Knowledge and Management

As the saying goes, "knowledge is power". By knowledge I mean knowing your business with measurements and numbers. Many businesses or business people simply come in to work each day and apply effort and "work hard" while making some gains some days and losing ground others but in the end, no real progress is made. Goal attainment and progressive forward motion is not about working hard and trying to do better than yesterday and really knuckling down. Its about knowing your business, knowing the actual numbers so you can correctly estimate and direct actions that will factually improve the numbers. For example, if you're a retail business you would need to figure out the hard numbers that relate to the following:

1. How many promo emails or letters or postcards do you need to send to make one person walk through your door

2. How many people need to walk through the door in order to make one sale

3. What is the average price of one sale

4. What is the average cost of one sale

You get the idea. The point is, there are numbers in any business that you as a manager or executive or owner must know. Once you know them, you can start making real progress. With the example above, if the retail owner knew the above numbers they could accurately estimate their promo, sales and costs and have accurate prediction based on executing their strategy based on the numbers that they knew.

It can be difficult to discover the fundamental numbers of a business but it's a crucial element to making forward progress and confidently growing the company. Without these numbers, your company will flounder with good days and bad days, ups and downs that never seem to end with no real accurate insight into what actually makes the company tick.

Every business has fundamental numbers that can be discovered and measured to create facts that can be managed in order to control outcomes and future growth. You have to "know" your company through numbers in order to gain traction. If you know that you have to have 10 sales discovery phone calls to make one sale and one sale is worth $10,000 and your first quarter goal is $200,000, then you "know" that you will need to have your sales team setup 200 sales discovery appointments in the first quarter. If you knew that it took 100 emails to setup one discovery sales call, you then would know that you will need to send 20,000 emails to make that happen. It starts to give you an idea of the actual effort needed to move the company forward to grow.

Not knowing this stuff means no control over the future of the company and results in missed targets or goals. Why bother having any planning meetings for the new year or the quarter if you don't have these numbers pegged. I read a great quote one time that stated, "the best way to predict the future is to create it..." - you can create your future for your company by knowing the vital numbers cold, from there you can accurately predict, manage and control your outcome.

- Robert Cornish
CEO, Richter10.2 Media Group