Business Insight Zone

My previous posts in this vein talked about using business information to create value for customers and moving from data to action in your use of business information. Now I’ll address why you need to get ahead on these issues now if you want to surf to business success on the world’s rising tide of data, rather than being swept away by it.

The Floodtide of Data

For years now, we’ve understood that information growth is exploding. The amount of data created and recorded digitally does not merely increase every year — it increases exponentially. Smart people are using this wealth of data in wonderful ways, for instance by bringing revolutionary changes to some fields of science.

In the business world, new social networks are creating huge flows of information, including lots of it that’s useful for commercial purposes — ranging from consumer behavioral modeling to straightforward competitive intelligence research.

On the personal front, it’s tempting to think of all of this as “information overload” and assume that being overloaded is inevitable, given the amount of information out there. But Clay Shirky has suggested that “filter failure” is the more useful term. It’s fruitless to blame the information for coming at you in waves when it’s you who signed on for it. In any event, it’s crucial that we develop better filters both personally and for our businesses, since the flow of information is only going to get larger — MUCH larger.

So we need to change our thinking instead. As individuals, we can apply better practices of information hygiene to our inboxes and the like. (Entrepreneur Ash Maurya has some good suggestions about how to do this.) As organizations, we must practice better information hygiene across larger systems, or else we’ll become victims of information overload rather than profiting from information abundance.

Using Better Systems — and Using Systems Better

The same technological revolution that unleashed all of this information on us promises to help us control it as well, but only if we’re willing to grapple with its complexities.

When I talk about complexity here, by no means do I mean only the technical details of systems run by your IT department. The technological aspect certainly is complex, because what IT implements — CRMs, ERPs, data warehouses, analytics, etc. — weaves into the operational fabric of every department in your company. Beyond that, though, it stands to affect the work (and maybe the psyche) of virtually every individual in your company. That’s serious complexity — and if you don’t get ahead of it, you’re sunk.

The easy case in point is the way that CRM systems often run aground within sales departments. If they’re not brought along the right way, sales reps will distrust CRMs, fearing that they’ll hinder rather than help them make their numbers.

The solution isn’t simply to ignore such attitudes and install a slicker CRM. Social CRMs, for example, can do a better job of using social-media information to empower your sales team. But they’re not a magic bullet, and if you don’t use your current CRM well, you can’t expect a social CRM to bail you out. Rather, you have to take on some hard managerial work to instill open communication habits, organizational discipline, and acceptance of change. Only then will you get salespeople, sales managers, and everyone else in the organization pulling in the same direction. That’s when you’ll get the most out of any technology, whether it’s the latest SCRM or pencil and paper.

The key here is to understand this:

Even the best systems can’t save you from the flood of data if you don’t use them in ways that support your business strategy and your customers’ needs.

What we have to do is to rethink all the ways that our business information systems interact with the fundamentals of our businesses, and then revise our approach to data. As CRM strategist Esteban Kolsky puts it, “All the data we are capturing is becoming too much for our antiquated models of data management to handle.” We have to bring our businesses practices around data firmly into the 21st century.

No one said it would be easy — but it’s worth it.

Marketplace Dynamics

Not only is it worth it, you may have no choice about it if you want to stay competitive. Customers and prospects have too many ways to filter you out these days, and their expectations of you are higher than ever. You need to know who they are and what they want so that you can approach them in relevant ways every time you make contact.

There is also increasing pressure from competitors. Progressive-thinking companies can get a jump on their markets if they’re early to grasp the advantages that go along with data abundance. Laggards will struggle to keep their heads above water.

What’s required of smart companies in this environment?

1. Understanding the fundamental issues: the massive growth of data, the need for better filters and systems to pick out the right data and put it to use, the consequences for early and late adopters in the marketplace.
2. Flexibility of thinking. Your future use of data — even the fundamental models for how you collect and analyze it — may not look like what came before. That’s fine — if you’re ready for it.
3. A willingness to experiment. Finding the “right” answers to all of these challenges is likely to be an ongoing journey marked by plenty of trial and error, not something you’ll hammer out in a day-long summit between IT, operations, marketing, and sales. Understand in advance that successful approaches to this new world of information and technology will be marked by failed experiments on the way, and be ready to dust yourself off and try again.

