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Powered by Search is a B2B software and technology agency with a team spread across Canada and the United States. Their special sauce is the elimination of the middle man by connecting clients with their specialized consultants directly. Their team of experts goes deep fast, with specific, actionable, and pragmatic guidance.

Meet Dev Basu, Founder & CEO

Dev Basu, Founder and CEO, not only specializes in helping B2B SaaS companies grow, but also acts as a growth coach for agencies with his program The Million Dollar Agency. Dev’s days are spent seeing through the qualitative data to find the bottom line result. His job relies on him being able to see the 10,000 foot view and then drill into the 500 foot view across all departments, picking up threads where necessary. 

“Before Databox, we were getting reporting from a variety of different sources. All of our financial reporting would come in from the CPA firm we used to work with. We waited for it every month or so. It always felt like looking in the rearview mirror, instead of driving the car and looking forward.”

“We had data from other sources coming in. Everything from time-tracking tools to capacity planning, but it was all in Excel. Someone had to go get that data. And we’d tried many different BI tools in the past to visualize it better. But ultimately the process was still very manual, and either involved dependencies or waiting on other folks to get that data. There was just a lot of waiting around before Databox.”

The Pilot’s View Dashboard

After implementing Databox, Dev and his team were able to access crucial decision-informing data more immediately. Dev employed the use of a “Pilot’s View dashboard”—a dashboard that wraps up all of his most meaningful metrics, bookmarked on his home screen so he can easily check in on the data he needs. The Pilot’s View dashboard offers Dev and his team a high-level look into the health of an agency’s business. It only includes outcome-based metrics that reflect real business numbers. 

Understanding the overall health of an agency’s business allows Powered by Search to drill into the specific business functions that need attention. From high-level numbers like revenue over the last year to more actionable insights like Deals Closed Won or the growth of COGS & expenses, the Pilot’s View dashboard allows Dev’s team to make quick, strategic decisions. For Dev, the value of using Databox dashboards is in the “dramatic” reduction in time it takes for his team to get on the same page. 

“It keeps us focused on running the business rather than being in the business of trying to get this data from a bunch of different places.”

Going Beyond Vanity Metrics 

Tracking the real metrics that reflect business health is crucial to the effectiveness of the Pilot’s View dashboard. For Dev’s team, this means growth metrics and efficiency metrics. Growth metrics highlight crucial numbers like net revenue and net profit. Dev tracks these numbers over a period of 12 months, so his team can easily spot and drill into any areas of acceleration or deceleration. Efficiency metrics like COGS & expenses—which should be outpaced by revenue—allow Dev’s team to track the true health of a client’s business. 

Looking to reduce your vanity metrics and start measuring the KPIs that matter? Dev’s advice is start simple—“If you [asked most business owners] what was your last 90 days worth of revenue, they wouldn’t know.” Getting control over these metrics is easier with Databox. Once you set up a dashboard in Databox, timelines give you control over the data you want to see. You can adjust the timeline you want to view by individual metrics with just a few clicks. 

“The idea that you can do the last 12 months or last six months, for example, can really help you get a really good picture without having to go run that as a function or as a formula in a spreadsheet. It just figures it out for you.” 

Using Automation to Stay Aligned 

Alignment around the right data is essential to making quick and effective strategy decisions. The Powered by Search team uses Databox’s automated features to save hours on manual information gathering and sharing. The team receives automated scorecards daily. These scorecards are daily reports on current, leading metrics that tie back to the Pilot’s View dashboard. 

The team sets goals for their clients in Databox, and receives alerts if the goal is missed or exceeded. Goals do more than help Powered by Search and their clients stay focused on the metrics they need to move—they help teams celebrate their wins. Dev wants to help highly-driven agency owners celebrate success: “It’s actually kind of nice to be able to look back at a snapshot and see how far you’ve come. Not just how far you have to go.”