Waves on the ocean: What lies beneath your performance data?

One manifestation on the surface of our ‘business ocean’ is money arriving in the bank account… diving deeper we should look at the journey of this money and see if the key moments reveal how we might have done things better:

The invoice

• do we send invoices on time?
• could invoices be broken down into stages and invoiced earlier?
• could a % of the work be billed up-front?

Debtors

• are we tracking debtor days and taking action on late payers?
• do we always get a purchase order signed off by the client?
• are our terms and conditions good enough?

Work in progress

• are we tracking time against the quote given to the client? Did we get the quote right?
• are we identifying scope creep and billing the client accordingly?
• are we meeting the KPIs for the value of work in progress?

Pipeline

• have we identified prospective separately from speculative?
• have we set and do we meet KPIs for the value of prospective and speculative work?
• do we have a score system to evaluate the viability of a lead?

Networking

• are we setting and meeting targets for thought leadership pieces?
• are we using our employees network to share content?
• are we positioning ourselves as partners rather than vendors?

For each element of your business you need to look beyond the surface results and understand how those figures came to be as they are. What is causing the success or difficulties, and how can they be improved?