The BrightGauge Blog

What happens when three students meet at North Dakota State University and all fall in love with the idea of being entrepreneurs? They all leave school to start their own business, of course! That’s exactly how BNG Team came to be. Twelve years later, they’re still going strong and have added BrightGauge to their stack of tools for an extra boost of support. We chatted with CEO Brady Nash to learn more about BNG Team and how BrightGauge helps their daily operations. How the BNG Team got its start When BNG Team was formed in 2007, the founders aimed to create solutions that benefitted businesses operating in small North Dakota towns, where they are based. Their roots were entrenched in the payment processing industry. “We started our own payments processing business because we learned that many other companies in the industry operated with unfair processes, like overcharging rates and fees,” says Brady. From the beginning, BNG Team has had a passion for empowering other growth-oriented businesses to achieve their goals with an expanding set of premium business solutions. With over 3,000 customers, they typically serve SMBs, MSPs, and small retail/restaurant shops with a POS system. “We consider ourselves problem solvers,” says Brady. “A customer in the SMB market who can benefit from multiple service offerings means there are more problems to solve, and that creates stickiness for us.” Over the last 12 years, they’ve experienced steady growth thanks to their smart business model which focuses on generating multiple sources of recurring revenue, plus their core values of excellence, happiness, and gratitude. Like BrightGauge, the BNG Team founders are big fans of the EOS Traction system. It’s helped them create a new level of accountability and made it natural for them to adopt BrightGauge into their stack of tools. Becoming a BrightGauge customer As another provider in the MSP channel, BNG Team saw an opportunity for a great partnership with BrightGauge. Initially, they were attracted to the idea that they could tie together data from several different tools they were already using, which made implementation a breeze. Now, BNG Team continues to choose BrightGauge because of the flexibility to customize their data and the insight they get into all areas of their company. “Plus, we LOVE the customer support team at BrightGauge,” says Brady. “They are always very responsive to our needs and happy to collaborate with us.” What BrightGauge has helped the BNG Team accomplish BNG uses BrightGauge across every business unit, getting deep insight into all aspects of the company, including sales, marketing, operational, financial, customer satisfaction, team productivity, and more. “We can drill down into areas that we hadn’t even considered until we started to visualize our data with BrightGauge,” says Brady. As a company that follows EOS Traction, BNG uses BrightGauge goal sheets to increase visibility and accountability. They also enjoy driving friendly competition within departments through leaderboards for the sales team, customer service metrics, and customer satisfaction. This has created excitement around positive SmileBack scores and also brings attention to their deficiencies, so they can be addressed promptly. Since excellence is at the core of their values, BrightGauge dashboards and reports have provided a way for BNG to measure their customer service metrics and provide constant feedback so their team can improve. “Without a plan and a way to measure success and excellence, it’s just smoke and mirrors. BrightGauge helps hold us accountable. Having this data at our fingertips takes the guessing game out of where we can improve,” says Brady. Thank you, Brady and BNG Team for being part of the BrightGauge family! Datasources used: ConnectWise, QuickBooks, SmileBack, DropBox KPIs tracked: Kill Rate, Time to Acknowledgement, Customer Satisfaction

