The Campbell Academy Blog (316)

On the Matter of Insight

This year (April to April) The Campbell Clinic (TCC) has targeted to turnover somewhere in the region of £2.3M or a little bit more.

50% of the way through the year we were at exactly 50% of our target.

The Campbell Academy (TCA) is targeted at around £330K and the lab at around £240K, the lab is on target, the Academy is above. Is this good?

It depends what good is and what good is depends on insight.

The numbers above are utterly useless until you sit them against what it costs to run the businesses and also what the businesses are for.

The numbers above are pointless unless the businesses are doing exactly what you set out for the businesses to do.

If the purpose of that is for profit only then cut your cost as much as you can and hang on for dear life to make your margins as big as possible.

If, however, you’re trying to do something different, to affect, to influence, to make the lives of the people who work for you and people who touch you as a business better then profit (although important) can never be the be all and end all.

This year, by way of a contact I made, through being a school governor, we secured a small business grant to allow some development of the team; from coaching and training and ‘my present’ from this is a leadership course at Nottingham Trent University that begins in January.

The concept of leadership is not new to me, I’ve tried to read around and investigate the subject in many different ways over the past few years. In the end the true essence of leadership is insight.

We have (at least I think) an extraordinarily sophisticated reporting system for a business so small. I tested it recently against the schools finance system and found that we are way beyond what an £8M school budget does to monitor itself and way beyond what the £50M trust who over sees the school does to monitor itself too. The reporting of figures is one thing; it’s the insight that creates the value.

The development of insight is complicated because it assumes that you understand what the business is for in the first place.

It’s just a little bit more complicated (at least I believe it is) than maximising profit and taking the money and running. Understanding and even deciding what the business is for is the first step to developing insights to decide whether it’s doing what it’s supposed to do.

By Colin Campbell on 08/12/2017, 18:00