This past week, I had the pleasure and honor to present to John Morris' Woodland Hills, California Vistage Group.
For those that don't know it, Vistage is one of the world's largest CEO and business owner organizations, with more than 17,000 members in 15 countries.
This is an impressive group - leaders of companies with average sales revenues of $32 million and competing and prospering in industries that run the gamut - from services and manufacturing, to construction, retail, and real estate.
At the core of Vistage are their peer advisory groups -"Mastermind” meetings of 10 to 15 executives that over time develop a productive and high-trust dynamic through which to attain breakthroughs of insight and accountability around and about strategic, tactical, and management challenges.
Expertly moderated by trained chairs like John - a tour de entrepreneurial force in his own right as co-Founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Tech Coast Angels - Vistage groups are where the hard, methodical work of small business building and growth gets done.
I was asked by John to present on best practices, as they apply to smaller companies, of data-driven decision making and business intelligence dashboards.
It is obviously a very timely topic - as “BI” tools and software have matured in the last few years to become for the first time truly easy to use, effective, and affordable for smaller companies and organizations.
In my presentation I talked about how the companies getting the highest “BI ROI” connect the dots between their "old" and "new" school strategic planning and thinking.
They are old school (in the absolute best, non-pejorative sense of the term) in that they recognize that strategy…
…arrived at through Mastermind get-togethers like Vistage, through board and advisory board meetings, through corporate “retreats” and through any form “step back and reset” get togethers - remains fundamental in attaining and maintaining long-term business success.
And they are new school in their leveraging the very many best-of-breed business application software as services to arrive at this strategy.
Tools like CapitalIQ, Simplycast, The Resumator, Box, Grasshopper, Wufoo, Smarsh, IfByPhone, SnapEngage, Docusign, Hootsuite, Infusionsoft, and Interspire that automate traditionally laborious and repetitive business functions.
And, as they do, collect massive reams of data on much of the marketing, sales, operations, finance and management activities of a business.
And, for the first time, the technology has finally matured to where all of this collected data can be automatically organized, standardized, and consistently presented on an always-on, always-accessible, and graphically “Appleized” Dashboard.
I was thrilled that John offered me the opportunity to present both Growthink’s "Old School meets New School" business intelligence philosophy, along with our dashboard offering.
And as I did, I truly felt blessed to live and work in a time when technology has created such promise and power to allow companies to run better, easier, and more in alignment with their missions than ever before.
And as they do, well…
…the best numbers on the best dashboards are starting to show increasing piles of profit and cash, too.