Improving Business Performance with Systematic Data Insights

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Measuring Business Performance

How Well Is Your Company Performing?

Can I ask you how well your company is performing?

You will probably use financial metrics to describe the performance of your company. Financial key performance indicators (KPIs), such as revenue, profitability, cash flow and others. Maybe you can even show me a fancy dashboard monitoring your business performance using financials in real-time. And using financials is indeed the best way to inform me – an outsider of your company – about your company’s performance. Financials are extremely powerful. People can easily understand and compare them to other companies. Financials are what people usually care about the most, especially revenue and profit.

The Limitations of Financial Metrics

But when you as a business leader or entrepreneur evaluate your company’s performance, your main focus must not be on financials. This is not what effective business performance management is all about.

The issue is that financials are a reflection of the past. Strong financial performance in the previous year doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll also be successful this year. And if you rely too heavily on measuring your company’s performance with financials, you’ll be too slow to manage your business. Once financials become available, telling you performance was poor and you need to drive changes to your business activities, you’ve already lost plenty of time. With their focus on the past and their limited ability to predict the future, it’s clear financials only provide limited insight into your company’s performance. To truly measure your company’s business performance such that you can use the insights to effectively drive improvements you need to measure more than just financials.

Are you relying too heavily on metrics that only tell you what has already happened?

Improving Business Performance with Holistic Insights

As a business leader or entrepreneur, your responsibility is to create a thriving future for your company. With the work you are doing today, you want to ensure that the business value keeps increasing going forward. Essentially, your focus must be on improving things today that will contribute towards your business success tomorrow. What actions are you taking today to guarantee a stronger tomorrow for your business?

Every business has five key performance areas. To drive future success, you need to be focused on improving the status quo in each of these key performance areas. The five key performance areas of your business are:

The Five Key Performance Areas of Every Business

1. Customer Experience: Are your customers satisfied with your products or services? How well do you understand and respond to their needs and feedback? A high level of customer satisfaction leads to long-term growth.
2. Operational Efficiency: How efficiently are your business processes running? Are you delivering quality products and services on time, without wasting resources? Streamlined operations reduce costs and increase scalability.
3. Employee Engagement and Development: How engaged and motivated are your employees? A strong workforce, where employees feel valued and aligned with the company’s mission, is key to executing your strategy. High employee retention and productivity directly contribute to long-term success.
4. Innovation and Adaptability: How innovative is your company? Are you continuously evolving, adapting to market trends, and finding ways to improve your offerings? Companies that foster a culture of innovation are better positioned to stay competitive and meet future challenges.
5. Customer Service Excellence: Can customers easily get help when they need it? Are issues resolved quickly and effectively? Strong customer service is a critical aspect of long-term success, as it builds trust and loyalty.

How Strong Performance in These Areas Drives Success

Strong performance in each of these areas will guarantee ongoing business success. The activities a business carries out to improve in these five areas drive long-term growth. Improving customer experience increases retention and creates advocates for your brand. Hence, revenue increases through existing and new customers. Increasing operational efficiency allows you to deliver high-quality products or services at lower costs, which increases profit. Similar observations are true when improving employee engagement and development, innovation and adaptability, and customer service excellence.

To improve business performance you need to be tracking how well you are doing in the five key performance areas. You need to identify metrics that help you to capture current performance and help you to identify how to improve it. Each improvement you are able to drive in any of these areas will help you to improve your overall business performance. This sets the foundation for future growth.

This is why you need to capture holistic insights about your business performance to improve it. With holistic insights I mean insights about each and every of the five key performance areas instead of only gathering insights about your financial performance.

What is Execution and Why is it Challenging

Understanding Execution and Its Importance

When assessing your company’s performance you are looking into how well your company is executing. Execution is the day-to-day tasks and activities a company performs to achieve business objectives. This includes everything from sales, product development, customer service to internal processes like Human Resources and finance. Essentially, execution is the “doing” of the business. How effectively is your company handling the “doing” part of the business?

All the tasks and activities your company is doing can be classified to one of the five key performance areas mentioned above. You can classify sales and product development as examples of execution under Customer Experience. Activities related to human resources would generally fall under Employee Engagement and Development and activities related to finance fall under Operational Efficiency. Some tasks may overlap and fall under several key performance areas. Are you certain that all your activities are properly aligned with their respective performance areas?

