“Visibility is the most efficient way to create a healthy culture and to move a company forward.”
– Jon Thompson, author of The Dashboard Effect
Blue Margin was invited by vcfo to lead a 1 credit hour continuing professional education (CPE) class certified through NASBA and the State of Texas. Jon Thompson presented on the subject of “Tactical BI for CFOs.” So that others might benefit, we condensed the webinar’s recording and provided it below, along with summary notes. (Please note: watching this recording will not qualify as a certified CPE course.)
Course Summary: Data visibility serves a critical role in scaling, creating value, and successfully managing a company. Learn how to get valuable insights from your data now, with minimal overhead.
Listen at Min 2:00
Running a mid-market company can be compared to driving an F1 racecar, but instead of having precise F1 steering wheel instrumentation (Figure A), business executives must often rely on a variety of spreadsheets, monthly reports, email updates, and ad-hoc meetings to manage their company (Figure B). What if the executive had the clear visibility of an F1 driver?
It would change everything.
Good Visibility: An F1 cockpit
Poor Visibility: The Midmarket Executive's "cockpit"
Listen at (Min 7:10)
Getting better visibility into business is not as labor intensive as you may think, but before starting any project, it's important to clearly define the goal. Better visibility alone will not have the impact leaders need. In order for data visibility to drive change, leaders should start by identifying the top three value drivers (i.e. inbound leads, revenue per deal, employee utilization, etc.) that are most critical to the organization’s success in the next 12 months as well as the individuals/roles responsible for each of them. These metrics should be manageable and predictive of the outcomes to be tracked against.
Jon tells the story of how Blue Margin started (Min 8:34).
After selling a dot-com Y2K startup to a private equity firm and spending a huge percentage of management time tracking down details to report to the board, Jon and his brother Brick began a new startup in 2011, Blue Margin. At the beginning, they focused on helping companies employ Cloud productivity tools. But as the brothers shared their instance of SharePoint which featured the charts and graphs they had developed to monitor their own company performance, many clients requested that same visibility for their business. They realized they had landed on the root cause of almost all organizational problems - poor data visibility.
Thus, the mission of Blue Margin as a business intelligence company was born – to rid the business world of poor data visibility. Brick and Jon discuss the critical role of visibility for the PE-backed executive on a recent podcast episode: Data Visibility and the PE-Backed Executive.
Listen at (Min 12:15)
With poor visibility, employees from across the company are pulling from a collection of databases and spreadsheets to see what’s going on in the company.
This lack of central narrative causes:
Listen at (Min 14:55)
Data visibility in the form of a dashboard brings clear, F1 cockpit instrumentation to a leadership team. It provides oversight, alignment, increased valuation, measurable accountability, and faster exits. When leaders have clear instrumentation, they can stop reacting and proactively manage. Operations become more efficient, productivity increases, and buried revenue is uncovered.
When CoolSys moved away from an Excel spreadsheet and leveraged dashboards to operate their complex organization they increased operating margins by 4-5%. Regions and functions were held accountable to key metrics and it contributed to a 52% reduction in employee turnover. (CoolSys Case Study)
Smart Care Equipment Solutions had 47 people creating reports off of Excel spreadsheets before investing in BI reporting. With near real-time Power BI dashboards, they increased employee utilization by 4%. (Smart Care Case Study)
Elgin Fasteners had been relying on a workbook with multiple data sources that was generated once per month, so their ability to react was limited. BI had the greatest impact in their manufacturing operations. Their technician efficiency and utilization report allows supervisors to pinpoint inefficiencies, points of constraint, and opportunities for employee training increasing production an estimated 10%. (Elgin Case Study)
Before deploying Power BI dashboards, Equilibrium Catalyst had been unable to track a breakdown of costs per carrier. Now they can identify that quickly, along with high freight costs. They are able to change carriers to save hundreds of thousands in costs. They also discovered approximately $1M in unbilled services. (Equilibrium Catalyst Impact)
Adam Coffey, 3 time PE-backed CEO and #1 bestselling author of The Private Equity Playbook, says that companies with a strong business intelligence systems sell more quickly and for higher multiples. Read his interview from our Expert Insight Series: Adam Coffey and The Exit Strategy Playbook.
Listen at (Min 28:35)
According to NewVantage Partners, 91.7% of organizations are increasing data investment, but only 19.3% have established a data culture. Why does that gap exist?
Understanding (and avoiding) the following three pitfalls can help leaders create a data-driven culture where most fail.
Listen at (Min 33:08)
BI initiatives are not like ERP implementations, and thus they shouldn’t be structured with a lengthy, expensive waterfall strategy. Follow this three-step process, instead.
Lead with Data Visibility
If you'd like to explore how Blue Margin's team can help you use data visibility to drive growth and team accountability, contact us below!