The data flood can be your friend. But you must work out how to filter, analyze, and use the abundance of good data contained in it — all in support of your company’s fundamental strategy and the value propositions that you present to customers. Otherwise, you’ll be swept away.

What are YOU doing to surf the floodtide of data?

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Image from rappensuncle, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

There’s a useful model from the realms of information science and knowledge management known as DIKW. It can help us think better about how we use business information to succeed.

The Basics

The letters stand for the four levels of a hierarchy, like this:

You don’t have to put it into a pyramid — some people prefer a chain, flow diagram, or something else — but the basic idea is that each level builds on the one below it. Before we get to examples and how all of this relates to taking action in business, here’s the nickel tour of the four levels:

• Data can be thought of as raw facts — words, numbers, sights, sounds, and so on.
• Information arises when meaning or relevance emerges from the raw facts.
• Knowledge comes when we situate information in the context of experience, expertise, or systematic study. In other words, information helps create knowledge when it’s synthesized and related within some larger framework of thought.
• Wisdom is our judgment of (a) what knowledge means or (b) what to do about knowledge with reference to our deeper values (for example ethical or moral considerations), to our desired highest outcomes, et cetera.

Some thinkers, notably the systems theorist Russell Ackoff, sandwich another level, Understanding, between Knowledge and Wisdom. But as Gene Bellinger points out, both connectedness and understanding increase at every level as you ascend through the DIKW model.

Playing Detective

Now, I’m sure I’m going to make any information scientists or epistemologists in the audience shudder as I trample on the fine distinctions of D, I, K, and W, but here’s my informal analogy for it: I think of DIKW through the lens of a detective story.

Picture me as Hercule Poirot . . .

(Note: in real life, I’m younger, taller, thinner, less well-dressed, not Belgian, and have much more hair.)

Picture the drawing room of a country estate. Monsieur Poirot has called together all the interested parties so that he can reveal the identity of the murderer. As he speaks, there is a noise in the background. What does it mean?

• Data = the noise in the background.
• Information = realization that the noise comes from a car engine being revved.
• Knowledge = Poirot says, “Yes, it is Professor FitzGibbon in his racing Jaguar, trying to make good his escape.”
• Wisdom = When some of the party tries to run out and catch the professor, Poirot says, “Do not concern yourselves — we need not chase him. The police have blocked all the roads.”

If my philosophical precision is awry from one step to the next, the main point is still clear — you’re moving up a chain of value from raw data — which often has little use in itself — toward greater context.

• The data at hand (noises in background) becomes real information when it’s put in the context of other facts (a lifetime of hearing car engines).
• That information becomes working knowledge in the context of the larger situation and other information (Prof. FitzGibbon is my prime suspect; the noise is coming from where I saw his Jaguar parked earlier).
• My knowledge of the situation, in the context of my professional experience (decades of detective work), prior actions (coordinated a blockade with the police), and overriding goals (catch the murderer), gives me wisdom about my best course of action in the moment.

This last step not only tells me — and those listening to me — that I need not panic; it also tells me what not to do. For example, my experience tells me that if I try to stop FitzGibbon myself, he might run me down with the car, and that the surest way to stop him now is to let the police do it.

From Wisdom to Action in Business

Note that my wisdom about the situation also implies my best course of action. Some thinkers on DIKW have echoed Peter Drucker when they point out that knowledge is about knowing how to do things right, whereas wisdom is about knowing the right things to do.

Since it can never be said too much, let’s pause to emphasize this point:

In business, we should be working every minute of the day to do the right things.

So let’s take my Poirot example and translate it to a business setting:

• Data = the numbers on a spreadsheet.
• Information = the value of Customer X’s account has declined for three straight years.
• Knowledge = WHY they downgraded.
• Wisdom = what to DO about it.

I’ve been an information merchant for a long time, but I can’t know all the ins and outs of every company, every industry, every situation, so I can’t play Poirot with your personal business challenges. In other words, I can’t tell you how to win more business from Customer X in particular — and probably no one outside your own company can.

More to the point, even having the wisdom to know what to do isn’t the same thing as doing it. You have to have everything in place — personal and organizational discipline, healthy working practices, good communications, etc. — to support action . . . and then you must TAKE action.

Fostering Action at Every Point

I can, however, suggest steps to take at the lower levels of the DIKW pyramid so that you’re armed to take the best actions with every customer you serve. The overriding goal is to reduce the friction and increase the utility at each level so that you’re able to move briskly up the pyramid — and, ultimately, to act swiftly to meet customers’ needs and build your business.

