Partner Case Study: The Project Booth

Introduction

In this case study, Layne Booth, owner and CEO of The Project Booth, tells us how she and her team empower small businesses to make independent, data-driven decisions based on carefully selected, curated metrics and custom dashboards. By integrating PowerMetrics into their clients’ daily work, the Project Booth simplifies their analytics and transforms their data from an underused asset to a powerhouse of insight that drives growth and fuels efficiency and profitability.

About The Project Booth

At The Project Booth, a 100% woman-owned and operated company, we specialize in developing customized metric-centric dashboards for small businesses. Our goal is to provide our clients with the tools and insights they need to thrive in a competitive landscape. In real-world terms, we aim to boost our customers’ profitability within 90 days. Some of our client's success stories include growing manufacturing capacity by 25%, increasing profits by 33%, and tripling sales to $3 million. Starting with our 90 Day Dashboard Service for initial build and refinement, we offer additional support through video libraries for dashboard maintenance, monthly risk and opportunity reports, and fractional COO services for deeper operational guidance. 

Our services

Each client’s journey begins with a detailed data audit and analysis, focused on integrating with essential software platforms, such as QuickBooks, Xero, Asana, and popular social media channels, like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. This initial step ensures that we're not only connected to the most relevant data sources but also prepared to cleanse the data—identifying inaccuracies, duplications, and gaps to pave the way for efficient metric and dashboard implementation.

Our in-depth reporting highlights the factors that inform strategic decisions. For example, the use of ROI evidence to optimize marketing efforts and the benefit of adjusting inventory in reaction to sales trends. Clients also receive a 12-month Roadmap and Forecast plan to help them meet their annual sales objectives. Our expertise in building data feeds, consolidating spreadsheets, and designing bespoke dashboards are some of our key differentiators. We create visually appealing, easy-to-interpret dashboards tailored to each client's brand. Backed by the metric-centric architecture built into PowerMetrics, our dashboards aim to inform and engage our customers as they progress through their business journey. 

Working with metrics

The process of selecting a client’s key metrics, ones that align with their company’s values and objectives, is a collaborative one. This journey begins with a comprehensive "getting started" call, aimed at understanding the intricacies of their business, including their aspirations and challenges. This initial deep dive sets the stage for a thorough audit of their financial, marketing, and operational data, allowing us to unearth valuable insights and identify the metrics that truly matter in achieving their goals.

Selecting which KPIs to follow isn’t a unilateral decision; as with all client interactions, we work together to arrive at the ideal combination. Following the audit, we engage in a detailed discussion with our clients, sharing our findings, pointing out immediate opportunities for improvement, and suggesting key metrics to monitor. Through a process of iteration and fine-tuning, we arrive at a bespoke set of KPIs. 

While we firmly believe in customizing metrics to align with the unique goals and strategies of our clients, several key metrics frequently stand out, applicable across a variety of sectors:

1. Revenue vs Forecast: This metric is crucial for evaluating the financial health and performance against expectations, providing a clear picture of where the business stands in relation to its financial goals.
2. Revenue by Service/Product: Understanding which products or services are the biggest revenue generators helps in focusing efforts and resources effectively.
3. Website Traffic and Referring Sites: These metrics offer insights into a company's online presence and the effectiveness of its digital marketing strategies, pinpointing where traffic originates.
4. Email Newsletter Performance: Evaluating the success of email marketing campaigns, this metric can guide strategies for engagement and conversion through targeted communications.
5. Social Media Followers and Engagement: This indicates not just growth in audience size, but also how interactive and responsive that audience is, reflecting the effectiveness of social media strategies.
6. Ads Performance: By assessing the return on advertising spend, companies can refine their advertising strategies for maximum impact.
7. Sale (Product or Service) Conversions: This metric highlights the effectiveness of the sales funnel, from lead acquisition to closing sales, providing insights into the customer journey and purchase process.

These metrics are foundational, yet adaptable, serving as a baseline from which we build a tailored approach to meet the specific needs and objectives of each client. This ensures they not only track their performance efficiently but do so with metrics that drive meaningful insights and outcomes.

Working with PowerMetrics

The Project Booth relies on PowerMetrics to help us craft professional, all-encompassing, automated dashboards for our diverse clientele. PowerMetrics, with its metric-centric approach and myriad features, enhances our team's and our clients' experience. Its cloud-based nature grants unparalleled access and flexibility, allowing both our team and our clients to interact with dashboards from anywhere, aligning perfectly with the dynamic needs of today's businesses.

The platform's robust user management capabilities ensure we can share valuable insights with our clients while safeguarding sensitive data, striking a fine balance between transparency and security. Thanks to Klipfolio's extensive API integration features, we're able to automate the data aggregation process from a wide array of sources, significantly reducing the need for manual updates and ensuring that dashboards reflect real-time information.

PowerMetrics’ user-friendly design and intuitive tools empower our team to tailor metrics and dashboards to meet the exact requirements of our clients. This ease of customization, coupled with the platform's facilitation of team collaboration, improves efficiency by streamlining our dashboard development process. 

Why PowerMetrics?

For us, PowerMetrics stands out for three main reasons: top integrations list (which continues to grow), ease of use and best-in-class customer service. 

Pivotal features in PowerMetrics center around data integration, metric customization, data accuracy, real-time updates, and universal accessibility.

From our team's perspective, the ability to build data feeds and to connect directly with a vast array of data sources is a good fit for SMBs that don’t use a data warehouse or even semantic layers. This connectivity allows us to efficiently aggregate data without the need for a data warehouse. Metric customization capabilities enable us to tailor dashboards to the specific needs of each client, ensuring the insights provided are both relevant and actionable.

Accuracy and the timeliness of updates are equally crucial, as they guarantee the reliability of the data, a necessity for informed decision making. 

From the client's perspective, the ease of accessing their dashboards anytime, anywhere is key. This feature helps them make agile decisions based on their current business metrics, regardless of their physical location. Clients also appreciate the way PowerMetrics brings clarity to complex data, significantly enhancing their ability to make fast, well-informed decisions. The importance of having accurate, up-to-date information cannot be overstated. It is the bedrock upon which our clients base their strategic and operational decisions. 

The Support Team at Klipfolio adds value to us and, by association, to our clients. They’re always available to help and their expertise and collaborative attitude make for a dynamic, flexible partnership.

How PowerMetrics became the core of what we do

PowerMetrics hasn't just changed our business; it's become the cornerstone of what we do at The Project Booth. Our mission is to help businesses grow by harnessing the power of dashboards, enabling them to use their data for competitive advantage. In today’s landscape of fleeting trends and "next big things," we've found our niche in something grounded and enduring: the strategic use of data for growth. The concept of dashboards may not seem new or revolutionary but the unique, metric-centric approach of PowerMetrics sets this BI solution apart.

Moving forward, we plan to help other agencies implement dashboard services to their respective clients. We strongly believe that if businesses, like marketing agencies, accounting firms, and operational services, add this incredible tool to their strategic client services, they’ll make more money for themselves and for their clients. 

Klipfolio’s analytics products

Klipfolio offers two cloud-based data analytics platforms:

• PowerMetrics is a complementary analytics solution that gives business users self-serve data access for independent, confident decision making. Centralized, certified metrics, governed by the data team, ensure data is accurate and aligned across all dashboards and reports.
• Klips is a traditional dashboarding BI solution that allows users to create and share real-time pixel-perfect data visualizations in dashboards and reports. You can use Klips to bring visualizations to your own internal teams and also to clients.