What is the most important bit of information you need to know about your business?
Although industries differ all business share certain traits in common.
The most obvious one is that they exist to make money. Knowing how much money a business is making is obviously essential, but what’s probably more important is your costs.
If you don’t know how much the total costs are you can’t calculate your margin as accurately (if at all).
Most businesses look at costs, income, turnover and other financial data on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis. Bob Parsons’ most recent post throws that practice on its head. Parsons and GoDaddy do it all daily!
That may not be an option for some business models, but its benefits are clear.
As Parsons points out, you can adapt more easily and thus run your business more cost-effectively.
The most obvious example of this adaptation would be in online advertising. A system such as Google’s adwords provides close to realtime reporting. If an ad campaign is not generating clicks and more importantly, conversions you can adapt it immediately.
Of course the volume of sales in a company such as GoDaddy would be such that even one day’s results would include a substantial quantity of data, especially if you consider that they account for such a high percentage of the domain registration market.