Here are a few key ideas to get you started:

• You need good data, and you need it more than once. If your company has a hard time gathering and handling data — about prospects, customers, the industries you serve, market conditions, or whatever — you’ll lose time and money as you try to derive relevant, useful information from that data. Beyond that, you have to be ready to gather data more often than ever, given the pace and toughness of today’s economy.
• Your own employees might not be the best ones to collect that data. Sure, you’d expect me to say so, given that I worked for several years in Hoover’s editorial department, painstakingly collecting and organizing information on many companies. But there’s a reason customers keep coming back to us, and its the same reason that keeps other high-quality providers of business information thriving within their market niches: specialization wins. Let your sellers sell; let your accountants keep accounts; let your marketers market your wares. And find a good business information provider — whether it’s us or whoever else meets your specialized needs — to handle the data load.
• You need data organized into useful information, and information organized so that it improves your customer and industry knowledge. We can help with this, certainly, but an unavoidable part of this work will happen inside the walls of your own enterprise. If your own organization fails to look forward by coordinating how information flows from sources to users, from one department to another, you’ll end up looking back with regrets about the opportunities you missed by being haphazard. You don’t need a magic bullet — you need the hard work of good organization.
• Your tools must work in unison. This is why we (and some other forward-looking information providers) have done so much to integrate our information into popular CRM systems: it’s not enough that the information exists somewhere and that you hypothetically have access to it — you have to have it available at the point of need so that you — or your busy salespeople, marketers, researchers, et al. — can use it on the spot. But again, this isn’t about signing up for Access Hoover’s and then forgetting all your cares; as anyone who’s ever implemented a CRM system will tell you, there’s a lot of technical and change-management work that goes along with it.

In the next installment of this series, I’ll talk about why it’s more important than ever to think ahead in your use of data for business.

Meanwhile, what else would you recommend for making sure the DIKW model translates into ACTION for your organization?

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Related posts:

• Previously in this series: Does your use of business information lead you back to CUSTOMERS?
• Wikipedia’s entry on DIKW. (Warning: it’s heavy on epistemology.)
• Bellinger, Castro, and Mills on DIKW.
• Nikhil Sharma, The Origin of the “Data Information Knowledge Wisdom” Hierarchy

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Image source for David Suchet as Poirot.

For all I know, he even thought of it himself, without reading my series of posts on sports metaphors.

(That’s a joke, folks.)

Actually, in his current New York Times column, “The Sporting Mind,” Brooks gives an interesting overview of how some academics view American sports — and especially how the American sporting ethos partakes of older Greek, Roman, and Victorian ideals of athleticism. A tidbit:

[Prof. Michael Allen] Gillespie argues that the American sports ethos is a fusion of these three traditions. American sport teaches that effort leads to victory, a useful lesson in a work-oriented society. Sport also helps Americans navigate the tension between team loyalty and individual glory. We behave like the British [in our emphasis upon team play], but think like the Greeks [in terms of courageous individual effort], A. Bartlett Giamatti, a former baseball commissioner, once observed.

Brooks’s own sociological observation — about the solidarity of Wisconsin fans attending a Badger football game — feels a bit tacked-on, though I think the underlying point is sound: for all of its problematic aspects, American sport still does serve some purpose as a force that brings people together across social divisions of race and class.

The Business Application

It’s worth pondering how each of the three sporting ideals that Brooks discusses play out in American business:

• Greek: Many companies and business thinkers emphasize the importance of personal contributions to business success. The courage and endurance prized by the Greeks are (a) called upon again and again as companies ask employees to give their all, and (b) lauded by successful businesspeople as the bases of their own success. One problem with this ideal is that some individuals place themselves far above the organization, insisting upon disproprotionate rewards for themselves even when group effort was the real source of success.
• Roman: There is a distinct element of spectacle in American business, both in how stories play out in the business press (Lehman crashes! What will the Fed do next?!), and in how some companies actually behave, internally and externally.
• Victorian: Any manager who has ever said, “There is no ‘I’ in ‘team’ ” was appealing to this tradition. (Anyone who ever muttered “But there is a ‘me’ in there” was exposing the weakness of that old chestnut.) And many business books have been written about what it takes to get an entire work team / department / company pulling in the same direction toward collective goals.

