You probably take the dashboard in your car for granted. But imagine cars without dashboards. How would you know how fast you’re going? How much gas is in the tank? If something is going wrong with the engine or tire pressure? (A reluctant “thank you” to that pesky check-engine light.) The fact is that your car dashboard - that compact, carefully crafted little view above and through your steering wheel - is absolutely essential to the successful operation of such a complex machine.
Now consider that you are currently driving another complex machine - your startup. How can you expect to successfully navigate the challenges and obstacles on the road before you without a dashboard? How will you make quick, informed, data-driven decisions? How will you steer the business, stay on the right road, and keep the wheels turning? In addition to your own usage as a founder, you also need to report to a variety of stakeholders on the status of your “vehicle” - your board, investors, and other team members also need to stay informed and make good decisions. A dashboard is almost as essential for your startup as it is for your car. In fact, considering the speed a typical startup moves, and the agility required, some would argue that a startup dashboard is more essential.
“Measure everything of significance. Anything that is measured and watched, improves." - Bob Parsons, CEO, GoDaddy.com
The list of benefits a good dashboard and business intelligence (BI) strategy provides your startup is long and proven:
Image source: Grow.com
Good dashboarding is one part art and two parts science. It’s easy to make the mistake of displaying too much data, or too little, or useless data, or, worse yet, confusing data. But if you get it right, dashboarding can be transformative to your company and provide you, your executive team, and your investors with a new level of data-driven confidence, speed, and direction. Here are a few things to keep in mind when implementing an effective dashboard strategy:
"That which is measured improves. That which is measured and reported improves exponentially." - Karl Pearson
The KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) or metrics you should be measuring vary depending on your business model, stage, and the current focus of your business. Below is a quick shopping-list of common metrics to consider. If you aren’t familiar with the terms, they are all pretty Google-able. Copy/paste away. (We will likely drill down into a few of these in future blog posts.)
Common Startup Metrics
Image source: Klipfolio.com
Image source: Klipfolio.com
Building and reading dashboards are a large part of what we do at Keating. We rely heavily on data to make decisions and provide timely, pointed advice to our clients.
For each of our clients, we provide a web dashboard showing a history of their basic financial metrics. These are designed to give the highest-level overview of their current financial positions, pulling data directly from their web-based accounting systems like QBO, Xero, NetSuite, or Intacct for near-real-time data visibility. We use these dashboards as the centerpiece of our monthly review and planning consultations each month. They are also extremely handy and popular in board meetings. Here are the most common and useful elements of our standard monthly finance reporting dashboards:
Source: https://grow.keatingconsulting.com/ - Anonymized sample data
Actuals versus projections
If a client has a financial model with projections (and they ABSOLUTELY should), we can map real-time data over the projections to show how the startup is performing against expectations. Each month, we discuss any deltas against the projections, analyze the cause of those deltas, and discuss how to address those deltas to either get back on track or update the projections to match reality. Talk about actionable metrics - these conversations often change the entire course of a startup’s direction.
Source: https://grow.keatingconsulting.com/ - Anonymized sample data
Each industry or business model adds to the list its own set of KPIs - from professional services, to manufacturing, to biotech, to consumer applications - that help define and drive success.
SaaS and Subscriptions
For our many SaaS-related clients, we often add specific metrics relevant to a monthly or annual subscription business model:
Image source: Klipfolio.com
E-Commerce and Hardware
For e-commerce clients, the following KPIs are common additions:
We even include a section on each client dashboard showing full near-real-time visibility into our own activity and billings on the account by their entire Keating team. We strive for transparency, cost-efficiency, and to avoid surprises; dashboarding lends itself perfectly toward those goals. Our clients can see in real-time the work being performed, by whom, and the associated costs.
Source: https://grow.keatingconsulting.com/ - Anonymized sample data
Besides implementing dashboards for our startup clients, we use dashboards ourselves to monitor and improve our own performance. Many metrics we use pull from multiple API-based data sources or systems and overlay data-points to measure ourselves and tell a story.
Real photo of the real rotating dashboard in our lobby
The dashboard in our lobby consolidates various high-level datasets from our time-keeping software (Harvest), project and tasking software (Asana), team/HR platform (Lattice), CRM (Hubspot), NPS scores (Promoter.io, Hubspot, and various Google Sheets) to let everyone see how we are progressing toward common goals important to our company mission ("We grow startups."). This dashboard is visible to all visitors to the office as well; we want them to see that we “eat our own dogfood” and actively monitor our own performance.
Our Client Success team has its own dashboard to monitor metrics representing how we are meeting and optimizing our service expectations for each client. It combines data from Harvest (time/hours), Hubspot (service tickets, client status, sales pipeline, NPS and email send-outs), Asana (onboarding, offboarding, special projects, and other tasks), and various Google Sheets (everything else) to highlight overall client satisfaction and to help identify opportunities for us to improve and expand (or contract) our services.
Our Executive Team has its own dashboard that pulls real-time data from more sensitive systems such as our internal accounting platform (Xero). We study it multiple times a week to compare revenues to targets, staff utilization (Harvest), department activity, client activity, receivables, and discounts or non-billable time that may represent an issue that needs attention.
Our Marketing and Business Development teams have a dashboard that highlights activities and trends that help optimize efforts and inform operations on what the pipeline looks like for staffing optimization.
More and more, we ourselves are figuring out how to let KPIs and data inform our own decisions, and dashboards have become a central part of our daily routines. We have gotten pretty good at dashboarding, and our own experiences have started to visibly contribute to our startup clients’ success.
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Let us show you what a good dashboard can do to help grow your startup.
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Read more on dashboarding