By Neil Bell, Founder, New South Outdoor, LLC.

As a billboard operator trying to grow my business, I juggle multiple tasks every day and not every aspect receives proper attention. There are, however, key aspects of my business I never overlook.  Here are the 5 metrics that I certain to look at throughout my week.

1) Monthly Billing Totals. Are my sales people hitting the monthly revenue goals we have set for them and for the company? This one is pretty obvious and I would bet most operators look at this on a regular basis. Sales can be one of the more difficult things in this business because it requires constant attention. Digital signs are a revolving door of advertisers and a three-month contract always seems to be over in a blink of an eye.

2) Contract Totals.  In addition to billing goals, we set contract total goals. Tracking this can be very informative as to the health of future billings as well as how sales people are performing. Some sales people consistently hit their billing goal but fail to hit their contract total goal. It suggests they might only be closing short-term deals or not securing optimal rates.

3) Working Totals.  I want to see what the sales people have working. If they need to sell an additional $30,000 in contract value this month, they most likely need to have three times that working. A thin working list means it’s time to intensify prospecting.

4) Occupancy.  Where are we with occupancy? My first thought is always “we should be achieving more”. But some of the other questions I ask are: can we even reach our billing goals with the amount of inventory we have open? And what if there is a lot of open inventory and we are hitting our goals, did we set those goals too low?

5) Accounts Receivable. We sold the space, but are we collecting the money??? We set goals on this as well. In each calendar month, we push to collect over 93% of what we billed in the previous calendar month. I am very lucky to have a wiz administrator that helps us consistently hit this metric. It takes a lot of follow up with customers to keep their payments on track.  Setting goals for collections is a must if you want to effectively manage your cashflow.

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