I was talking to a client recently about how they manage the performance of their business.
They're in professional services, so much of what they sell is people's time and expertise.
We were looking at the numbers, and there was quite a lot of information available. They could tell me what had happened last month, what had been invoiced, how the business had performed and where things stood financially.
All useful information.
But I was more interested in what was coming next.
How much work was already committed? How much capacity did they have available? Which people were likely to be stretched over the next few weeks? And where might they have gaps?
The answers were less clear.
It led us into a conversation about something I think a lot of service businesses overlook.
Your hours are your stock.
If you were running a business selling physical products, you'd probably have a reasonably good idea of what was sitting in your warehouse.
You'd know what had been sold, what was available and what you needed to order. You certainly wouldn't want to wait until the end of the month to discover you'd run out of something important.
Yet when your business sells people's time, it's surprisingly easy to operate without the same visibility.
You know how many people you've got. You know they're busy. You might even know how much work is in the pipeline.
But do you know how much capacity you actually have available to deliver it?
And are you looking at that information regularly enough to make decisions before something becomes a problem?
What's interesting is that the client already had most of the information we were talking about.
It wasn't really a question of needing another expensive piece of software or a complicated reporting system.
The bigger issue was how consistently the information was being reviewed and, perhaps more importantly, what happened as a result.
That's a distinction I find myself coming back to quite often in coaching.
There's a difference between having information and actually managing the business with it.
You can have a perfectly good dashboard that tells you what happened last month. But if nobody is sitting down regularly to understand what it's telling them, challenge the assumptions and agree what needs to happen next, I'm not sure how much value it's adding.
And I don't think this is limited to professional services.
You see similar things in sales. Businesses can tell you their monthly revenue, but they're less certain about the number of qualified opportunities coming through or whether there's enough in the pipeline to support the next quarter.
Or recruitment. They know the team is busy, but they haven't really worked out when they're going to need another person until everyone is already overloaded.
In both cases, the numbers that would help them make an earlier decision are often available somewhere.
They just aren't getting enough attention.
One of the questions I like asking business owners is what they would want to know if they were going away for a month and somebody else was running the business.
Not every detail. Just the handful of things that would tell them whether everything was broadly on track.
Most owners can come up with a pretty good answer.
The next question is whether those things are being measured, reviewed and acted upon now.
Because there's not much point having a dashboard if you're only looking at it after you've arrived.
I came away from that coaching conversation thinking about how much management time gets spent explaining what has already happened, rather than using the same information to influence what happens next.
Perhaps that's a useful question to ask yourself:
When you look at your business numbers, are they helping you make decisions about the future, or mainly explaining the past?
If you're spending more time explaining what happened in your business than planning what happens next, it might be worth taking a step back.
A conversation can help you identify where you need better visibility, which numbers really matter, and what you could be doing differently to stay ahead of problems rather than react to them.
Book a call with me and let's explore what that could look like in your business.
P.S. If you're curious about where your business is performing well and where there might be room to improve, take a few minutes to complete my Business Success Scorecard. You’ll get insights into your strengths, potential growth areas, and where to focus next.
