Knowing the Score

Every successful business owner has the tools they need to keep score. They know if they are profitable.  It is just as important for your team to know this too. People want to be on a winning team. To know if they are winning they need a simple Key Performance Indicator (KPI) to tell them the score.

Your KPI Must be Simple

At D&D our KPI is called UpTime. We sell our time at D&D . When time is billable to a project it is called Uptime and is totaled weekly. If I were to run this company with only one measurable it would be UpTime.

It is important to think about what your one KPI is and make it as simple as possible. One number is simple and with employee feedback we added percent capacity to our weekly UpTime figure. Capacity is the number of hours we worked that was billable as a percentage of the total number of hours that we worked. As I write this I have just received our weekly UpTime email and I see that we are at 93% capacity. This is a strong indicator telling us to review staffing and consider hiring.

Your KPI Must be Immediate

As in sport you want to know what the score is right now. We do this weekly because of our time card schedule. Our accounting team is efficient so we know by Thursday at 10:00AM how many hours we billed for the previous week. An email goes out every Thursday before noon telling everyone in the company our current UpTime. As in sport people dig in a little more when they are behind a bit and get charged up when they are winning. This builds a great team atmosphere.

Share Your KPI with Your Customers

Wouldn’t it be cool if your customers got on board and helped you to achieve your goals? I believe that your best customers would want to.

Is this a scary thought?   

Does your company share it’s KPI’ with its customers?