I spend a lot of time on airplanes lately.  My Foursquare mayorship of John Wayne airport can attest to that.  Every time I walk by the cockpit I’m amazed at the instruments and dashboards that pilots deal with on an everyday basis.  It struck me again yesterday while I was sitting in a meeting with my CEO who was talking about our company dashboard and using it to “fly the plane.”

I think it’s a great metaphor.  Every smart business uses a dashboard to track their progress towards their business goals.  Whether it’s paying customers, new leads, subscription rate, average revenue per customer (ARPU), there are important metrics that help you see how you’re flying your business before you get to the destination (business objective, quarterly revenue/profit goals, etc.) You can get down a couple of clicks by drilling down into dashboards for marketing or PR or operational cost, and then further into email open rates and clickthroughs and contact rate and call handle times.

The goal though is to find a dashboard that fits your needs.  Here the analogy works again: flying a plane is a lot more difficult than driving a car, so in addition to the car’s fuel, speed and engine heat dashboard you have things like altitude, wind speed, navigation, cabin pressure and hundreds more. If your business is large and complex you’ll naturally have more indicators that you need to track; but if you’re a sole proprietor of small business owner there may be just a handful of indicators that tell you all you need to know.

The important thing is to find the balance between the amount of information you need and the frequency with which you need it.  If you have too much information it can become mud. Even worse is if it creates too much work for you to keep up on a regular basis.  At the opposite end, too little data won’t reveal critical information that can help you keep your business on the right track.

The goal of course is to find that right balance that gives you timely information about the key drivers of your business so that you can get a better sense of what is happening to your business with enough time to do something about it.

So what does your dashboard look like and does it have the right amount of information on it so that you know how you’re flying the plane?

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