Peerview Data Insights

My little nephew and I planted flowers in a window box together last spring. Week by week he would come and visit and check on it or call asking me to send photos of the little sproutling and how much it had grown to his mom's phone. The progress was exciting. Watching it go from little seed to full-grown plant was amazing to him. The excitement he felt for growth is probably similar to the feeling you feel when you track your customer growth with your company. There's a pride in seeing the numbers rise and letting it resonate that "hey, I did that". 

Whether you're the boss, the owner of the company, or simply a devoted employee: the decisions you make matter. Sometimes your decisions have such weight they can seem almost debilitating. In either case, this Harvard Business Review article is a good read because it shares insights on three things that can help you make decisions more efficiently in life and business. 

I was out to dinner with friends this weekend when someone brought up "the NASA method" of problem solving. This approach is derived from when NASA was putting a man on the moon. When they'd hold meetings, NASA had everyone sit in (from rocket scientists to the custodial staff) because they wanted everyone to be on the same page about the mission status so no ideas were left unexplored. Even ideas from those who didn't have a degree in rocket science.

Why?

NASA realized there's no way it would've been able to carry out a mission as big as landing a man on the moon without tapping into every resource.

Small business is the same way. 

If you’ve ever driven in dense fog you can probably remember the feeling of intense apprehension you felt as you drove along, unable to see anything around you. At any given moment you could be extremely close to hitting something or someone — or you could be completely fine with plenty of wiggle room and room to drive freely.

Either way, you’d never know until you got out of the fog. It’s all guess work.

For any small business or startup, guess work is the name of the game. There is no cookie cutter method to the madness, no drawn up or fool-proof plan on how to operate or approach threats or pain points to your business. You do what you can, but sometimes the only thing that’s clear to you is that you are operating in what feels like a fog.

Choosing to benchmark and analyze the data that your company accumulates is like choosing to utilize solar power. The sun is going to shine no matter what, so you might as well turn it into a resource.

Everyone says they're busy these days. It's the knee-jerk response of the centry. "How are you?" "So busy!" 

Some might say that using AI-driven analytics software is the best way to go about dealing with your company performance data.  After all, what's not to trust about AI? Isn't the whole appeal of AI that it does everything seemingly more quickly and flawlessly than a human ever could?

Companies are generating more data than ever before, but most of it just sits there. Getting good insights from it is often too hard, too costly or just takes too much time.

When you work for a small company or a start up you find that, more often than not, there is not a set in stone way to do things. Everything comes down to a lot of trial and error and finding ways to “perfect” whatever you find works.

Busy season is upon us, and if you’re like most small business owners, you’re finding yourself feeling a bit frazzled. No matter how prepared you think you are, it can still feel like you’re scrambling. And amidst it all: you still have a business to run. How are you supposed to think about strategy and analytics when there’s so much to do?