Altitude Breakthrough – Using Business Dashboards

While attending the Altitude event in October, we experienced some powerful breakthroughs. I want to share some details about one of the key takeaways we had and the first one was using a business dashboard.

(Matt Gill with Eben Pagan at the Altitude event)

What is a business dashboard?

It is a report, a piece of paper, a printout, an email, a web page or any one of many other formats where you see a daily or real time view of what is happening with your business.

For an online web business, the dashboard might show:

• - Number of visitors to your site:
  • – from search engines
  • – from pay per click
  • – from affiliates
• - Number of people signing up for your newsletter
• - Number of people who purchased your product(s)
• - Number of emails sent out
• - Number of customer service emails received
• - Number of customer service phone calls received
• - Number of customer service tickets generated
• - Number of customer service tickets resolved
• - Today’s cash in the bank
• - Today’s accounts receivables
• - Today’s accounts payables

The first one I saw was prepared by hand every morning using a typewriter for one of my consulting clients in 1981. The owner could make meaningful decisions about his business one day and see the results in the next day’s report.

A few years later I created one for managing 1,000 operators. One could instantly see whether or not to postpone breaks, call in extra help or send people home early, saving us millions per year in lost revenue and overtime.

I’d planned on using that in our business but concluded it would be part of the “super system” I envisioned us creating to help run our company.

What Eben did at the Altitude Seminar was show how simple it is to start doing it today…using Excel spreadsheets. The moment he mentioned that I felt like kicking myself in the rear. I should have thought of that. At the next break in the seminar I made a few phone calls and asked to have two dashboards created: one showing our traffic and list sizes; the other showing our revenues and financial condition. We had working prototypes the next day and have fine tuned them since. We now can see where we are financially and where we are with traffic, sales and list building.

These have already influenced several decisions that would have been poorly made without this great information.

In both cases it takes about ten minutes each day for these to be prepared using Excel and then emailed to the distribution list. The greatest thing about it is these Excel dashboards are available now rather than “some day” when the big system is finished.

Altitude is all about action. Having great ideas – having spectacular, earth shattering breakthrough ideas have absolutely no value unless they are acted upon.

I had a chance to talk about the seminar with one of my mentors when I returned. This particular mentor is one of the three co-founders of a Fortune 500 company. I mentioned some of the great lessons I learned at the seminar including that one.
He said, write this down “A bias toward action” and put it on your PC. I look at that Post-it Note every day and take action early rather than continue to think about great ideas.

That sticky note summarizes the single most important takeaway from the Altitude Seminar – Take Action.

The second greatest takeaway is that of the Excel dashboard. Keep up to date with what is going on in your business so you can now make better decisions today.

So that’s just a small sample of the kind of information you can get from the Altitude training. If you’ve been considering it, you’ll have to act fast. Its only available until Friday at midnight, unless they sell out sooner (the last time I knew they only had 271 sets left).

Our special "Decuple Your Profits" bonuses sold out, but for the next 5 people who order here, I'll personally make sure you still get the special bonus package including some of our best information and extra training to help you profit fast.

~ Dan Swanson

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