The three best bits of data
I shared this with some friends and colleagues when it was first published. It's the thing I get asked for more than anything else. "Do you have a copy of that Timpson's thing?"
It's by James Timpson and it was published in The Times. 2nd May 2021
"Every night at 7pm, I get an email listing that day’s sales. This data isn’t collected by an “Epos” (electronic point of sale) till system, but by colleagues filling out a form online. They also write the sales numbers on a piece of paper and keep it on a bulldog clip. This takes five minutes a day. It sounds old-fashioned, but when people physically write things down they seem to take more notice. If you ask our colleagues what their sales are so far today, I bet they’ll know to within the nearest £50."
"Over the past 25 years, we have acquired a number of (loss-making) retail chains. The first thing we do is switch off their Epos tills. All we need is a drawer to keep the cash in and a calculator to add up the sales. We have thrown away more than £8 million of kit — and it’s made life easier for us."
"The businesses we bought were often collecting vast amounts of data from their fancy tills, yet the managers were actually reading very little of it, and it rarely helped colleagues give better customer service. As sales plummeted, they analysed more data, and brought in more finance experts and consultants to work out where the problems were. Redundancies weren’t made from the data team — it was the people on the front line, serving customers, who lost their jobs first. These companies failed because they lost focus on what’s important: great customer service."
"So our second barometer is customer service scores, which I look at every day. We ask customers to use an online form to rate their experience out of ten (our average score last week was 9.4). Every colleague sees their feedback in real time, and if we get a bad score our area managers are expected to call the unhappy customer straight away to apologise and fix the problem."
"One piece of data beats everything else. A quarter of a century ago, my dad taught me the best way to measure the health of our business was to look at the cash figure every day. Each morning at 10am, I get an email from Caroline in the finance team showing the cash we have in the bank compared with the same day last year. This fact offers no hiding place. The year-on-year comparison shows the strength of your cashflow and whether you are truly making money."
