The Small Business Gold Mine: Find the Data Nuggets You Can Use to Build Your Business
Summary
Every business has a gold mine on their records. For the manager of a small business, these pearls of information are accurate and valuable. Finding and using them should be a priority.
What’s in your records
Almost everything you need to know to make wise decisions about the future of your small business is in your records. do you have information about
- Dirty
- Returned
- Bills
- General expenses
- Customers
- Staff
- providers
- Production
sales records
Each of these general headings can be subdivided for further detail. Your sales records, for example, will show what’s selling and what’s not, who’s selling and who’s not, which products are reliable, which bring in the best profits, and which sales promotion worked best for you.
customer records
You must have all the basic details about your customers, whether they are companies or individuals. That should include name, address and phone number at the very least. You know what they buy and how often. You know how much they spend and how they usually pay. This information may be hidden in your records, but it is there. And it’s relatively easy to find out what brought them to your business in the first place. There is much more too.
Putting it all together
Combine your sales records with your customer records and discover, for example,
- which products or services are most in demand from whom
- who responds – or not – to your advertising and promotion
- spending patterns and product or service patterns of different customer groups
- which customers consistently spend the most and what they spend on
- which products or services attract which customers
The list goes on and the same applies to the other general headings.
You know for sure…
- How much does it cost to acquire a new customer?
- How much does it cost to retain each customer in your database?
- costs per sale of general expenses and expenses?
- Which vendors are your most valuable followers?
- the lifetime value of a customer?
- Exactly how much profit do you make on different products/services?
Fact or myth?
You can probably answer questions like this. But is your answer based on fact or myth? In a service business I know of, the conventional wisdom was that a service provided 5% of revenue. That “had been the case for years.” not so The actual analysis revealed that the service accounted for 21% of revenue.
conclusion
Business records in small businesses are a goldmine of valuable information. I am not saying that this information is readily available. But it’s in your records. It is crucial for successful business development. You simply need to set up systems to extract and benefit from it.