Here’s something that gets overlooked more than almost anything else in an independent business.
You’ve been collecting evidence for years.
Every email you’ve sent. Every page on your website. Every offer you’ve put out into the world. All of it has left a trail. Open rates, click rates, visitor numbers, sales figures, social insights. A quiet, detailed record of what worked, what didn’t, and what your audience actually responded to.
Most founders walk straight past it.
Not because they don’t care. Because when something needs fixing or something new needs creating, the instinct is to look forward. What should I do next? What’s the new thing? What do I need to create?
But your data is already sitting there, pointing at the answer.
BLOG SERIES:
Hidden Assets
YOUR DATA
READ TIME
2 mins
It’s not an analysis. It’s a conversation.
You don’t need to be a numbers person for this. You don’t need a spreadsheet with seventeen tabs or a dashboard that takes twenty minutes to interpret.
You just need to ask it a question.
The most useful one is usually the simplest: when did I last do something like this — and what happened?
Website feeling quiet? Look at when it wasn’t. What was different? Where were visitors coming from? How long were they staying?
An offer not landing? Look at the last one that did. Who bought it? Where did they find you? What did they say yes to?
A new piece of content feeling flat? Look at what got the best response before. Not just the likes — the replies, the DMs, the “this is exactly what I needed” emails.
That’s your data talking. And it already knows more than you think.
What counts as data?
This is so much broader than you’d expect
The obvious stuff: website analytics, email open and click rates, sales figures, social media insights.
But also:
Past experiments. Things you tried that didn’t quite work — do you remember why? Even a half-formed note to yourself counts.
Emails you sent or received. A client reply that told you exactly what they needed. A response to a newsletter that showed you which subject line made people actually open it.
Anything that gives you a window into what happened and why.
If you’re not sure what your data is telling you, start with the story rather than the numbers. What do you remember working on? What do you remember falling flat? Your memory is data too.
What it looks like in practice
You might remember this example from the Threads Series.
Someone worried because enquiries had slowed down. The instinct was to do something promotional — advertising, a discount, a sales push. Fix the visible problem.
But when we traced the thread back through the data, a different picture emerged.
Website visitors were down. And when we looked at where visitors had been coming from the previous year, it turned out a prominent industry website had mentioned the business and linked to their site. Those visitors arrived warm — already trusting, already curious. The journey from visitor to enquiry was a short one.
The data didn’t just find the problem. It showed exactly what had created the conditions for success the first time around.
Which made the next question much more specific and much more answerable.
Not “how do I get more enquiries?” But “how do I get more warm visitors — or create something that does a similar job to that recommendation?”
That’s the difference between guessing and knowing.
Before you start anything new
Ask your data what it already knows.
Look at what worked before, even imperfectly. Find the closest thing you’ve already tried. Take the best and leave the rest.
Your time and energy are finite. The most valuable thing you can do with them is build on what’s already proven — rather than starting from zero every time.
The answer you need is probably already there. It usually is.
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