What do you think? Does this three-part sporting model fit with your understanding of American business — and of your own company?

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(Thanks to C. V. Harquail for tipping me off to Brooks’s column.)

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Photo of Camp Randall Stadium at the Univ. of Wisconsin by Royal Broil.

Let’s tell a story.

Here’s an old trick with a new twist: If you’re stuck for what to do next in your work, especially at those levels between “grand corporate strategy” and “which thing do I do in the next ten minutes?,” write a case study — starring you, doing the work you do now — that peeks into the future.

Give yourself an 18-month window for the actions involved, and assume that you’re writing the case study another six months later, so that the trend of (successful!) outcomes from your efforts will be clear. I pick 18 months because Peter Drucker, among others, suggested it as a good, workable timeframe for turning even big plans into reality. To put it another way, it’s a timeframe that bridges the quarter-to-quarter focus on earnings and the five-year windows that go along with many overarching corporate strategies.

At the top of a piece of paper, write “18 months.” Next to it, write the Big Outcome achieved by that point — “Breakeven” or “Patent Awarded” or “First Mentor Class Graduated” or “Sold the Company” or whatever. On a line under that, write “15 months” and list some things that led into the Big Outcome. Keep breaking it down by steps: “12 months” . . . “9 months” . . . et cetera. Chop the time smaller as you get closer to the start of the project, since (a) the tone of many projects is set in the early going, and (b) these are the steps you may be able to envision better from where you sit now.

Tweaking and Writing

Once you’ve done this all the way back to the present, you may realize that the timeline is wrong. Maybe you need less than a year to get your new product idea off the ground. (Heck, for some things you might need less than a month.) Maybe you need five years to write your multivolume history of the Internet. If you figure out that the timeline is askew, just fiddle with the durations until it makes sense.

Now for the kicker. Don’t just leave the steps listed in outline form: actually write the case study. No big whoop — 800 words could be plenty — but let your imagination soar. Make up ambitious-but-believable numbers for site traffic, revenues, users, donors, contracts, or what-have-you; fill in glowing quotes from you, your ecstatic customers, and suitably impressed industry watchers. Talk about how the model is being copied and adapted by other forward-thinking organizations.

Two Problem-Solving Approaches In One

What you’re doing with this exercise is:

1. Thinking like an engineer. After President Kennedy established the goal of reaching the moon before 1970, the space program’s engineers broke down the mission into its parts. Knowing that they had to end up with astronauts landing safely back on Earth, they could formulate both the components of a successful moon shot (achieving Earth escape velocity, accurately computing and following flight trajectories, adequate air supply, etc) and the sequence of the missions that would build up to a moon landing. You’re doing the same thing here, albeit at a smaller scale. (Then again, I don’t know the size of your ambitions!)
2. Using narrative. Humans are drawn to stories. We want to make sense of things, and our explanations become more powerful when they fit into a narrative flow: A happened; B happened because of it; to everyone’s surprise, C came along and threatened to ruin everything; but, thanks to D, they all lived happily ever after anyway. Writing out a story with yourself as the forward-thinking hero could be a good way not only to capture in words the engineering problem you face, but to convince yourself that it’s really possible for you to navigate your way through it.

Now that your engineering/narrative project is done, you need to run with it. What’s the first thing you can do to turn your case study into a reality? Make it happen this week!

And while you’re at it, why not leave a comment to share your own best tactics for breaking down big problems into manageable chunks?

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Photo by Marco Arment.

Last week I found out from my friend David B. Thomas that his company, SAS Institute, has won yet another award for being a great place to work. (You may remember Dave from last summer’s exchange about “Social Media Manager” — the title that he and I both bear.)

This time around, SAS won the Big Kahuna award in the category — the coveted #1 slot in FORTUNE magazine’s annual list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For.” It comes as little surprise, since SAS has made the list in each of the 13 years that FORTUNE has compiled it.

Lest you think that SAS sacrifices its bottom line to coddle its employees, you should know that it is the largest privately held software company in the world, and that it continues to grow steadily.

Dave was nice enough to field a few questions about his experience with the company. My questions and his answers follow.

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How long have you worked for SAS? What roles have you held there?

