I talked recently with an Excel user who’s making a great living from Excel reports. Because many Excel users are looking for jobs, I thought someone else could use a similar idea.
The idea is based on one that I first heard about as a teenager.
My best friend’s father owned a car dealership. One day, my friend said that his father was attending a “Twenty Group” meeting. He explained that his father met quarterly with 19 other owners of non-competing car dealerships. With the help of a consultant, they shared their financials, discussed business strategies, and revealed inside information about which strategies were working and which weren’t.
My caller had applied the Twenty-Group idea to a completely different industry that he knows well. And he’s doing very well with his business.
He called me because IncSight DB — my package of Excel database workbooks and dashboard reporting templates – is a key ingredient of the business, and he was asking how to add enhance DB in various ways.
Here’s the general idea:
Monthly, he gets a file of financials from everyone who’s a member of one of his groups. The financials all have the same format, so he easily can add them to his Excel database workbook. He then uses the dashboard and other report templates to generate reports for each member of each group.
The reports include comparisons of each member’s financials to the average of his group and also to the average of all members in all the groups. Because the industry includes publicly traded companies, he also plans to compare the group’s financial data to free financial benchmarks for their industry.
Then, when each group meets, my caller reviews the financials and leads the conversation among the members.
You could use this technique in many different ways, but always with members who don’t compete with each other. For example…
- If you have an accounting practice, you could group geographically diverse clients in similar industries
- If you’re an expert in an industry that includes many franchise stores, you could create groups of their owners.
- If you’re an expert in some major aspect of running a business, like marketing, operations, or finance, you could create groups for owners or department managers.
You just need data from the group that you can summarize and display, a willingness for the group to share both their failures and successes, and the trust of the members.
If times are tough right now, it’s something to think about.
