Track everything important with this rolling snapshot report
The Rolling Snapshot Report is a personal favorite for COOs of multi-publication and multi-media companies.
The Moneyball theory, to track everything and rely on the math, applies here.
How much has a competitor depressed the yield per page in one market? Which team overperforms in new customer acquisition?
It’s a great tool for anyone running a large company or micro team who wants to see what is really going on, for the management team to review the performance of KPIs, and for ad directors and other aspiring managers to begin thinking like publishers. After the initial setup, the report has to be updated once a month. Most of the information comes from the P&L, but other items, such as printed pages, can be tracked in a log by the department manager.
You can put anything in here: Charge-backs on ads with mistakes or the number of 60+ day accounts on the aging list. What about contract length? Is obtaining annual contracts a KPI this year? It’s all up to you.
Since it is a rolling – last month versus this month – as well as YOY, it’s easy to see both sets of data at once.
So take this download as a starting point and make it your own.
Here are some things to consider including:
Revenues
• Sales by rep
•Sales by category
You can also add ratios and other metrics
• Number of Pages
• Ad/news ratio
• Rev/page
• Rev/ad page
• Free and trade pages
•Rev/employee
On the cost side, there are a number of other factors to look at from the P&L:
First, the hard cost for Printing, production, distribution, sales, and admin overhead.
Cost metrics include the % of sales for each of these – along with the profit margin.
You can also include a cost/page, hour/page in production. For some companies, the fixed (overhead, salaries, distribution) versus variable costs (printing, commissions, hourly production staff) is a revealing data point.
You may be able to download most of this for the prior year into a spreadsheet, decide what you want to track, and update it monthly. Anyone looking at the report can tell you that your printing as a % of revenues is higher than last year but tracking lower every month, for example.
It’s a great tool to share with the management team or board at a monthly meeting to “see” what is going on within the company.
Let us know if you have any questions at Alisa@nichemediainsider.com
