Features

• Custom content management application
• Article architectural is designed for optimum search engine optimization
• Simple design
• Call to action form
• CRM integration to Batchblue

Key Features:

• CMS built in WordPress
• Custom front page animations dynamically pulling content from posts
• Custom book pages dynamically pulling article content by book categories
• Customized twitter feed
• Image gallery
• Password protected industry page

• Website hosting with 100gb of transfer and 1 gb of file space
• Email hosting with 10 email accounts and unlimited email aliases and forwards
• One hour of website help per month.  This can be adding content, updating pictures, adding widgets or CMS training.

What metrics do is get us knowledge instead of information.  This knowledge gives us visibility into the “improvement” activities we are doing in our organization to see if they are actually working.  We call these metrics economic engines from Jim Collin’s book Good to Great.  There are two engines that give us visibility into improving the economic health of our organization— growth engines and profit engines.  It is important to separate growth engines from profit engines because we have all heard of stories of companies that grow like crazy, but end up growing out of business because they didn’t understand the economic realities of the cost structure needed to support their sales.  On the flip side we’ve heard of companies that have an incredibly profitable and well tuned machine, but seam to have troubles growing.  Let’s look into each engine more.

Graph from The Lean Startup by Eric Reis. Click on the image to buy from amazon and support the book.

Growth Engines

Growth Engine metrics are tied to how you get new business in the door.  One of the great tools for this metrics is looking at funnel graphs.  This type of graph shows the process with which you a lead into a sale.  For a company that focuses on direct sales, the steps in their funnel might be: lead -> appointment -> presentation -> sale.  For an online web application, this process might be: visitor -> trial sign-up -> first login -> paid account.   The first step is to identify the process our organization goes through to increase business.  The next step is to implement some sort of tracking plan that looks at the sales process within segments of time.  Time is important because numbers are only useful when they are compared to other numbers.  When evaluating numbers in the context of time, you can see if the changes you make in your growth engine are actually improving results.  The graph to the right shows a funnel graph taken from Eric Reis’ book “The Lean Startup“.  It shows the % of people that moved through each step of the growth engine for a company called IMVU.  Their process was Registered -> Logged in -> Had one conversation -> Had five conversations -> Paid.  In his book, Eric makes the point that IMVU was making an incredible amount of improvements in their product, but as they analyzed the funnel graph, they realized these changes were not translating into more paid customers.    IMVU started to realize that their activities were not actually creating value for the product.  This knowledge forced them to make some hard decisions about what they thought their product should be and why customers were interested in it.  What an incredible example making better decisions with just ONE simple graph.

In my last article, I told the story of when I worked in a marketing department if a computer training company and my job was to track marketing expenditures and compare them with the results of sales.  I created a report for management with just a couple simple metrics.  One of them was the cost per lead and cost per sale of each marketing medium (eg yellow pages, direct sales, television, newspaper).  One of the things we realized from the reports was that our ads in yellow pages and newspapers where becoming less effective.  It was the mid-90s and the economy had really started to take off and was nearing full employment.  The mass amount of people were not looking for new skills because they already had a job.  So, we changed to more “intrusive” ad mediums placing more ads on TV with a different message focused on the idea that computer skills could provide a better job.  We changed one thing at a time and then measured the effect.  From the cost per lead and cost per sale metrics we found that the new TV ads were much more effective than other types of ads.

Profit Engines

Jim Collins says in Good to Great, “If you could pick one and only one ratio – profit per x ( or in the social sector, cash flow per x) -to systematically increase over time, what x would have the greatest and most sustainable impact on your economic engine. ”  He goes on to show that each company in their study had created value by focusing on a simple and singular metric that gave them key understanding of what the economic drivers where of their organization.  Jim Collins provides many examples of an economic engine: profit per employee for Wells Fargo, profit per customer visit for Walgreens or profit per ton of finished steel for Nucor.

I experienced the value of profit metrics first hand when I took a break from technology for three years and managed the plant of a vinyl window manufacturer.  The owner was great at establishing simple metrics for evaluating the performance of the plant.  Like any business if you wait to view information at the end of the month or at the end of a quarter, it is too late.  So, at the end of each day the owner wanted to see two metrics from me: completed product and shop wages.  These metrics gave him a picture of the value of the product that went through the shop and also gave him a picture of what the cost of wages were for that product.  While material goods was the biggest cost of manufacturing, we had optimization software in place that made this cost fairly easy to predict and fairly consistent over time.  This metric wasn’t something the shop had an incredible amount of control over.  But wages were the next highest expense and we had incredible control over this metric.  And in a low margin business like most of the manufacturing sector a metric like wages could mean the difference between sustainable profits and going out of business.

