Over time, it is essential to monitor the growth and development of the business by the entrepreneur. If you have a clear graph that gives out the key business metrics graph, it becomes easy to see what is working well or what may not be working well. This article aims to present how growth graphs can be used by entrepreneurs to achieve business growth and some expert tips to consider by Stanley Bae when using graphs.
Tracking Key Business Metrics
The first one is to define 3 to 5 strategic quantitative measures, which will indicate the state and development of your business, according to StanleyBae. Understand what the concept of growth entails for your business. Growth could entail sales, customers, web traffic, etc. It is recommended to set clear numerical targets tied to the company’s objectives. For example, revenue growth by 40%. It is, therefore, necessary that we track the right metrics in order to measure progress in meaningful ways.
There are best practices in the form of S.M.A.R.T goals, which stand for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. This helps you to concentrate on those few areas that are essential in the achievement of your goals. These could include:
- Revenue
- Number of customers/clients
- Website Traffic
- Sales volume
- Net profit
Document these measures on a monthly or quarterly basis over the life cycle of your business. Collecting this valuable information on a regular basis will help arrange it according to time to comprehend the advancements.
Creating Your Growth Graph
Once one has tracked their basic metrics for some time, they can construct a graph showing the growth path of the business. The x-axis should be in time intervals of, say, quarters or fiscals, depending on what the company follows. The y-axis should display the figures of quantitative metrics. Graph each business metric against time. Join each point of the data for each measure. This will help highlight trends and growth curves for every aspect of your business.
Other useful information that can be added to the picture are comparison lines consisting of goals or industry averages. Ensure that the graph is labelled and has a legend indicating what the various lines represent.
Advice from the Professionals
There are many online tools for making charts, such as Google Sheets, Excel, or business intelligence tools, that help to save time in depicting the graphs. Choose clean and easy-to-understand layouts that effectively convey trends. Think about using lines for time periods, bar charts for periods of time, or even gauges with important numbers.
Make different lines and bars in different colours to distinguish elements such as revenue, number of customers, or user signups. Ensure axes’ labels and short captions providing information about the plotted values are also added. It is important to incorporate a neatly drawn growth graph as it adds credibility to the work. Here are some professional tips on getting value from your business growth graphs;
- It is also important to update the graphs on a quarterly or annual basis to incorporate the new data. This will make trends relevant.
- Seek out positive hockey stick shapes where rates of growth are steep.
- Look for potentially problematic downward trends that might require action.
- Check the growth metrics against the business goals set at the beginning.
- Determine which parts of your business are experiencing the most growth.
- Present your growth graphs to business partners, managers, advisors, and investors.
- Make your graphs helpful in the formulation of crucial business directions and the required adjustments.
Using Analytics Dashboards
The primary use of graphing entrepreneurial growth is to understand what is effective in the advancement process. Recognize patterns such as increased conversion rates of customers from marketing promotions or decreased sales that need new products. Report your findings to your senior management team in order to see what is working and what is not. Establish future goals that should be challenging but achievable depending on what the graphs reveal concerning the capabilities of the startup. To optimize your business, export your business metrics into an analytics dashboard. This will immediately plot your growth graphs alongside other plots. Analytics dashboards are compatible with many of the most commonly used small business applications. Power BI, Google Data Studio, and Klipfolio are some of the best examples of dashboards available in the market.
Conclusion
It is essential for every businessman to plot and analyze business growth graphs on a daily or weekly basis. Measuring the above metrics over the life of the company will help to identify successes, trends, issues, and milestones for more information or to incorporate growth graphs into your business analytics tool kit on priority. The growth of your business will also have a smooth upward trend once you measure consistently and implement these expert tips, according to StanlyBae.
