Data Management

Helping Your Business Run More Efficiently

The beauty of being a business owner is that you will eventually come to the point where you can choose to have someone else do a majority of the data management for you while you laze around your pool all day (or start another business). For some entrepreneurs, what makes business ownership great is the opportunity to build the business and then hand it over the data management to someone else to work while you reap the rewards.

One of the factors that separates successful businesses from mediocre or poorly performing businesses is the automation factor. Business owners - especially online business owners - should be looking to automate their work. In fact, they should be building that goal into their business plan and infrastructure from day one!

Data management is the best "next step" between doing everything yourself and getting someone else to manage it for you. Automation is getting the project or task to complete itself, allowing you to do something else. Automation allows you to have some tasks done without your sweat and labor and frees your time to do other important work.

So, how do you manage? Here are a few ideas to help you automate your online business:

- Look at the kinds of things you do during the day and try to identify areas that you don't like to work on or areas where you are constantly doing repetitive tasks. Very often, there are already computer programs available that can help you do those tasks such as contact managers, personal information managers and autoresponders.

- Automate your schedule. Rather than rewriting your to-do's each day, use a system like Microsoft Outlook to do a lot of the scheduling work for you.

- If you sell digital products sites use resources like ClickBank and Paypal. These will allow you to sit back and relax while they do repetitive work such as taking payments and downloading products to your customers. ClickBank also has its own affiliate program built-in so others can sell your products. Merchant account sites like PayPal let you accept payment without any work on your part. Compare that to the non-automated way of phoning in every credit card number... it's a great time saver!

- Your "shopping cart" should be automated and linked to your online inventory. When someone places an order, they pay and receive the goods and all you have to do is sit back and spend the money. Does your shopping cart manage your inventory for you? If not, find one that does and use it!

Using just a couple of these simple suggestions can save a great amount of time in managing your data. And running your business efficiently means more profit for you.

However

If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Manage It

In 1996, in the movie Jerry McGuire, actor Cuba Gooding, Jr. made famous the phrase “Show Me the Money!” Ten years later, a variation of that command, now “Show Me the Data!” rings in conference rooms throughout the country. Managers far and wide, at least the successful ones, are looking at the data. Don’t tell me your opinion, show me the data. Can you back it up with data?

If you can’t measure data, you can’t manage it. Companies may be able to survive for a while if managers aren’t using data to make decisions, but they will eventually see their demise; likely sooner than later. Those companies to benchmark off are the ones who are not only surviving, but thriving! Pick your favorite phrase: TQM, Process Management, Data Management, Quality Circles, Improvement Teams, Standards and Measurement departments or any other title you prefer. The function is the same. Look at baseline data – percentages, dollars, hours, quantities – and continuously monitor the performance.

There should not be any task that a supervisor or staff members perform that cannot be measured. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Take a fast food restaurant for example. There are a plethora of areas that can be measured such as days without an accident, customer wait time in line, length of time burgers are in the warmer, amount of money off in the drawers, customer complaints, etc. Graph it out and keep a spread sheet of your figures. Clearly you’re looking for improvement. If there was a decline, brainstorm, find the root cause and then fix the problem.

The process is the same no matter what industry you’re managing. Whether you manufacture widgets, if you are the CEO of an internet marketing firm or if you sell cookies, take a look at all the steps involved in day to day operations. Assign values to the process. Set goals. Review the results on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Data manage.. Remember, if you can’t measure it, you can’t mange it. Charts and graphs are an excellent tool to visually remind you of where you have been and where you plan to go.

In the midst of measuring your subordinates’ performance, don’t neglect to measure and manage your own operations. Don’t think for a minute that your boss isn’t looking at your performance. And if you’re the top dog, you had better be managing yourself well, or you will never succeed at managing others.