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Operating a business is more often an art than a science. As with any great work of art, creativity is the main driving force. But the best artists don’t neglect the science behind what appeals to the human senses in their chosen artistic discipline.
For example, popular music has a general template behind the art. The song structure of verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus is widely used because as humans, we’ve come to expect that structure (or something similar) in music. When something deviates from that norm, it feels wrong to us.
In a similar way, the art of business has a certain way of organization that gives it the scientific structure it needs.
Baking Cakes
To explain one specific case where business still needs to move from art to science in the business world, we’ll use an analogy. Let’s bake a cake!
To bake a traditional cake, you’ll need some general fundamental ingredients (flour, sugar, salt, eggs, butter, milk, baking soda). Then you’ll need to implement the typical baking process (measuring, mixing, baking, decorating). With those as inputs, your output is a cake.
The Current Cake Making Process
I give this example to help describe how we’re currently measuring profitability within organizations. If we apply current profitability measuring techniques (Take total costs and divide it by the number of employees working on a project), we’d have made a cake with the same amount of salt as flour. I’m not certain that’s a cake I want to be responsible for.
For good reason, executives are typically laser-focused on revenue and they’re constantly looking for ways to cut costs. To that end, marketing has martech, engineering has devops, and sales has revops. Every day, businesses are moving more from art to science. Yet, we’re still measuring profitability by subtracting costs from revenue. No nuance involved.
The Cake Maker
As an operator, your objective is making your organization run more efficiently. How can you do this if your costs aren’t associated with actions, people, or processes? How do you price without knowing what your labor costs you? How do you know which customers to search for without knowing what kind of deals make you the most profitable? How do you make decisions on headcount and workload distribution without seeing where time is spent and how effort is prioritized.
You’re handed a list of ingredients and told to bake a cake. Not only that, you’re given no indication how any of those ingredients affect the end result. You have something of value (a cake) that you’re trying to give to your customers, but have no idea how much of each ingredient (employee/department effort) is required or what each ingredient will do to the end product. What’s more, your process will require the specific times necessary for each step to culminate with a cake worth paying for.
The Perfect Cake Recipe
In the Cardagraph platform, the costs associated with baking your figurative cake are organized, structured, and associated with the actual amount of effort being put toward your customers by your employees. You can see with more accuracy where your time and effort is being spent and whether or not the prioritization being employed is correct.
Cardagraph helps you make more money by giving suggestions on how to distribute your workload, where you’re losing out on profitability, and which kinds of deals to prioritize based on the margins associated with them. Get your ingredients and process set perfectly so that both you and your customers are thrilled by every cake you make!
