Do you know the make up of your customers?
This week I asked an owner of a cleaning company, Julie, if she had any statistics, which in the business world is termed Management Information (MI), which would provide her with a bird’s eye view of the business at a glance.
Unsurprisingly the answer was no as Julie is so busy with the day-to-day actual operations of the business and, well, cleaning. So, as a starter I asked for last months’ figures for:
- Number of new customers (new wins in the month of June)
- Total number of existing customers
- What’s the split by customer type (private individuals / private companies / public sector / other?)
- Average monthly £ income per customer type
- Number of private individuals which are clean only
- Number of private individuals which are cleaning & ironing
The aim of the MI figures above is to start to build up a snapshot of customers in order to judge what the customer base split is and where the money (ie. revenue) is coming from. The next step would be to work out what the top 5/10 customers are by revenue.
An area to focus on for growth is up-selling private individuals from ‘clean only’ to be both ‘cleaning & ironing’ which is why 5 and 6 are listed above.
Once gathered, the figures should be put in a spreadsheet so then we can do month on month comparisons going forward. The quicker the figures can be generated after the month is completed, the better. As long as its not too much trouble and doesn’t take up time, you can always present the figures as graphs or pretty pictures to convey the message quicker.
These figures should then be acted upon and form the basis of discussions as to how the figures can be improved upon, with an actual, detailed plan for each strategy that is then reviewed alongside the next set of monthly figures.