I’m not the person to ask about creating budgets. For home life, maybe but I need a lot of incentive to stick to it. For work, no. I know so little about what it costs to run the company and what it would take to bring a profit and even less about what ideal goals would be for salespeople. Yet somehow I, along with the rest of the staff, am included in those conversations.

My thought has always been that the company leadership determines budgets and then passes them down from above. Those budgets are then expected to be met. Seems pretty simple to me. But in a small company like the one I am working for, pretty much everyone is in a leadership role and I guess that’s why we are included. It will look great on a résumé, as long as we set goals which don’t cause the company to go under. I honestly feel like I could do that.

I like reading about companies that do not have explosive growth. I like to hear about the ones that set modest foals each year to improve, and then reach them. To meet the goals, they only hire as needed and only spend as needed in the places needed. To me that is a conservative and smart way to grow. Since I know little about our financials, my gut says we aren’t taking the conservative approach.

A lot of feeling goes into our decisions. I feel this or I feel that. And that bothers me. Feelings aren’t the best indicators of good business decisions. Thinking people should be doing something, likewise, does not mean they will do said thing. This comes up more often that I’d like to admit. “I think people should pay us to be on our site,” why?

One of my goals for the new year is to base more of our decisions on data. Cold hard data. We’ll collect it and analyze it and only then will we make an informed decision on what to do next. The data can come from feedback or market growth or observations from other sites. However, the data doesn’t come from your gut. Ideas do, and that’s fantastic, but ideas need to be backed up, tested, and proved.

In 2017, I’m going to collect the data I need to make informed decisions for the 2018 budget.