I’ve been at SAS since May of 2007. I started as a corporate PR representative, working with local media and national general media, and overseeing our awards program, including the Fortune Best Companies Award. I handed that off when I took the job of Social Media Manager in January 2009.

Based on your own career experience, what distinguishes SAS as a great place to work?

A lot of companies talk about work/life balance, but SAS really does believe in it and practice it every day. If I have to stay home with my son when he gets sick, there is absolutely no stigma in that. If I want to go to the gym in the afternoon (something I don’t do often enough), that’s seen as a positive thing.

The benefits all have a bottom-line value, but even in tough times like this past year, SAS sticks to its guns. Jim Goodnight announced at the beginning of 2009 that we would take a hit to the profits rather than lay anyone off. That was the most principled stand by a CEO I’ve ever experienced.

Plus, they really do trust employees. I saw that in the creation of our social media policies. We talked a lot about the upside and the downside, but there was very little discussion of enforcement and penalties because that’s not the way management thinks around here. And the outcome is we haven’t needed heavy-handed enforcement or penalties.

SAS is no stranger to this type of award. What is the company doing to sustain its performance as a great place to work, given prevailing conditions in the economy?

The Fortune #1 ranking was only one of our big pieces of news today. The second was that we achieved 2.2 percent growth in 2009 with total revenues of $2.31 billion. Even in a really tough year, we managed to increase revenue and be profitable. That’s the validation that our commitment to employees works and is an integral part of our business strategy, not a superfluous add-on.

In your view, what’s the very first thing an average company could do to mimic SAS’s success as a great place to work?

Try to take the long view. If you truly want to build a company with lasting potential, plan for your success five or ten or 20 years down the road, not quarter by quarter. Give your employees a stake in the outcome and show them that you trust them to do their best, and chances are they will. And don’t block their access to social media!

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Thanks to Dave for taking the time to share his thoughts — and congratulations to SAS for its sterling performance.

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Related:

• David B. Thomas on “Social media at Fortune’s Best Company to Work for in America”
• In defense of “Social Media Manager.”

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That’s a timeless piece of wisdom, as formulated by Peter Drucker.

Simple as it is, we often fail to consciously — and conscientiously — make the logical connection:

What gets measured –> What gets done –> Big Goals

When you think about your Big Goals, whether for your company, your team, or just yourself, go ahead and think through that chain of connection. In fact, take some pains to work your way through the details:

• What has to happen for your Big Goals to come to fruition?
• What are the moving parts of the Big Goals — the major projects and tasks?
• What metrics apply to those projects and tasks?
• How can you collect and manage the data to satisfy those metrics?

Now, turn the process around and look at each thing you’re already measuring. For each one, ask these questions:

• Which Big Goal does this metric help us to achieve?
• Does this metric help us enough that it’s worth the time, effort, and expense to gather and organize the data?
• Is the metric well-organized so that it’s easy to understand and most relevant for helping us reach the Big Goal?
• Is the metric well-communicated so that decision makers and other stakeholders understand the numbers and their implications?
• Would it hurt anything if we stopped using this metric? Or, in other words, should we be measuring whatever-it-is at all?

Pay close attention to that last bullet, because there’s are at least two costs hiding in there if it’s something you shouldn’t be measuring. First, there’s opportunity cost, since whatever time or money you spend on measuring the thing could be spent be better on something else, or simply not be spent at all and fall to the bottom line.

Second — and maybe more important — is the hidden cost of making decisions based on misleading or irrelevant metrics. What if, for example, you measure how much time your sales reps spend on the phone, and now you’re confused because you’ve gotten them all to reach new heights of phone time — but without a corresponding rise in sales? Talk time on the phone can be a good metric, but if it’s generated by reps’ having long conversations when they could accomplish more with short ones, or by reps’ wasting time talking on the phone to weak prospects, it’s the wrong metric to rely upon.

It’s easy to find yourself measuring the wrong things — because what was once useful to measure no longer is, because we haven’t adapted old metrics or tools to new contexts, because we’re stuck measuring what we can measure instead of what we should measure, or simply because we’ve been mistaken about what’s beneficial.

If you find you are measuring the wrong things, it’s not the end of the world. Figuring out your mistakes means that you’ll better understand your business, or even just your personal processes. And it should open your mind to finding the metrics that do work for you.

What do you measure? How do you know when to re-evaluate your metrics?

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Related post:

• Build a hustle-meter!

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Photo by Joel Penner.

