I wanted to share an experience with you, that I haven’t had with a client for a long, long time, well not to this degree anyway. 

We were working with one of our new clients in our CFO program and we were working through setting up their dashboard. 

Part of the process we go through, is to make sure that their data is all in order first, and then we go through a process of choosing the right metrics to measure so that they can align with their strategic plan and goals so they know what to push or pull at any given time. 

This client has an e-commerce part to their business and we were going through their e-commerce platform. As I was doing the initial fact finding, I came across their abandoned-cart metric and I almost fell off my chair. For month-to-date in May 2020, there was over a $1,000,000 in the abandoned cart! 

I thought to myself, ok lets have a look at this a little bit further and began to review other months. 

And do you know what I found? from the first of January until the end of May there was $7.8 million in abandoned cart! and I’m thinking, holy crap, what is going on? 

But here’s the thing: that information has been there for them the entire time, but they haven’t been observing it, or no one in the business has really been observing it. They’ve been so focused on other aspects of their business that are going really well that this is almost like the forgotten cousin. 

In these situations the first question you need to ask yourself if you uncover anything like this in your business is, is the data accurate? And as we audited this and went a little bit deeper, we found that there’s probably around a $4 million dollar anomaly in this. 

So the $7.8 million’s probably like $3.8 million,  but even so, $3.8 million in abandoned cart in five months!.

I sat there and I did some math, I thought, if only 5% of those people purchased, that’s an extra $165,000 to $170,000 in sales at a really decent margin for no extra work. These people are already there, they’re about to purchase, and they’re not taking the last step. 

So my question to you is, how many metrics in your business are there ready for you to look at that you’re neglecting  because you’re busy focusing on other things, that could potentially be thousands, tens of thousands, hundred thousands or even millions of dollars worth of additional revenue for you and your company? 

You need to make sure you’re looking at these numbers regularly so that you can understand what you need to do strategically and tactically to improve the score in your business. Improve your bottom line for greater profitability, greater cashflow and greater efficiencies. 

If you’d like someone to do that for you, that’s what we do. We set everything up and then monitor it for you, and make you aware of what you need to be looking at or what’s going on because you don’t have the time to do all of that. 

A great CFO will do that for you and that’s what we do, so if you’d like to learn more about that, feel free to reach out, happy to have a conversation. 

But just think to yourself:

1. Am I looking at all the key metrics in my business regularly? 

2. Am I observant of where I might be leaving money on the table?