Know Your Business and What it’s Really Doing

Many (most?) small businesses don’t have good data about what is going on in their business. 

Generally, it is for a few reasons: 

1. There is no use for the data if it is extracted

2. The costs to implement a system is too high

3. The business doesn’t seem like it has any data to be extracted. 

Let’s start backwards. 

If your business doesn’t seem like it has any data to be extracted you might be right.  Here is a quick test to see you might have some data: 

– You have more than 3 employees

– You work with a variety of customers (more than 10 a month)

– You deliver a service that is consistent. (not totally custom for each customer)

If you answered yes to any of those, you might have some business data to be extracted. 

Costs to extract the data

Because there are some requirements for how a business must capture data, the costs are generally erased. In other words, you can expect to save at least as much as it costs to implement. 

A little bit of infrastructure needs to be built to work well for a business. 

For example, for a lawn care company, we built a web app that they logged all their jobs, tracked pricing, etc…

And the app saves their team more money in time than it costs. (Verified by them) 

“The software you built has saved 15, 16, 17 hours consistently every month. It’s amazing.”

– Tim rose, Subscribed Lawn care

 No use for the data

Typically, if data can be extracted, it is worth extracting. 

But, I will warn you, this is where it can be hard to understand from the outset of a project. 

Because, the best bits of data are not discovered until a web app has been in use. 

Need proof?

Let’s use that web app we just mentioned. 

First, we built the app, so they could enter in the addresses of the properties, client details, pricing, build weekly job lists, enter employee info, and the employees mark off each job on the app as they complete it. 

Well, after using it for a while, we discussed how they were building the lists. Basically, the manager would organize the weekly lawn cut lists in a way that made sense. He would try to minimize drive time between each job.

But, at Experimarketing, we started thinking.. we have the data already for each job location.  Perhaps we can build an algorithm to minimize drive time. So that is what we did. 

It cut the drive time between lawns of the 3 teams in HALF. (From 292 miles per week to 151 miles)

There were other uses for the data too. 

One was figuring out that they had lost $115k due to a simple, solvable problem. 

Another was speeding up customer response times.

Oh yeah, and one other I probably shouldn’t go into detail here. Let’s just say the data about exact times the lawn is finished… got one team fired.

We are just scratching the “data surface” of this web app. 

In the next 2 seasons, I expect this company to triple profits from when we started. Easily. Even if we don’t make any more changes to their app, they will do that.

And they will be making it harder for their competition to compete. 

So, steps they took: 

1. Web app to track their operations (reduce time, improve quality)

2. Start extracting available data & improving their systems

Do you want to discuss this for your business?

Let me know. 

I am the CEO at Experimarketing. 

I work 1-on-1 with all my clients (and with a team supporting the operations).

My name is Jordan Arsenault.

Text me at 1-902-314-5365. (Don’t call)

You can text day or middle of night. I will respond ASAP.

Just text me this: Your objection to extracting your business’ data.

Let me see if I can overcome your objection. 

Because, if you have read to here, you must be interested but you MUST also have some hesitancies. 

So what are they?

1-902-314-5365 – Text me.

Thanks,

Jordan Arsenault