How Accurate Business Projections Can Boost Your Growth

Written by: Angela McManaway & Matt Van Vleet

When you’re running a service business, you need to be able to focus on the things you can control and not waste time collecting data that isn’t giving you the ability to make confident, smart business decisions that enable your business to be healthy and grow.

To do this, you need to be able to access business data that’s accurate and be able to see it in advance to make decisions proactively with the most accurate information possible. How will you know where to place the right bets as you grow if you don’t have a way to see what might happen if you do or don’t make those moves?

The trouble is that many companies don’t have a way to look into the future like they need to in order to make the smart hiring and expenditure decisions without guessing or hoping for the best.

Some have an entire person on staff just for this purpose. That job is not only time consuming, but it’s also expensive to the company, and unfortunately involves a lot of mistakes and time expenditure for leadership to make sense of the data that person gathers.

Others pull data from the past 30 days hoping to gain insight only from the past, not taking into account what’s happening today.

You can’t change the past. If you want to grow, you have to look toward the future. But you can’t think forward without taking both the past and present into account.

Real Data, Real Insights, Real Growth Potential

You don’t have to feel like you’re running your business blindly hoping the most recent spreadsheet errors are going to “come out in the wash” financially and not create problems for your org. Nor do you have to look only to the past hoping what you find there will lead you to the right future decisions.

If you can’t tell where you’ll be in six months, how can you make the right hires or project how many hires will be workable for the upcoming year, what education to invest in for your people, or whether you could possibly even expand into a larger office space without accurate, current insights and projections at hand? Unfortunately, you can’t—you’ll be guessing.

You need to make your business decisions about the future based on the whole picture rather than just a snapshot of your company’s past. You need to be able to hone in on how you can grow, where you can grow, and the ways you need to make adjustments to continue to grow with real, accurate data to back it all up.

What you need to make the most informed decisions is accurate projections via an intuitive and intelligent tool that will show you what’s happening now, what’s happened before, and what’s changed, all in one smart, error-free place. Then you can make smart bets and business decisions based on real data that gives you real answers to what’s happening across your entire organization. When you make better decisions, you can offer more value to your customers. When you spend less time guessing about what to invest in, you can spend more time actually investing in your people and enabling their growth—so they can enable yours.

When you have a system that takes care of accurate projections for you, you free up your leaders to lead and solve problems instead of trying to collect data or understand what your problems are in the first place. Then they can focus on where you can go in the future and easily map out the right moves to get you there.