A lot of founders (and other decision-makers), who work in small(er) startups, spend way too much time managing and preparing data and way too little time growing the business.
I already know that someone is buried in manual work with reports when I hear things like this:
🚩 “The reports are often not accurate”
🚩 “The month-end report for the previous month is ready by the end of the following month”
🚩 “We hired an intern to copy-paste data into spreadsheets”
🚩 “We are using Google Docs / Excel to create our management report”
If you can relate to these things, chances are, you are spending more money and time than you should on putting together the reports that help you understand what drives your business.
I can even bet money that you might be wasting upwards of 1K every month on doing stuff that you probably are not fond of doing and… stuff that results in marginally decent insights into your business.
Example 💁
Let’s say, you spend an hour a day checking on your business and 1 day a month doing month-end reporting. That is 40 hours of time spent each month. If we assume that 1 hour of your time is worth 50 (dollars/euros/pounds), then you are wasting upwards of 2K/month doing stuff you probably do not like doing! Like copy-pasting data.
Let’s imagine you are using just some of the bellow technologies:
- Google Analytics
- Advertising platforms (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Taboola, Outbrain)
- CRM (HubSpot, PipeDrive)
- Direct Mail (Mailchimp, Sendgrid)
- Internal databases on your sales
- Social Media to grow followers (Facebook, TikTok, Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram)
- Shops to sell your product (Shopify, Amazon)
- Payment processors (Stripe, PayPal, Adyen)
- Accounting systems (Xero)
You should already be thinking about your future data needs. Even if you are using just a few of the above mentioned technologies, exporting, storing, and combining the data from these platforms into your own Data Lake will help you avoid going between these platforms to check your performance and it will automate, and thus, reduce mistakes in the reports.
The most frequent excuse for not automating reporting is… 🥁🥁🥁
We are too small to think about data and analytics
That is the argument I do not buy for 2 major reasons:
- It costs nothing to start automating your reports and data flows. Literary, there is a proliferation of tools that will give you free trials and free tiers.
- The earlier you start collecting and combining your own data, the better will be your historical trends, against which you can compare your business growth. That data stays with you forever!
Start freeing up your time by automating business insights and manual data tasks so you can spend that time doing what you love.
Cheers,
Kirill