Alright, so that’s a blatant rip off of the whole “no person is an island”, but it’s true. It’s always useful to watch statistics over time. Then you can see if they are going up or down. But it’s often necessary to compare different graphs to really see the full picture.
Let’s take an example. All of a sudden the accountant calls and says that the expenses doubled last month. This might be a very alarming piece of news. But what if he called and said expenses doubled and income tripled last month. Whole different ball game, right?!
Like the saying goes, “statistics can be made to say anything”. But that’s only true if you don’t have all of the data. When you have the full picture, they tell you how things are doing.
So let’s say you get that same phone call from the accountant with the alarming news, but you have UseMyStats set up. You pull up your dashboard (or the new “stat snapshot” page) and right there is your “combo graph” that has both income and expenses on it and you can see that income went way up. Well, your day just went from terrible to not too bad.
And you want to see if you can figure out how to make it better, so you pop open the group graphing page and look at your finance stats and you see that total payroll went up also. That might tell you that the new person you just hired deserves a bonus!
And you want to see what they did that helped since you just hired a new marketing person. So you hop over to the marketing and sales group of graphs and you can see that the number of outgoing marketing was the same and nothing else had changed in terms of outgoing marketing. But the income per client jumped dramatically and number of new clients has increased.
You pop into those two graphs and check out the notes next to the dates where the increase started. And you see that the new marketing person started working next to the receptionist and started talking with each customer after they had finished their service.
You’ll probably have to go talk with that person to find out they were making sure everything went perfectly, letting them know what other services they could get that they didn’t even know about and encouraging them to bring in their friends and take advantage of your referral program. But the five minutes you spent on UseMyStats after that horrendous phone call from the accountant just told you that things are actually going well and you should go talk to your new person and encourage them to keep up the good work.
And since you were getting ready to go on vacation, you make a note to do just that when you get back and continue on your way without the worry!
P.S. Check out these new tools for comparing statistics:
- There’s the Dashboard mentioned above
- The new Stat Snapshot page (found under More>>Statistics)
- The Group Graphing page (found under Graphing>>Graph Whole Group)