# There is no Magic Pill to organize your business data



## ehMax (Feb 17, 2000)

_ - Written by contributing ehMac.ca Member, Steve Smith - _

As a consultant, Iʼm often approached by business owners who are looking for ways to help them become ʻmore organizedʼ. Too often these individuals are looking for what I refer to as a ʻmagic pillʼ that will help make them super organized in the blink of an eye. Many focus on the solutions, before they develop a clear understanding of their requirements.










If youʼre a small business owner, or a solo, and you feel like youʼre drowning in the information that your business needs to operate efficiently and productively, itʼs not that difficult to get yourself organized. But it does require some effort on your part. You need to sit down and develop a plan on how to record, store, and manage your business information. Donʼt get yourself confused between technology and information. This plan does not deal with the technology being used, it should describe how information flows within your company.

Typically when someone approaches us with the goal of improving the organization and flow of their companyʼs information, we ask them four simple questions: What are you currently doing to manage the information? What is working for you? What is not working for you? And what is your main goal moving forward?

We donʼt want to hear, “we are currently using XYZ application version 3.1.25 running on a 2.40 GHz processor with 4 Gb of RAM on a Gigabit ethernet network”.

We want the overview such as: “weʼre capturing prospect names and email addresses from our web site, and from the business cards we take in at trade shows. Roughly 40% of new prospects come from our web site, 35% come from trade shows, and 25% are emails and phone calls that have been word of mouth referrals from our existing customers. Joe deals with the territory that includes these cities, Mary with these cities, and Ashley makes first contact with all of the new prospects to qualify them before she turns them over to Joe or Mary. Our average sale takes 4-5 weeks from the time we first make contact until the deal is closed. Weʼre not sure how many of our sales come from new customers vs. repeat business but we think it is more than 1⁄3. Most of our sales involve product that is ordered after the sale is made, this results in longer wait times. Weʼve thought about investing in a larger warehouse space and making larger orders from our suppliers but this scares us. We know it will shorten the delivery times, but we donʼt want to be ordering the wrong inventory and have it sit on the shelves of a warehouse. As the owner I want to spend more time looking at the overall picture and less time worrying about the little details. We offer our own warranty and need to track when items were purchased, and when warranties expire.”

Hopefully each question will get you thinking more about the process (and not just giving simple one sentence answers). There can be a lot of information that a business deals with in any given day. The longer you go without understanding what it is, and what youʼre doing with it just increases the amount that is piling up and also increases the risk that information is becoming lost or slipping through the cracks.

At its simplest level, the goal of any business is to attract potential customers, inform or educate those potential customers on the products and/or services that the business can provide, and then negotiate a transaction that is beneficial to both the business and the customer. And of course to be profitable.

Depending on the type of product or service your company provides, the length of time to complete a transaction could be a few minutes, a few hours, days, weeks, or months. Certain information may be required to be collected by law, other information helps to manage the business, and still other information might be used to analyze the performance of the business, itʼs employees, and the decisions being made.

If youʼre the owner operator of an ice cream truck, you donʼt need to have your potential clients fill out a two page input form before they can order a strawberry sundae. However if youʼre in the business of selling or distributing products that fall into certain categories of the Canada Food and Drug Regulations, youʼre required to track specific information for each transaction, including lot numbers of the items sold.

Before you start to look at how you can use technology, you need do your homework. This includes determining what information needs to be collected, when it is to be collected, who is going to collect it, and how it is going to be gathered and stored. Last but certainly not least, what is the information used for?

Imagine a typical situation. Youʼve hung out your shingle and gone into business. A potential customer learns about you and makes contact with you.

*What happens next?*

Do you capture their name, address, phone number, email address? When should you capture it? When they first make contact, at some point midway through the sales negotiations, or at the time the actual transaction takes place? Who is responsible for capturing this information? How is the information recorded? Do you have some type of data input form? Is there consistency within the business from one employee to the next? When you look at the collection of contact information, do you have only first names and email addresses for certain contacts, but full names, addresses, dates of birth, motherʼs maiden name, high school English marks, and the shoe size for other contacts?

Do you have different employees handling different roles within your company? Itʼs not unusual to have one person handling the selling of the product, another recording the actual order, another dealing with the delivery, and still another looking after the payment. This factors into the way in which information needs to flow within your organization. When multiple people deal with the same customer or order, you need to understand how the various roles deal with the various types of information. Who should be handling information and what information they should be handling needs to be identified.

Some of this may seem trivial, but youʼd be amazed at how often it is either not thought out, or assumptions are made which turn out to be misunderstood between co-workers:


Two employees each think that the other is checking the company voicemail, so it goes unanswered for days.
An employee is off sick and nobody knows what he/she had scheduled. Or they canʼt find the contact information for the people they were scheduled to meet.
An important sale is made but then it is discovered that the product is out of stock from your supplier, and wonʼt be available for months.

Get the opinion of others within your organization. Donʼt assume that you know how each person handles their specific tasks. Get others to complete the same assignment. Have them record their own interpretation of how the information flows, then compare their ideas to yours.

Even solos need to examine this. If you find yourself struggling to keep up with simple tasks, missing deadlines, double booking your time, etc., you need to step back and determine why the information that you are dealing with is not getting organized properly. Donʼt blame the technology, blame the process, and then determine a new and better process.

Take the time to think about as much of this before you make any technology or solution decisions. The time invested will pay dividends as it will allow you to be able to make intelligent and rational decisions about the type of solution you require. Making the right decisions will have an impact on the productivity and profitability of your business.

_Article written by contributing ehMac Member *Oakbridge Information Solutions*. Master Daylite Partners, Certified Daylite Trainers, FileMaker Business Alliance, and MoneyWorks Consultants._


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## Dennis Nedry (Sep 20, 2007)

[deleted]


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## hayesk (Mar 5, 2000)

Dennis Nedry said:


> Things like these are a process, not a product.
> 
> People who get those confused always land up in some sort of mess.


Exactly, so many people think purchasing OmniFocus (which is a great tool, don't get me wrong, it's just an example) will all of a sudden organize everything magically. They don't stop to think about whether their problem is solved by that tool, and whether or not they'll put the effort into using it.

This isn't just a problem for business workers. Look how many kitchen and exercise gadgets are sold to people who think buying the product will solve their problem.

You can't purchase a gadget or "magic bullet" to solve your problem until you define it and then think about whether the product actually sovles it.


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## ssent1 (Sep 3, 2005)

David Allen's book, "Getting Things Done" is a pretty good resource for structuring your thoughts on your process and workflow. For most of us, we've got the organization tools, but a good process for driving effectiveness is more elusive.


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