At its simplest, being digital means keeping your business records in an electronic format. A spreadsheet to hold client information is one example of a digital solution. A cloud-based accounting system for creating and emailing your invoices is another. These digital solutions can help you to create and organise the data you need to manage your business. Plus, you get search tools that make it easy to find that missing invoice payment. Now that you are on the digital highway, you will need processes to manage this data to keep it current, clean, and consistent. This will help you to use your data to grow your business. Investing in the data skills of your team will be critical to supporting this success. You will need to create a data strategy that defines how to keep the data within and between each digital solution consistent. Your data strategy will allow your team to understand how to use the data to support your business planning. Good data skills let your team manage, integrate, and analyse your data as part of your daily activity. With these skills, your team can provide information that supports better decision-making. The following examples show how a business owner can make decisions based on their data. Winning Bakery Bid Lisa bakes speciality cakes that she sells to local cafes and recently won a contract to supply a small chain of franchised coffee shops. Before making the bid, we helped Lisa to identify how she could control costs using her cloud-based system inventory system. We helped her develop a data management policy and identified the key metrics she wanted to track. This included a report that let her team manage daily production and inventory consumption. This report showed Lisa she could increase production without investing in new equipment or premises. These data insights added further value as Lisa’s team now orders ingredients when she needs them. This reduced her excess inventory and led to a reduction in overheads and increased her net margin. During the bid planning, Lisa mentioned some challenges with her suppliers not delivering on time.  She used the inventory data to create a report tracking supplier performance. This highlighted that the sole supplier of eggs was continually failing to fill orders on time and in full. When shortages occurred, Lisa would either purchase eggs from her local supermarket at a greater cost or reduce her output. This issue was affecting her margins as well as her reputation with her customers. In her next call with the supplier, Lisa discussed the issue and the options to maintain a supply of eggs that supported her expansion plans. After the call, Lisa decided to start purchasing eggs from two other suppliers to offset the delivery risk. Lisa met with the franchisor to discuss her bid and they wanted to know about her production capacity. Lisa used her production report as evidence she could meet their requirements. At one point, the franchisor asked if Lisa was experiencing issues with the supply of eggs. Lisa said she had contracts with several suppliers to meet her production needs. Lisa’s insight from her inventory data and her business decision to engage other suppliers were key factors in her winning the contract. Business Expansion Planning Rafael is a dentist with a small practice located close to a railway station. He employs another dentist, a dental hygienist part-time and a practice manager. As part of his data strategy, Rafael has a patient management system that integrates with his cloud accounting solution. He had an opportunity to expand his practice into the building next door and wanted to assess the costs of the expansion and hiring more staff. From his accounting solution, Rafael knew the current payroll costs for his team. He knows the total number of patients and the average spend per patient from his patient system. We helped him create two different budget projects for the larger practice. One option was to hire another dentist and a hygienist. The other options consider hiring two dentists with the assumption that the hygienist role will be full-time. Rafael assumed that two new rooms will cost the same to equip for both options. Rafael used the current average patient spend to determine how many new patients he would need to break even. The cost assumptions for the utilisation rate of the extra staff and extra overheads came from his cloud accounting system. One factor Rafael had not considered was his customer waiting times. Analysing this data, allowed Rafael to hire a part-time dentist ahead of the expansion. Based on the data insights, Rafael went ahead with his business expansion plans. Hiring a part-time dentist was a bonus from Rafael’s data analysis. Data Skills – A Business Asset Lisa and Rafael both wanted to grow their businesses. Using their data they made informed decisions. A data strategy is key to ensuring your data helps you grow your business. Investing in data skills for your team will be a key factor in your continuing success.