend to steer your attention and focus to what’s in front of you, rather than what needs your time and attention.

It’s easy to get distracted by what you want to be doing, what’s presenting in front of you, or just generally what interests you, rather than what your business needs from you.

Keeping your sights set on objective numbers will show you exactly what the story is. It’ll help you get out in front when trends and patterns start to present themselves, and it will keep you focused on what actually is the problem at hand.

It’s better to grow from a proactive, data-driven perspective, than from a reactive state of mind.

Chances are if you’re currently struggling in your business, you’re stuck in that reaction state.

Let’s fix that. Drop into my calendar and book yourself a free Brainstorm Session. Just a quick 20 minute chat with me, where we’ll do 4 things:

• Identify what’s working and isn’t working in your business right now;
• Find where your opportunities lay for the next 90 days and beyond;
• Find the bottlenecks that are holding back your business growth and scaling, and preventing you from the time/money/mental freedom you originally built this business for, and;
• We’ll put together a 3-step Game Plan so you can take immediate action and get started moving momentum forward ASAP.

I want to help you build a business that YOU own, not one that owns you.

Here’s that link again. Grab a Brainstorm Session spot with me.

If you need help with your financial/marketing/client-centered metrics, this is also a great way to buckle down on the data with me!