I’m a firm believer that anyone can grow a business following a straightforward formula. DO STUFF, ANALYZE, REPEAT. It’s not complicated, and it’s not meant to be. You do things, analyze the data, and repeat for the next ten years, then success follows. Once you understand that, everything becomes easier because you do stuff, track the performance and repeat till you get a bunch of things working while getting rid of things that aren’t.
Doing stuff is the easy part. Everyone has a bunch of ideas, and that’s how the process of doing stuff starts. You have the idea, set it in motion, and then begin analyzing data to see if that idea works.
Analyzing the data should be easy, but sometimes it’s not so black and white, so you must be very careful. Let me give you an example of what can go wrong. When I started King of Maids, we began to get all of our clients from Craigslist. If someone didn’t notice a coupon in the AD, they’d complain about the price, thinking we are extremely expensive. When we got traction on Yelp a few months later, those customers never complained about the price. By analyzing the data based on Craigslist customers, one could make the mistake of lowering prices because everyone is complaining that the price is too high. Yet the problem wasn’t the prices. It was the traffic that complained about the prices. You have to dig deep and understand who the users are complaining about prices.
Knowing this, you keep the prices as they are (maybe even increase them to make as much on Yelp customers), then you figure out how to sell the Craigslist customers or forget about them because they aren’t the right customer for you. For us, we leveraged Craigslist customers at the beginning since it was free, then once we got traction elsewhere, we stopped advertising on CL because it didn’t have a good ROI (return on investment).
Get good at analyzing data or hire someone that will do a phenomenal job. They must understand when something is working, when something isn’t working and when to cut their losses and try something new. With that being said, let me show you 5 reports inside BookingKoala that helped us grow King of Maids.
Ratings Report
Providers are the reason you’re in business. This Report will make it easy to determine how well your company is doing and where to improve. In the last seven days, you can see that we received 42 reviews from customers. This feedback came automatically, without chasing anyone for input. I mention this because it’s essential to have automated processes. Determining if your Providers are good or not automatically based on reviews will save you a lot of time and effort. This Report is forever used because we use it to contact those who had a poor experience. We also use it to see which Providers aren’t fit to be on the platform and represent King of Maids.
Services Report
A report like this will help you figure out the best services to offer your customers. You get to learn which frequencies are popular and what customers are buying from you. It’s highly beneficial at the beginning to determine your best services and place them right in front of your customers. Then you can continue to use this report when introducing new services to your customers.
Cancellations Report
Using this report, you can determine why customers are canceling your services. It’s essential to understand such metrics because not all cancellations are bad. If someone canceled because they are moving out of state, that doesn’t mean we are doing anything wrong. From the example in the picture, someone canceled because we didn’t have the spot they wanted, but they said they would be back. Does something need to be changed? No, because we aren’t doing anything wrong however the reason tells us that we need to hire more cleaners otherwise, we are losing out on money.
Trends Report
This critical report will help you achieve tremendous success when setting up marketing campaigns. It will take you some time to collect such data about your customers; however, you will know how much money you make per customer once you have the data. Why is this important? Because if you know that, on average, each customer has 3 bookings in 12 months with your company totaling $454.20 in revenue, you’ll learn how much money you can spend and still be profitable. Assuming you keep 50% of the revenue, which is $227.10 in profit, you can spend $100 acquiring a new customer and still make $127.10 on that customer the same year.
Campaign Insights Report
This report can be found inside the ‘Campaigns’ tab under the Marketing section of your account. The report is an excellent way to measure your Campaign progress. You can use it to determine the best email templates, times, and subject lines that get the most bookings and revenue for your company.
Filip Boksa
CEO and Co-founder at BookingKoala, home to thousands of entrepreneurs worldwide. Grew his first business King of Maids, to over 5 million by 22 with $6,000 and no outside funding. Today focuses on helping businesses through BookingKoala.
