NetBusinessBlog

How And Why To Create a Weekly Business Report

Posted on 01. Mar, 2008 by Dave in Business

In my previous post I gave away my weekly business report, which actually is a sheet of paper I get delivered on my desk every Monday morning. Since most of the numbers are generated automatically, an assistant needs to spend just an hour or two putting it together.

But why do I use such a weekly report?

First a little background. At the moment I run seven businesses and own another four big projects. If I was a typical internet marketer I would be overloaded with work. Even trained and experienced entrepreneurs would be. But to keep things profitable you can?t spend time on the details, you have to keep a good overview and have others do the work for you.

Thus I setup a sheet with the highlights of each week in terms of what has been done, what has been accomplished and what it meant to my business. The goal of my businesses, and for most out there, is to turn a profit. So I sat down and brainstormed to find around 5 numbers that are contributing to the profits.

With online marketing they?re almost always the same: visitors, leads, subscribers, paying members/clients and conversion ratio. As James Brausch puts it: the formula for online success is Traffic + Copywriting (Conversion) + Products. From this formula you might also extract the importance of the number and quality of products.

How to create one yourself…

It?s important to keep a birds eye view of your business. You should be able to see all the important facts and sum them up in five minutes or less. It?s the same when you present your company to a person you just met. Be concise, clear and have everything ready for potential clients and even investors or buyers.

Find out what the most important numbers are in your business besides the actual profit. See where your sales are generated and keep track of it. Regularly meet with others to brainstorm ideas to test. Have your outsourcers keep an agenda of what they?ve done and what the results were.

Then put it all together on paper. Preferably one or two sheets of paper. As soon as you have to use more, it takes more than 15 minutes to read and remember. At that point you?re losing focus, which results in less profits.

Create one for your own businesses right now and start using a spreadsheet to compare previous results. Excel or OpenOffice Calc are two great programs to do this for you. Of course you have to set aside time to update and review your numbers, so take one set hour a week to do this – so you can never forget it.