From newborn to boardroom - preventing 💩 from happening

For newborns, vital body functions are regularly measured to determine whether the newborn is developing according to the expected growth curves. If anything is off, specialists are available to help out. They will try and measure various body functions to find out what is causing the deviation and how to treat it. 🕵️

Objectively measuring body functions is key to finding the cause and making plans for a cure. For some diseases, there are preventive checks to catch a developing disease early and treat it immediately. For other diseases, you get a vaccination. Injecting viruses into a newborn to make the newborn more resilient. Tough love. ♥️

Treat your company like a newborn. Make sure that you know the vital functions of your company, measure how they perform and check if they develop according to plan. That’s why these measures are called key performance indicators. They need to measure key parts of your business. If the KPI’s start showing signs of decline, get your thermometer! 🌡️

When you start investigating, make sure you understand how your KPIs relate to each other. Doctors can run multiple predefined tests to investigate the cause of your sickness. For a company, you need to have your lower level KPI’s and data ready and available to determine the cause.🔭

Finally, define your targets. Make clear what your gross margin should be and when it is too low.  KPI’s without targets are useless. It is like measuring blood levels without knowing what acceptable blood levels are.🎯

Want to vaccinate your company against diseases? Execute stress tests on your processes to determine where processes break and how to counter these breaks and/or pre-install a buffer. Your KPIs will quickly recover. 💯