What do you wish you knew about your own business?

Finish the sentence. If I could know one thing about my business that I currently cannot see, it would be.

Most owners answer within a few seconds, which tells you it is not a new thought. It has been sitting there a long time.

The answers are usually practical. Which customers are slipping away. What each job actually costs by the time it is finished. Which enquiries we lost and why. How much of our money is stuck, right now.

The part that surprises people

In almost every case, the business already holds that information. It is written somewhere, by somebody, for a different purpose.

What is missing is not the data. It is that nobody has ever put it together, because putting it together is a day of work that nobody has been asked to do and nobody has time to volunteer.

So the question is less can we get this and more is this worth a day, and the answer to that is usually obvious the moment it is asked out loud.

Try it once, by hand

Before anybody builds anything, produce the answer once, manually, for last month.

It will be slow and slightly wrong and it will be enough. You will find out two things immediately: whether the answer actually changes any decision you take, and what you would really want to see next to it.

Half the time, the first manual attempt shows that the thing you wanted to know is less useful than a different number sitting beside it. That is a cheap discovery to make by hand, and an expensive one to make after somebody has built a report.

Finish the sentence yourself. Then ask whether anybody could produce that answer by hand for last month.

Producing that answer by hand once, before building anything, is a step we insist on, because it saves people from reports nobody reads. Tell us what you wish you knew.