Sometimes one good thing leads to another. That was the case after my talk in November at the Dallas Social Media Club, where I met Suzanne Hoenig. She’s one of the organizers of the DFW Servant Leadership group, which promotes the ethical principles of servant leadership laid out in Robert K. Greenleaf’s essay “The Servant as Leader” and carried forward by the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership.

The good thing yet to come: on the 27th, Suzanne and I will have a “fireside chat” at the Dallas headquarters of TDIndustries about the overlaps between servant leadership (her specialty) and social media (my specialty), as our incredibly cute anime-style avatars discuss in more detail here . . .

Hope to see you in Dallas on the 27th!

Pick anything important you’re working on and think about the question in the title. I’ll wait . . .

Okay, you’ve thought about it? Now answer these questions for yourself:

• Is your timeframe tied to your sales cycle? To your budgeting process? To your personal level of patience? To some arbitrary (meaningless) standard? Or what?
• How quickly do you expect a return from your efforts? How much of a return do you expect soon? How much in the long run? (And what do you mean by “soon” and “in the long run”? Does your team agree on these definitions?)
• How quickly are you asking yourself to act? To make decisions? Is this faster or slower than what you expect from peers / direct reports / bosses / vendors / clients / prospects?

Why am I asking all of these questions? Because experience tells me that mismatched timetables are a major source of business friction, misplaced urgency, and fouled-up projects.

What do you think?

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Photo by Alexander Boden, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

I admit I have a soft spot for Ford Motor Company. My friend Scott Monty has been leading their social-media efforts for a while — and was nice enough to let me interview him on that subject late last year. Through a connection of Scott’s, I was able to attend an impressive presentation by one of Ford’s sustainability leaders, John Viera, last year. And in the broader picture, it was clear even long before the bankruptcies and bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler that Detroit was no longer home of the “Big Three,” but rather of “Ford and the Other Two.”

Now CEO Alan Mulally’s turnaround plan — which emphasized “dealing with reality” from the start — is bearing fruit:

Ford Reports Nearly $1 Billion Profit
The latest and strongest sign of the automaker’s comeback comes as it pays down debt and adds to U.S. market share

Mind you, Ford isn’t out of the woods. Even with this big quarterly profit, it’s running a multi-billion loss for 2009. It has more than $20 billion in debt, though conversely it has a similarly large stockpile of cash. It’s also highly reliant for profits on its financing arm, rather on vehicle manufacturing itself. Beyond all that, Ford is reliant on a consumer economy that’s still quite shaky, and that may be facing a long jobless recovery.

Still, credit where it’s due: Ford took more hard business medicine, and did it earlier, than either of its Detroit peers — and now it is reaping the rewards.

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Related posts:

• What does the future hold for the Detroit car makers?
• Ford’s Sustainability Focus.
• Ford’s approach to social media: an interview with Scott Monty.
• What next for Detroit?

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Recently a Twitter acquaintance pointed me to this article:

BabyAge.com Learns to Listen to its Customers

Her emphasis in citing the story was on the radical design — black cribs — that BabyAge came up with as a result of its new focus on listening better to customers. And why not? Black cribs are certainly counterintuitive, and I figure it’s always a good thing when any company listens to its customers / users / audience more closely.

But the pet topic that jumped out at me from this story was . . . MARGIN.

The other day I talked about the ways that smart companies are growing their profits even when they can’t grow the top line. And past reporting I’ve done suggests to me that many companies — especially in their sales and marketing departments — have wide-open opportunities for growth that arise from the pursuit of higher margins rather than higher revenues above all.

Here’s a key section from the story on BabyAge:

Keifer said he’s seen some softness in his company’s high-end brands since the current recession hit — something that did not happen after 9/11 or when the dot-com bubble burst.

This helped Keifer realize that while top-line sales are great, a company cannot survive without margins. Especially in a time when consumers are on the Web looking for the best deals.

. . .

“We’ve gone overboard to make sure everyone in our company understands what margin is, and in the last two months, our margin has gone up 10%,” Keifer said. “It really took this recession for us to get everyone from the warehouse down to the call center to understand that we’re not in the business for top-line, but for margin.”

Hey, I love me some revenues. But margins are what make or break most businesses, in good times and bad.

Now over to you: What are you doing to improve your company’s margins?

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Photo by westerndave.