Attention Vice Presidents, Presidents and CEOs: What Do You Keep Track of?
Running a company these days is very challenging. Exceeding revenue and profit goals can be very difficult in today’s economy. Things move quickly these days and clearly can change at a moment’s notice.
I will admit I am a numbers guy. I keep track of a lot of things that I find very useful in running and managing the business.
Here are a number of things that help me do that:
- Revenue per person
- Billability
- 7 year history of client revenue
- Profitability by client
- Revenue for the month
- Hit rate by client and by new business development person
- When I am reviewing leases - square feet by employee is critical
- Percentage of salary to revenue
- Inactive accounts
- Employee turnover rate
Every company is different. Systems and procedures vary from one company to another, but I am sure some of these ring a bell and are being used by you while others might not be.
Which ones make sense to you?
What do you track?
I look forward to reading your comments.
March 9th, 2007 at 11:58 am
Speaking from the vantage point of a smaller firm, we also track the following:
Dollar value of sales and proposals made each week, total value of outstanding proposals, total value of outstanding proposals made within the past 30 days.
Also track/project results by gross margin (revenue less project related costs paid out or subcontracted).
Project profitability.
March 16th, 2007 at 9:55 pm
I track a few things. I track how many client/prospect calls/contacts each salesperson makes per week (broken down by day), in order to offer insight into their bidding/win activity (which I obviously also track).
I keep a close eye as well on how many new clients are bought in every month, as diversification of our client base is a huge foundation in the continued growth of our (or any) company.
Alot of what you mentioned I track, such as:
Client win ratio
Salesperson win ratio
Yield (margin) per job/per salesperson/per client
Total $$$ amount of outstanding business
Most of the above is tracked on either a weekly basis, monthly basis, or job specific basis. If you want to try and insure that you meet or exceed yoru goals, you need to be on top of the process so that you don’t end up in a situation where without tracking, you just gave yourself enough rope to hang yourself.