Profit Solved - Clarify Your Small Business Objectives

Without clarity your profit picture will be too fuzzy to serve as an accurate guide to making more money in your small business. Sharpen your focus in these four areas to improve your bottom line.

Personal Reasons: Understand your personal reasons for successful small business ownership.

Most small businesses are started for personal reasons. Your motivation might  come from a skill, hobby or passion. The tipping point is often an incident in your life. It might be the threat or reality of losing a job, need for extra income due to a child on the way, insufficient retirement funds or general frustration.

Many times your personal reasons for starting a business of your own are really, "more personal" - they have to do with who you are as a person, the need to have more control over your time and more options in your life.

The greater clarity you have about the "Why" behind your decision to start your small business the greater chance you will be focused and produce a higher level of profitability.

Business Goals: Clearly state your business goals regardless of your personal talents or skills.

You and your business are really two separate entities. You, as the person who owns the business, and the business itself. This is an important distinction because business must stand alone for several reasons.

You need to set goals for the business to achieve to be profitable. These goals are set based on the mission statement of the business rather than the capabilities of its owners. That would be too limiting. Also, for the business to be in the best position to be sold some day it must be capable of operating independently of its ownership.

Without a clear set of goals your business will lack focus and not be able to develop and implement a profitable business plan.

Active Lifestyle: Schedule activities for each lifestyle area: individual, family, spiritual, career, financial.

Small business ownership is generally all consuming. It gobbles up a huge amount of your time, at least mentally if not physically. If you set goals for each core area of your lifestyle you can maintain more balance and, as a consequence, be in a position to accomplish more in your business.

Use a simple system to select one or two goals for each lifestyle area including business ownership. Schedule time for each goal on a weekly basis. The amount of time allocated for each area or goal does not need to be equal. It just needs to be scheduled.

When your business clearly serves your lifestyle and is integrated into your daily life plan you free up time and energy to accomplish more and positively impact your profit potential.

Mandatory Time: Plan your use of time in 30 minute increments with an emphasis on mandatory items.

Time is money, particularly when it come to the business of making money. It has a equal if  or greater value in one's personal life. A month, week or day is too much time to plan with accuracy, but a 30 minute window is not.

Set long-term objectives to create direction. Set short objectives to set actions. Set blocks of 30 minutes to work on or complete actions. Reserve your 30 minute blocks of time for those actions which must done to complete key profit plans.

The technique of scheduling mandatory items within 30 minute blocks of time give you a  clear picture of the steps you're taking to optimize your profitability.

Today is the best time to bring your profit picture into focus and enjoy the benefits that come from clarifying your small business objectives.

Matter Management Reporting - A Business Objects Approach

Corporate legal Matter Management systems are implemented through multi-million dollar projects that frequently result in unpopular, underused tools that never provide the expected return on investment. One element, common to many such situations, is the limited utility of the data being captured. The data in the matter management system is either irrelevant or inaccessible to the interested parties. Integrated Matter Management reporting is the solution to this problem.

In the best case, future reporting needs have been considered and included as critical inputs in the design phase of the larger matter management project. In the worst case, reporting was left out of the design entirely, and end users and management are already angry and dissatisfied with what they perceive as a very expensive failure. Once this type of deficiency is identified, Matter Management specialists can correct the design and integrate the key reports into the system that will make it more relevant to day-to-day business and the reporting requirements mandated by management.

The right specialists will be fluent in matter management as well as management reporting and the underlying tools. These subject area experts can upgrade and enhance a successful matter management system, or salvage and improve one that is foundering. Specialty consultants are crucial to a successful matter management implementation because of their unique combination of experience, independence from vendor influence and accountability to the client organization that engages them. The same advantages make them most desirable resources during a project remediation. Skilled resources that rely on the good will of their paying client are highly motivated to comply with customer timelines and expectations.

A good matter management reporting implementation will be flexible, responsive, logical, and user-friendly. The tools most often employed to retrieve and display data from a matter management system are Business Objects (or Crystal Reports), Microsoft Access, Cognos, and Microstrategy. Most of these are Business Intelligence platforms (MS Access is not). Using these tools, a skilled designer creates a metadata layer that interprets complex data for use by end users and report writers (metadata means 'data about data').

In Business Objects, the metadata layer is called a "Universe". Sound universe design is the heart of a successful reporting effort. Poorly designed universes will result in several significant problems, including:


Inaccurate reports
Performance problems (with Reporting, the application and/or the database server)
User dissatisfaction (with usability, results, etc.)
Proper universe design will incorporate the following practices and features:
Custom universes and objects, built to address customer reporting needs.
Consistent, logical universe layout
Clear and friendly naming conventions.
Multiple universes, built around clusters of related data.
Logical, consistent points of interface between universes.
Efficient database joins
In a Business Objects universe design, multiple universes should be created, according to the complexity of the data and business processes involved. The separation of data into multiple universes improves the usability and performance of the reporting environment. Usability is enhanced as the reporting interface presents fewer choices, with more obvious correlations and interactions between fields, so that a report writer can create more accurate reports more quickly. Performance is enhanced as database communications are simplified and streamlined. A matter management reporting environment will use a Matter (Case) universe to anchor the rest of the data. A Finance universe contains everything about invoices and budgets. The Finance universe can be linked to Matters when a more complex report requires details from both universes. A Contacts universe presents all of the details in the "rolodex", encompassing all of the people and companies that are involved in any way with a legal matter in the system. Other universes will link to it whenever additional contact details are required. A Timekeeping universe will present timesheet data and have links to the Matters and Contacts universes. Other universes may be necessary, depending upon the business processes that are part a firm's Matter Management system. These may include an Intellectual Property universe, a Discovery universe, a Risk Management universe, and others.

Once the universes are in place, reports are created through the collaborative efforts of business experts, analysts and report writers. Specialty consultants are a superior resource during this step because they can fill the latter two roles, while conversing fluently with the business experts to maximize reporting results and minimize delivery time.

Summary
A strong reporting implementation is vital to the overall success of any Matter Management system, in many cases driving the benefits that provide the ROI for the entire project. Experienced specialists can contribute dramatically to the success of the effort. The reporting design should be flexible enough to accommodate its ongoing success, as active users will constantly develop new questions for their reports to answer. Good reporting will improve the user experience and management utility of the system, raising both data quality and participation among the user population.

© 2007 Matt Gwilliam

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