Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
There’s a marginal difference between the types of companies that can coast, making an expectable revenue each year, and those that appear more volatile, tending to fluctuate in earnings from year to year.
That is dictated largely by the organization’s collective mindset and leadership direction. Right now, it’s important to emphasize the use of data analytics for business and how companies can utilize these analytics to scale operations.
Perhaps you’re a company executive looking to revamp the company’s strategic trajectory by leveraging internal assets. Perhaps you’re a sales analyst looking for ways to capitalize on years of accrued data for a new proposal.
The kind of data your company holds may prove useful for different reasons. It’s your job to identify what information you have and how it can be used to anticipate the future and ultimately make decisions based on it.
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Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset
If you’ve never heard of these terms before, you can learn about the key differences between growth mindsets and fixed mindsets and even discover which mindset you adopt yourself. But in the meantime, let’s highlight how the two characteristics shape the way we think about success.
A fixed mindset holds to the grounds that your intelligence, ability, and potential are static. It may often rely upon one’s upbringing and initial grade school and college education. It is often unwilling to budge when faced with adversity or differing perspectives. A person with a fixed mindset is often afraid of failure and, therefore, will often resist situations that push them uncomfortably beyond what they know they are already capable of.
A growth mindset, however, means that your primary motivation comes from learning and improving upon past mistakes. Where fixed mindsets primarily seek to avoid initial failure, growth mindsets don’t mind failure since it’s seen as just a stepping stone toward greater success.
It’s part of a growth mindset to look at big data patterns within an organization and its competitors to inform meaningful changes that will improve results and minimize repeated problems.
If you’re someone with an inherently fixed mindset with your worldview and business philosophy, it can be difficult to make the pivot to embracing failure as a good thing. If you can break through the mental wall to reach a place where failure is simply a means to an end, you’ll be able to anticipate losses and ultimately turn them into wins.
Why Should You Use Data Analytics for Business?
There are numerous applications of big data analytics and how it can impact businesses, both big and small. Let’s run through a few topics where data can be leveraged:
- Sales patterns – Records of how different products compare to one another in quarterly sales can help owners understand how much to supply for each product type for future anticipated sales
- Sales margins – Profit margins associated with each product can be compared on a large scale to distinguish which product line is bringing in the greatest net profit. While the volume of sales with product A might beat out the volume of product B, product B might have a stronger profit margin, helping the analyzer understand that product B is a stronger profit generator.
- Consumer trends – Understanding the buying habits of users from your data can help dictate the strategy of how, when, and where to target them in the future. For instance, if sales data suggests that the majority of sales occur on the brand’s website, on weekends between 9 A.M. and 11 A.M. EST, then concentrating marketing campaigns on those time slots would be an effective response to that sort of business intelligence.
Calculating Future Risks
Large swaths of business data can help companies anticipate future economic conditions. Not predict the future, but anticipate it.
Purchasing habits from consumers can help guide analysts in understanding correlations with economic dips. In uncertain times, gleaning from accrued data can help inform businesses about potential recessions before they are made manifest.
Understanding the entire organization’s operating expenses is crucial to surviving any economic storms that we might face in 2023. It’s important to know the cost to operate and then plan for a possible future emergency by putting aside liquid cash into an emergency fund.
Identifying the spending patterns and the more costly expenses can help business owners understand what to reasonably cut back on to preserve the company in the event of economic downturns.
Dive Into Your Data
We’ve only scratched the surface. But that’s the point! As mentioned, there are nearly limitless ways to interpret your organization’s data. These include:
- HR purposes, to look at employee hiring trends, turnover, and tenure statistics.
- Consider the patterns of energy consumption to learn how your company can cut down on costs.
The data you choose to collect and record shouldn’t be left by the wayside. Use this as one of the biggest internal assets that you’ve been developing over time. Data analytics will open the door to increased clarity and informed business decisions. You might also want to explore Airtable alternatives for managing your collected data effectively.
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