Business clarity allows leadership teams to understand performance, risks and opportunities across the organisation in real time rather than relying on partial or delayed reporting.
At Freeman Clarke, we use the term vision quite often. But we do not only mean imagining what is ahead for your business.
We also mean asking whether your reports and management information provide the level of business clarity needed to make confident strategic decisions today.
You can grow in the short term by reacting to opportunities as they arise. But to grow a business sustainably you need to clearly see your activities and the outcomes, your customers and the wider market. Achieving this level of visibility is what creates genuine business clarity across the organisation.
Creating sustainable business clarity requires a strong platform of systems, reporting structures and data ownership processes. The good news is that we’ve done it many times.
Based on our experience, we have created this simple list of six steps CEOs can follow to improve business clarity across their organisation.
- Clarify who’s in charge. Create a strategy and architecture for where master information is held and how it is shared between systems and people. Which system is the master? Which teams are responsible for creating and maintaining the data?
Automate links between systems where possible to avoid manual effort which is expensive and (inevitably) prone to errors. - Set the rules. Set standards for data management and maintenance. Decide who is responsible for ensuring data is correct and for training and policing those standards. Monitor how often these rules are broken and whether specific teams or people are repeat offenders.
- Be efficient about reports. Finalising reports for specific individuals can be endlessly time-consuming. Instead focus on the broad areas of information that managers or directors need. Ensure you have flexible tools and reporting skills so you can build and change reports easily.
Review your reports regularly and ask yourself which reports are valuable and which are not. Stop producing those that are no longer useful. Or change formats where ‘report fatigue’ has set in and useful information is being missed.
Again, automate wherever possible. Manually generated reports are a great waste of time and money. Automation plays an important role in maintaining consistent business clarity as organisations scale. - Take a hard look at what you’re reporting. Often reporting is focussed on old-fashioned financial indicators. Identify the more relevant indicators, especially the non-financial ones, which will allow you to strategise and manage events as they unfold.
For example, as well as monitoring sales last month, monitor web activity or numbers of enquiries, which may be indicators of future opportunities. Monitor unusual changes in stock levels or supplier lead times, especially of critical items, to avoid future issues with fulfilment. - Analyse profitability by product, client, and service line. Ask yourself, What are the real drivers of cost? Where do you have influence over cost?
Use this information to drive cost-reduction projects to provide an extra few points on your profitability for the coming year. Using it to inform the sales and marketing strategy can be transformational to the overall success of the business.
Sustainable business clarity allows leadership teams to focus less on operational uncertainty and more on strategic decision making. With the right systems, reporting structures and data ownership in place, organisations can improve forecasting accuracy, identify risks earlier and scale with greater confidence.
For many mid market organisations, improving business clarity becomes the foundation for stronger growth, better profitability and more effective leadership time allocation