Validate your hypotheses
If collecting your employees’ input is the first step to uncovering weaknesses in your company, the second step is validating their observations with facts.
“Once you think there’s a problem, then you’ve got to go deep into the data t
o
prove that there really is or there isn’t,” Hallman says. “You’ve got to be careful about just taking anecdotes. But when you start hearing enough anecdotes and they all line up together, then I think it’s worth [investigating].”
Hallman looks to both financial and operational data to back up his hypotheses.
“It’s important that [data] be accurate, that it be timely and that it be granular enough that you can use it to really get to the answer of what’s going on,” Hallman says.
But data alone doesn’t do you much good if you can’t analyze it. So even though Hallman prefers the most up-to-date data possible, he likes to have previous figures for comparison. Having people that can question why the data is changing can mean the difference between data and information.
Data, for example, would be that your gross margin on a particular service is 42 percent. But the information is that it went down from 44 percent or up from 40 percent and why.
To get there, you have to ask questions.
“There are two things that help immensely,” Hallman says. “First is just putting talented persons on it. The second thing is you really have to have good data.”
Hallman also looks outside the organization to see what makes his peers successful. Not only can this suggest your soft spots, but it also offers solutions.
Hallman validated InSight’s previous goal of condensing their footprint by looking at successful industry competitors. The common thread was that they were all dense in a small number of markets.
“I looked at what’s going well for others, what’s not going so well for us and what’s going well for us in certain markets,” he says. “What are the common elements in those markets that we could try to bring to other places in the business?”
