Do you keep a scorecard for your startup?
Do you know what they are?
In simplest of terms, organizational score cards are an analysis tool used to keep record of what works and what doesn't.
Do you have them for your startup? If you don’t I really suggest you start today!
Entrepreneurs are gutsy risk taker individuals but we have to be smart in everything we do to reduce the amount of risk we take on every day. People keep journals or sticky notes for ideas, resources such as providers or possible investors so why not keep a journal or list or cards of things have worked for you in the past and things that have not.
Try keeping a journal of sorts for this purpose, update it at the end of your day with short notes and descriptions of conversations, implemented strategies, designs, ideas and feedback on them. I had a client not too long ago that approached me asking for help because no matter what he tried his efforts were not leading anywhere in development and market reach. As part of the evaluation I discovered that just like most entrepreneurs, this Wordpress developer was doing everything in his business from accounting to sales and even most of the design work his company developed. He was working on a side (unpaid) project that had now taken a lot of his time and was causing business expenditures to skyrocket because of the man hours and outside resources acquired to further develop the product but no matter what he did couldn’t control the snowball effect. He was panicked.
His problem was that he grew his business out of pure hard labor with no management experience under his belt so as he grew his company he became less able to step back and set up a management system that understood the process of completing work, overhead allowance, marketing efforts, strategies, conversations with vendors or clients and project development for his new product. He just knew that whatever he had done to grow his business was working but as he introduced side projects his workflow got out of control, he was losing time and money.
Score cards helped him keep track of his daily efforts, seeing where he was wasting resources with redundancies or unused skillsets in his team, he was also able to see how his business evolved. key performance indicators (KPI) helped him to ultimately make agile decisions that would otherwise be intimidating. Our success came from deciding to cut back some of his bigger projects that were cutting into his overhead time which led him to outsource some of his (overhead) project needs to contractors or employees which caused a cycling snowball effect with every new project only delaying his development further as he couldn’t QA what was being done for him without neglecting his business. By cutting larger projects he was able to streamline his operations to deliver more smaller projects that ultimately paid him more as they weren’t cutting into his business operation (overhead) time which was cutting into his new baby product. He launched, and sold to his tool to Mashable.com a while back.
Through scorecards he translated efforts into visible actions to create strategic layout of deadlines, business needs and project thresholds.
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