Again, any metric we create must be simple and it must give us data in some sort of context.  This gives us better decision making ability so we can see if we are improving or not.    When we create our metrics correctly, even my eight year old son can understand them.  But don’t let simplicity fool you, because it does not mean easy.   It takes hard work, discipline and vision to implement systems that give us valuable metrics.  So start to push for these metrics now in your organization.  Test your processes by making small changes and then measuring them with metrics.  As you start, don’t worry if you don’t have things automated right away.  Once you have metric creation systems put in place, and you are sure you have chosen metrics that measure things that actually effect one of your economic engines, then you can start to think about automating the process.  The light these metrics shine on your ability to make decisions may seem as magical as the first light bulb would have seemed to the people of Thomas Edison’s day.

The reason I was so passionate about business intelligence was that my first job out of college was working at a computer training company that spent a decent amount of money on advertising and they would track every dollar spent on every ad medium.  Then they would track each phone call when someone responded to an advertisement and one of the first questions they would ask was how the caller heard about the company.  Then from this initial piece of data, that person would be tracked through the system to see if the company was actually able to set them up with an appointment and then if they showed up for the appointment and then if they enrolled in the school and then if they actually started school.  My job was to create reports and graphs of all this data for management to make better marketing decisions.  I actually loved the work, and loved how effective is was for management to get this data in a format that allowed them to make intelligent decisions.  My salary at the company was completely devoted to this reporting, but it paid off because money was being spent wisely on marketing efforts that actually worked.  The company had a vision for analytics and ran their company by these numbers versus relying on gut level instincts (which many times are wrong).

What got me started thinking about all this is the new movie out based on Michael Lewis’s book “Moneyball”.  The story follows the 2003 Oakland A’s and their General Manager, Billy Beane, who used a method called Sabermetrics to choose undervalued players that had the ability to help win ball games. Sabermetrics is defined as “the search for objective knowledge about baseball.”  Billy went through a process of identifying the metrics they thought would give them the most benefit for the least amount of money.   They choose to ignore the vanity metrics that are traditionally used by teams to evaluate players like batting average and instead use a similar metric called on base percentage.  What I love about the story is how hard it was for Billy Beane to implement decisions using the objective statics found in Sabermetrics with the team.  Nobody in the A’s organization really “got it”.  It just wasn’t the way baseball was done.  It took significant vision from Billy and it took incredible leadership to implement these ideas, and it wasn’t easy.

At the end of the day, making decisions based on objective analytics led to a big pay-off for the A’s with a winning season.  And there is also a big pay-off for companies that are run this way as well.  The problem is that it takes significant leadership to be disciplined to figure out the key metrics needed to increase growth or profitability of a company.  And then it is even harder to make tough decisions based on the findings from the metrics.  As Moneyball shows, this process wasn’t easy for Billy Beane, but it was well worth the effort.

1.  Be Prideful.  Think of yourself as the one with the answers.  This applies to both business people and technology people.  Try to involve as few people in the process as possible.

2.  Don’t ask questions.  Since you already know what the end product should be and how it should function, you really don’t need to ask for feedback or have people actually try out the software.

3.  Stay Cutting Edge.  You don’t want to have a project that is “So Yesterday”.  Be sure you change your requirements and technologies to stay with what is hot.  After all, what good is something that works if it isn’t “hip”.

View the website at: http://www.4us.org

Key Features:

• Custom content management system
• Front page news feed
• Front page event feed
• Event registration and management
• E-commerce system for event registrations
• Volunteer management
• Donation system and management
• Fundraising system for people to create event teams and invite people to fundraise
• Video integration
• Ability to set up custom event fields and functions to manage events in the future

Key Features:

• Content management system
• E-commerce store
• Blog
• Rss integration
• Custom photography

The result was a minimalist design centered around their incredible pictures.  The site was built in WordPress giving them access to update content.  All project images are automatically resized and attached to the page through the media manager to make the process of uploading new images easy and painless.

View the website at: http://www.plantingdesign.com

Key Features:

• Content management system
• Custom AJAX image loading based on mouse hover
• Rss integration
• Project browser