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Is your business making decisions JUST off of it’s financial statements? If so, you could be missing out on any chance at obtaining a competitive advantage.
If you meet once a month to review your business’ P&L, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flows while maybe sprinkling in a few sales reports, you are operating at a huge disadvantage. In fact, your business could be suffering from DRIP Syndrome. The term DRIP refers to the phrase “Data Rich and Information Poor”. This means that businesses can have tons of data (and most do, whether they know it or not), and the data just sits there, trapped in it's systems, unusable.
So what is data? When it comes to business, data is simply the information generated on an ongoing basis by the operations of the business. Think about every transaction that occurs, every new client, employees following processes; each of these generates a record somewhere in a system whether it is a CRM, an Excel spreadsheet, or the API of a software application.
Without organizing and processing that data, it sits there in a sea of 1s and 0s or Excel cells in no particular order, hierarchy, or visual representation. Spreadsheets, exports, and even pivot tables are not very helpful tools when it comes to decision making. If you cannot use this data, it is incredibly difficult to develop a competitive advantage for your business. Decisions should always be data-driven, but how do you do that when it lives in foreign languages across multiple platforms?
Here's some easy steps you can take to identify your competitive advantage and make sure you are information rich.
Collect your data
Organize data
Visualize data (charts, graphs, etc.)
Constantly check in on data (at least weekly!)
Identify trends or patterns (competitive advantage can be found here!)
Make data-driven decisions based off of this information!
If you need further help or if you have any questions, that’s what Alpha Data Strategies is here for! Contact us at info@alphadatastrategies.com.
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