Whether you are pulling out of your driveway onto a back country road or flying down the parkway at 70 mph – checking to see what your dashboard says is critical. Do you have enough, gas? Is your engine overheating? Is your check engine light on? How fast am I going?

All key things that you need to know at any given moment to make sure that you will arrive safely at your destination. It’s a simple enough concept and we do it every day without giving it a second thought. Common sense would tell us that it is equally important to check your corporate dashboard everyday as well, and yet, it goes ignored day after day, month after month. Unfortunately, too many business owners neglect this important function.

Your dashboard for your company would read such things as: Daily Productivity Levels, Market Share, Inventory Levels, Profit Margins, Competitive Landscape, Human Capital, Drivers of Profitability, Life Cycle and Sales Cycle, etc. In order to stay competitive a company needs to continually gauge their performance on a day-to-day basis and make adjustments as needed. Continually analyzing and improving the metrics in every possible scenario is a critical must.

It is important to remember that you can not improve that which you don’t measure. To that point, you can’t adjust your strategy to block a competitor, unless you first know what it is that they are doing. As a business owner, it is imperative that you sit down and map out your dashboard and identify the key metrics that you need to measure internally and then what information needs to be assembled externally: competitors, raw materials, etc. Once you have identified all key elements that will make up your dashboard create a single spread sheet or chart that you can drop in your critical numbers that will show you on one-page all the key variables affecting your business today and in the future.

This tool is valuable because it helps to give perspective about your business and enables you to have tremendous clarity about your current market position. It is also instrumental in helping diagnose any problems that may arise. Keeping on eye on this dashboard on a consistent basis will allow a business owner to see a problem as soon as it arises, rather than when it has had time to fester and build to epic proportions. If you want your business to achieve maximum speed and to build some serious momentum – you need to watch your dashboard and adjust accordingly!

Reader survey: How many readers/business owners have set up their own ‘dashboard’ to help them manage their business? Was there an instance when this highlighted a serious problem early on?”

 If you have a question for the Maniacal Marketer, please send it to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . Christine Regan is the president of Redlake, Inc, www.redlake.tv, a marketing and sales agency in New York.

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