The Challenges of Executing Effectively

Without a doubt, your company’s ability to execute is key when building exceptional performance. But executing well is challenging. I’m sure in your business you experienced several times that projects did not achieve agreed key business outcomes. You probably also have experienced instances where your team identified issues that were negatively impacting customer experience or operational efficiency. Many executives believe these failures in execution happened because people don’t do their jobs well enough. Sometimes, this can be the root cause. But, there’s interesting research about failure rates in execution, especially about execution of new strategy. This research indicates the failure rate is as high as somewhere between 60% to 90%. Is it possible that the root of these challenges lies not in individual performance, but in the systems and processes your company uses to execute?

Systematic Issues Behind Execution Failures

What does the research say about why execution fails? It isn’t really about people. The issues are rather systematic. Amongst the top reasons is missing leadership alignment. If leaders of different departments pursue different goals, this can create inefficiencies, delays, and failures to reach objectives.

Another common reason for failure is related to resource allocation. Companies often set ambitious objectives but fail to allocate the required resources to achieve them. Lastly, teams often communicate too little, and important information is not available between them. This can be especially problematic if there are cross-functional dependencies. How often do teams in your company struggle because of a lack of timely and effective communication? For example, imagine the marketing team continues to promote an unavailable product because it wasn’t informed that production issues made the product unavailable.

Since failures in execution are mostly due to systematic issues, companies need better systems to manage execution.

Successful Execution Is Like Climbing a Mountain

If you think about it, execution is a lot like climbing a mountain.

The goal is clear: reaching the summit. But getting there requires careful planning, coordination, and teamwork. Each team member has a role, and every step along the path demands focus and cooperation.

Imagine you and your team embarking on a challenging climb. Before you even start, there’s preparation—gathering the right gear, studying the terrain, and mapping out the route. As the ascent begins, the team regularly pauses to assess progress, checking the map and reviewing conditions. Maybe the path becomes steeper, or the weather turns. At each checkpoint, you evaluate whether you’re still on track. Adjustments are made quickly, preventing the team from straying too far or encountering unnecessary risks.

Each climber contributes to the mission’s success. Some take the lead in navigation, others manage supplies, but everyone is aligned toward reaching the summit. If something goes wrong, the team corrects the mistake, recalibrates, and continues upward.

Much like mountain climbing, successful execution depends on constant feedback, collaboration, and adaptability. Regular reviews ensure everyone stays aligned, challenges are addressed early, and the team continues making progress toward the shared goal.

The Business Performance Review Mechanism is exactly about this. It helps you to optimize the performance of your business by using systematic data insights. Let’s look at it in more detail.

Improve Business Performance with the Business Performance Review Mechanism

Introduction to the Business Performance Review Mechanism

Using data insights helps you to significantly improve your business performance. And using data insights systematically generates even more opportunities for improving business performance.

This is where what I call the Business Performance review mechanism comes in. The Business Performance Review is a mechanism designed to help your company achieve long-term business success by developing an excellent ability to execute. It works by monitoring the performance of each activity using a large set of business metrics. For each metric, there is a dedicated metrics owner—a person accountable for the activities measured by that metric. The metrics owner is responsible for carefully analyzing the metric’s development to ensure that progress is being made effectively.

The Business Performance Review Meeting

The core of the mechanism is the business performance review meeting, which is held at a specific cadence—ideally weekly, but at least monthly. The company’s leadership, all metrics owners, and key stakeholders attend this meeting. During the review, every metric is evaluated to determine whether it is on track to meet its goals. If a metric is off-track, the metrics owner initiates a discussion to identify the root causes of the deviation.

After identifying the root causes, the metrics owner presents an action plan to get back on track. In a collaborative effort, other attendees—especially business leaders and key stakeholders—add their insights and perspectives to ensure that the root causes are correctly identified and that the action plan effectively addresses the issue. This collaborative approach ensures that corrective actions are thorough and that everyone remains aligned on business priorities. How could your team benefit from such a structured and collaborative review process?

Outcomes of the Business Performance Review Mechanism

The business performance review’s systematic approach creates three outcomes:

1. Clarity on Performance: Everyone gets a clear view of how your company is executing its goals. 
2. Ensure Alignment Across Teams: Your teams collaborate and work hand in hand. They are aware of challenges and are aligned on priorities and solutions, leading to a better organizational effectiveness. 
3. Rapid corrective actions: When a business activity is not yielding the desired outcomes, you are able to take rapid corrective actions. This ensures your company gets on the right track to meet its business goals.

Therefore, with an effective business performance review mechanism your company significantly improves its ability to execute.

