When thinking about reaching your business goals you should approach it in the same ways as you would if you were tracking your personal fitness goals; looking at your fitness regime and what you aim to achieve, writes Jules de Ponte, Solutions Specialist at Altron Karabina.
De Ponte describes measuring business performance as being similar to joining a gym, saying that: “When signing up for a gym contract, the gym assigns you a personal trainer; and the first thing they ask is what end goal is? Do you want to lose weight? Do you want to train for an event? Do you want to increase fitness? Or do you want to build muscle?”
This is exactly what you should be doing in your business when it comes to implementing automation, analytics and reporting. You first have to set a goal you want to reach, and then determine where you are in terms of reaching that goal; after which, you can set out a plan to reach those goals.
Like in the gym, the personal trainer will first determine your current state of fitness; weighing you in, checking your strength level and determining your BMI. Now that they understand where you are in terms of your fitness level, and where you want to be, they can help put together a plan to take you from where you are, to where you want to be.
“With that information in mind, the trainer can then tailor a fitness program for you. They will give you a nutrition and exercise plan to suit the desired goal; the plan for someone wanting to lose weight will be completely different to that of a person wanting to gain muscle. Even if the end goals of two different people are the same, if they are starting from completely different points, their respective plans will be completely different. There’s no one size fits all,” de Ponte adds.
It is the same for businesses – their goals are different and the paths to achieving those goals will also be different.
Here comes the important part when it comes to automation, analytics and reporting. “You would track your fitness progress using all the fitness apps and gadgets, like smartwatches. All of these fitness apps are automated. They can determine your workouts, and what type of exercise you are doing, often without you even indicating you’re starting a session. Once a session is complete, these apps will give you graphs to show your progress.”
Few people, if any, track their fitness using Excel spreadsheets. It is a laborious manual task that takes ages and is prone to input errors. Says de Ponte: “This is not a way to track your fitness if you’re serious about it. So, you shouldn’t be tracking your business performance that way either.”
When you look at the graphs and the data you get from your smart watch, they are presented with graphs that are meaningful, showing you your trends and all sorts of useful information on which you can make decisions. You need the same for your business in order to make relevant decisions to move forward.
Now, think of Altron Karabina as your personal trainer, says de Ponte: “Our business analysts will help you tailor a specific business fitness plan that will suit your specific business needs. We will help you determine the correct goals and we help you determine where you are at the moment as a business.”
Altron Karabina will then place all the tools at your disposal to track and measure your progress towards those goals, be it customer relationship management (CRM) tools, data analytics processes and tools or advanced analytics to help with decision making – all the tools and processes which can be fully automated.”
If you take your personal health seriously, you should be taking your business health just as seriously.
Tracking your fitness goals and your progress is important, notes de Ponte, because if you see that little squiggly line trending upwards, you know that you are doing the right thing. “It is also a big motivating factor. If you can visually see that you can now cycle 20% further with a lower heart rate, which motivates you to keep going,”
The same counts for companies. You can’t make progress and reach any sort of goal if you’re not tracking your business performance against your goal.
“If you don’t know where you are, and you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter which direction you take. You will simply be milling around and never reach anywhere meaningful. If, however, you have a goal or a destination, and a solid plan to get you there, you will then be able to measure how far you are in reaching that destination,” de Ponte explains.
Altron Karabina can automate your business fitness tracking and performance measurement, just like you would expect from your fitness apps; all of it individualised for your business, exactly as for your fitness programme and according to your personal BMI and statistics. Your business solution will be built specifically according to your business needs with a personal touch.