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Peerview Data Insights

Five Questions Your Clients are Struggling With (And How To Answer Them)

 

What's your pain point?

It's a common question and one of the main reasons CPAs use our client analytics & benchmarking tool:  so they can easily identify, isolate and address the issues that are causing their clients trouble.

What's interesting is that whatever specific problem the company is dealing with — high costs, bad cash flow, even turnover — it can often be traced back to the same core set of questions or challenges:

  1. How fast should we grow?
  2. How much revenue should we expect from our people?
  3. Do our costs compare to our competitors?
  4. Is our marketing right?
  5. Are we missing anything obvious?

Why are these questions at the heart of so many problems?

Topics: Money People Customers Planning & Forecasting Competitive Analytics KPIs Business Performance Small Business

Winding Down: Lessons and Thanks in 2017

As December winds down, reflection always seems to be the natural step to closing out another year. As we reflect this winter, we want to say how thankful we are for each of you this year. We want to thank all the accounting firms, lenders and individual companies that have subscribed since our launch. Things have been going extremely well and we have loved getting your feedback! Secondly, I want to share some of what we’ve learned on the journey so far:

Topics: Business Performance Small Business Business Intelligence New Years Eve new year

A Case For Keeping Up With The Joneses (When It Comes to Business)

As a general rule of life, we like to think that the idea of “Keeping up with the Joneses” is overrated. Move at your own pace, stick to your brand, and define success by your own terms.

Topics: Business Performance Small Business Business Intelligence Accounting Software

The Robots Are Coming! How Companies Can Prepare For The Rise Of Artificial Intelligence

Threat? Or opportunity?
 
AI is coming, but as Greg Satell, author of Mapping Innovation, points out in an article in INC. titled "Here's How Your Company Needs to Prepare for AI," it  might actually enable companies to generate more value from human capital, not less:
 
One thing we are seeing is a shift from cognitive skills to social skills, in which machines take over rote tasks and value shifts to human centered activity. So it is imperative that every enterprise adapt to a new mode of value creation.

Today, an architect needs to be far more than a draftsman, a waiter needs to do more than place orders and a travel agent needs to do more than book flights. Automation has commoditized those tasks, but opened up possibilities to do far more. We need to focus less on where value is shifting from and more on where value is shifting to."  
Topics: Small Business Analytics big data Benchmarking CPAs Accounting Trends

A Quote That Should Make You Question Everything Your Company Is Doing

In the forward to Competing On Analytics: Thew New Science of Winning, by Harvard's Thomas H. Davenport and Columbia's Jeanne G. Harris, David Abney, CEO of UPS, makes a powerful case for why companies need to continuously assess their competitive performance:
Topics: Small Business Analytics big data Benchmarking Accounting Trends

10 Posts That Will Change The Way You Think About Your Business

  1. This is How Your Business Will Be disrupted
  2. Are You Swimming Naked?
  3. Competing In A Data-Driven World
  4. 10 Simple Rules For Your Big Data Analytics Adoption Strategy
  5. Why Even Bother With Business Data If You Don’t Have Time To Do Anything With It?
  6. Two Mindsets Guaranteed To Stunt Your Company’s Growth
  7. How Benchmarking Keeps You What Jeff Bezos Calls A “Day 1” Company
  8. A Checklist For Growth-Focused Companies Looking To Leverage BI
  9. When It Comes To Data-Driven Analysis, Your CPA Is Your Secret Weapon
  10. What Happens If You Wait Too Long To Embrace Big Data, Analytics and Benchmarking? 
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Topics: Small Business Analytics big data Benchmarking Accounting Trends

What CEOs Can Learn From Walt Disney

This article from Entrepreneur  draws leaderships lessons from Walt Disney.  While it's intended for entrepreneurs, the lessons also apply to mainstream CEOs.
 
Two quotes stand out because they give insight into why and  how he was able to be remain so consistently innovative:
 
Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future."  
We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths."  
Topics: Small Business Analytics big data Benchmarking Accounting Trends

Is The New Ad Agency A CPA Firm?

As an industry, professional services firms used to be narrowly defined by area of expertise:  accounting, advertising, public relations, law, design, engineering, architecture, software development, etc.
 
That's all changing.
 
A couple of headlines jumped out recently to illustrate that point:
 
It's not that advertising's traditional domains (creative and media buying) don't matter to clients, it's that other services matter more.
 
As  Alice Hatch, head of Deloitte Digital points out " The role of the chief marketing officer is changing. The CMO is playing a completely different role in the C-suite and in the boardroom now." To serve those expanded needs means "you need a much broader base of capabilities and understanding of business and technology strategy, understanding of depth, data and analytics — that is not what the agency model was built on originally."
 
What's bad news for agencies is good news for CPAs.
 
Sound strange?
 
Not if you consider the way overlapping and complimentary client needs influence the way professional services firms are structured.
Topics: Small Business Analytics Advertising big data Accounting Trends Marketing CMO

Why Benchmark Your Performance? Mark Cuban Makes A Compelling Case  In A Single Sentence

If you don't know how you compare, you can't compete.

Topics: Small Business Analytics big data Benchmarking Accounting Trends

What Happens If You Wait Too Long To Embrace Big Data, Analytics and Benchmarking?

Most companies have come to accept the fact that there are significant benefits to being data-driven. 
 
The problem is knowing that and acting on that are two different propositions.
 
This paragraph from  a recent post on 7wData speaks directly to the danger in waiting too long to embrace Big Data, analytics and benchmarking:
 
As the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) declares, big data is shaping up to be a “winner-take-most” proposition, where leading companies will press their advantages and laggards are at the mercy of wholesale technological shifts that promise to upend entire industries.

Not convinced? Leading companies are not only leveraging big data and analytics to improve internal processes but they’re also creating alternative business models and new revenue streams. In other words, big data tends to bolster competitive advantages in innovation, personalization and operational efficiency."
To put it more bluntly, those who are first will last, those who are last will fail.
 
Topics: Small Business Analytics big data Benchmarking Accounting Trends