The 8 Key Benefits of a Business Performance Review Mechanism for Your Business

Implementing a well-executed Business Performance Review Mechanism generates the following 8 key benefits for your business:

Financial and Operational Business Performance Benefits

1. Enhances Financial Performance: As your company becomes better at executing, you create a better customer experience, achieve higher operational efficiency, improve employee engagement and development, reach higher levels of innovation and adaptability, and achieve customer service excellence. These improvements will increase revenue and profitability.
   How would an increase in customer experience and operational efficiency impact your bottom line?
2. Accelerated Problem Resolution: Your team quickly identifies and resolves issues impacting your business performance before an issue creates larger damage to your reputation and financials.
3. Reduced Redundancy and Inefficiency: The accountability and clarity generated through the business performance review help reduce duplication and counterproductive activities. Everyone knows who is working on which goals, streamlining efforts and improving efficiency.

Team and Culture Business Performance Benefits

4. Objective Reality Check: The Business Performance Review is a truth-seeking exercise. It enables you as a business leader to confront reality about your company’s performance, even when the facts are challenging. Evaluating the status quo is crucial for effective decision-making about how to improve performance.
   Are you ready to confront the facts, even when they are challenging?
5. Strengthened Accountability: Each metric has a metrics owner accountable for the metric’s development and optimization. This clear responsibility ensures that the activity measured by the metric is actively managed and improved.
6. Improved Focus and Alignment: Using metrics to measure business performance improves the company’s ability to identify areas where further improvements are required. The data also provides a common ground for business leadership and employees to align on priorities.
   How aligned is your team currently on key priorities?

Employee and Data-Driven Culture Business Performance Benefits

7. Increased Job Satisfaction: Research shows employees are more satisfied when they understand the impact of their work and the company’s priorities. Both of these factors become more evident with the business performance review. Increased job satisfaction can ultimately lead to better employee performance.
8. Cultivated Data-Driven Culture: Implementing business performance reviews fosters a data-driven environment. This practice enhances business intelligence, driving more strategic decisions based on analytics and insights rather than assumptions. With a focus on data, companies can improve their strategies, boost operational efficiency, and improve overall performance.
   Would your company benefit from a stronger focus on data-driven decisions?

Which Companies Benefit the Most From a Business Performance Review?

When trying to decide whether the Business Performance Review Mechanism is right for your company, there are a few things to consider:

Company Size

• Micro-businesses (Less than 10 employees): You don’t need a business performance review mechanism. You should definitely ensure you are using KPIs and performance metrics to holistically measure the performance of your business. But at your size the team is tightly-knitted with effective direct communication channels, making it unnecessary to implement a performance review mechanism. 
• Small Businesses (10 to 50 employees): Implementing a business performance review mechanism will be helpful for your company to ensure you stay on track, have clarity on performance, identify issues early and your teams are aligned. A lightweight version of the Business Performance Review is usually sufficient for a company of your size.
• Mid-Sized Companies (50 to 250 employees): Mid-sized businesses are often at a stage where departmental silos begin to form, making communication and alignment more difficult. This is where a business performance review becomes critical. The company has enough complexity to warrant a formalized review process to ensure leaders and teams are aligned. Regular reviews will help identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and underperforming areas before they escalate, while also ensuring that departments work together towards common target.
• Large Enterprises (250+ employees): In large organizations, where managing multiple teams and departments can be challenging, business performance reviews are even more essential. These companies typically deal with complex projects, cross-functional dependencies, and significant resource allocations, so the ability to track performance and identify issues early is crucial. The larger the company, the more likely it is to benefit from a structured, data-driven performance review process to maintain cohesion and ensure long-term strategic goals are met.

Industry Type

• Most suitable for industries like manufacturing, technology, finance, healthcare, and service-based sectors, where operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and innovation are key drivers of success.
•  Extremely suitable for industries that deal with large volumes of data and require alignment between departments such as tech, e-commerce and logistics.
•  Not suitable for creative industries, where outcomes are often more subjective and less easily qualifiable. 

Business Complexity

• Cross-Functional Dependencies: Companies with operations that involve cross-functional collaboration – such as marketing, sales, product development, and customer service working together – are ideally suited for this mechanism.
• High Volume of Metrics and Data: If a company is data-heavy, the business performance review mechanism is ideal to ensure the company focuses on what really matters.

Growth Stage:

• Suitable for companies of any growth stage but especially beneficial for companies experiencing rapid growth or companies in transformation. 

Conclusion

To build a high performing business, you need a performance management system taking a holistic approach to understand your company’s performance. It incorporates insights across all key performance areas—customer experience, operational efficiency, employee engagement, innovation, and customer service—is critical. By systematically using data insights, you can identify opportunities for improvement, align your team, and make faster, more informed decisions. The Business Performance Review Mechanism offers a structured way to enhance your company’s ability to execute effectively, ensuring sustained growth and operational excellence.

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