Data is important, but what good is it if you don't know how to use it?
Collecting data for the sake of collecting it doesn't serve any purpose. It's a wasted effort. Even worse, acting on data is critical to fine-tuning your business. In the worst cases, it can be the difference between sink and swim.
Tommy and Melissa got a chance to hear Alyssa Quill (Storage Asset Management) speak about how she uses data and reports. Let's see what she had to say!
Question: "How can you use use data to drive actionable business changes"
Check out the video clip below to hear their answers:
In this Gabfocus Session: Understanding Data and Reports, Tommy and Melissa spoke with Alyssa Quill of Storage Asset Management and both Jeremy Rollwitz and Cherolyn Johnson Chiang of The Jenkins Organization. The topic at hand? Data reporting and how to understand it in order to make informed decisions about your self storage business.
Check out the full Session to dive deeper!
Don't want to watch the clip? Here's what Alyssa had to say:
There are really only three purposes.
One is I'm trying to predict the future, like what's going to happen in the future? How much money am I going to need? How much money am I going to get? What volume? How many labor hours am I going to need? Things like that.
Or I am trying to measure the past, which might be I developed an incentive plan for the team working at my store, and I want to measure how did they do last month so that I can pay them and keep them motivated.
Or I have some decision I need to make. Should I change prices? Should I spend more on Google Ads? Should I change the training? Or is there a piece we're not getting right? Things like that.
So I think any time we're pulling data together and going to present it to somebody, it needs to be able to do one of those three things.
If I just put a number in front of somebody by itself, to most people, that will mean nothing. So they need something to compare it to.
So if I'm measuring performance in the past, comparing it to a budget or a target or a benchmark.
If I'm trying to predict the future, how does that compare to where I'm at right now? Am I getting better? Am I getting worse?
And if I'm trying to make decisions again, you just need some sort of trend or comparison to last year, to the last month because I have the world's worst memory.
So if I just look at even a management summary. How's the property doing today? Okay. Is that good for that property or is that bad?
I don't know.
I need to compare it to something."
—Alyssa Quill