Are you an Autotask Professional Services Automation (PSA) user? We have some updates you may be interested in hearing about. A lot of our users have talked to us about ways they feel our integration with Autotask could be stronger, and we’ve taken note. We’ve been hard at work making improvements that’ll help you get better data insights out of Autotask + BrightGauge. These changes are now live, so we wanted to make sure you were in the loop! Easy-to-create reports Something we heard time and time again was that you wanted an automatic way to generate Autotask reports. With BrightGauge, this couldn’t be simpler. The reporting feature takes the Autotask data you’re tracking and converts it into custom, interactive reports with plenty of personalization options. You can add a cover page, your client’s logo, an image module, view the report in landscape versus portrait mode, and so on. To add to that, the Autotask + BrightGauge integration comes with 8 report templates that are a huge time saver. They include a Daily Member Scorecard, Weekly Project Work Summary, a Service Calls report, and more. You can open a template, choose your client recipients, and send it off in just a few clicks. Whether you start from scratch or use a template, you can schedule your reports to go out on a recurring basis to the clients you want, on the date and time you choose. Set it and forget it, but build trust with your clients all at the same time. Default gauges All available datasources in BrightGauge come with pre-built gauges, dashboards, and reports, so you can get to your data on day one. With the Autotask integration, you now get almost 200 default gauges pre-loaded into your account. In other words, as soon as your account is connected, you’ll be able to start viewing lots of KPIs that matter to you and your business. We’ve added a bunch of KPIs based on direct feedback from many of you. Highlights include SLA statistics filtered for business hours, Live Ticket SLA Data (see what’s about to breach), Service Call Details, and lots of KPIs pertaining to resources (like Tickets Due Today Per Resource). Pre-built dashboards You’re likely tracking multiple KPIs at the same time, so you’re going to want to see them side-by-side on a dashboard. With the Autotask + BrightGauge integration, you’ll get 9 pre-built dashboards to get you going. They include a Member Scorecard Dashboard (gives great insight into employee efficiency), a Projects Overview (see tasks and projects by project phase), Service Ticket KPIs (everything you need to know about your tickets), and more. Plus, if you use another PSA, RMM, BDR, finance, or other tool, you can see those KPIs right alongside your Autotask data. How do I know which version of Autotask I'm on? In your BrightGauge, head to your datasources and take a look at the logo displayed. If the logo says 'Autotask Professional Services Automation', like the one shown below, on the right, you're on the most up-to-date version. If you see the old logo, then you'll need to migrate your data to the newer version of Autotask. Watch this video to learn how to migrate your data from one datasource to another within BrightGauge. If you want to learn more about these Autotask upgrades or want to get connected to BrightGauge ASAP, please reach out to our team. We’re happy to answer your questions and get you started.

We’re excited to welcome Byron Peeples to the team as a Sales Development Representative! Join us in learning more about the newest member of our growing BrightGauge family… In the beginning Byron Peeples is a fellow Floridian, born and raised on the west coast of the state, in Fort Myers, Florida. After school, he decided to stick around, attending Florida Gulf Coast University. While there, he earned his Bachelor’s degree in Communication Studies, and was active in organizations like Student Government and the Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity. Byron had such a positive experience with Pi Kappa Alpha that, upon graduating, he accepted a role to work at their headquarters in Memphis, Tennessee. As a leadership consultant, Byron spent two years traveling North America, visiting 56 schools in 37 states, and even recruiting a group of 124 to create a new chapter of the fraternity at Coastal Carolina University. For Byron, traveling the country and working with undergraduate leaders was one of the greatest experiences of his career. Most recently, Byron was the Senior Partnership Executive at Millennium Alliance, where he focused on offering business leaders high-level learning opportunities and access to powerful networking connections through their assembly platform. In that role, he really honed in on his business development skills. Joining BrightGauge While at Millennium Alliance, Byron’s extensive research introduced him to BrightGauge and news of the acquisition by Continuum. In his experience, an acquisition usually means great things. Couple that with the fact that there was an opening for a Sales Development Representative, and his interest was piqued! “The SDR opportunity fit many of the tools I’ve developed over the years,” says Byron. “From the time I reached out to the recruiter, to the final interview in the BrightGauge office, I felt welcomed and at ease. This was definitely the place for me.” Clearly, we all felt the same way. Byron is excited about learning the product, getting to know the company and culture, and trying out all the great food spots near the office. Out of office What’s the best part about living in Miami? A lot of people say it’s the beach, and that’s where Byron calls home! Most weekends are spent in the ocean or at the pool, hosting out-of-state family and friends and showing them what Miami is truly all about. Aside from that, Byron loves good food and craft beer (all guilt-free, thanks to his dedication to exercise). We think he’ll fit right in!

When it comes to choosing the right key performance indicators (KPIs) to track, there are a lot of factors involved and it really depends on your organization's goals. But one KPI that mostly all business managers make it a priority to track is Profit Margin. Everyone wants to know how profitable their business is, and looking at Profit Margin as a percentage is a great indicator of how well you're doing. This quick tutorial video shows you how to build a simple Profit Margin Percentage gauge within BrightGauge. If you have questions at any time, please feel free to reach out to our support team! For more KPIs and tutorial videos, check us out on YouTube.

Becoming familiar with the ins and outs of BrightGauge can take some time and practice. Hopefully, you’ll find some guidance in our knowledge base and through our blog posts, but we know that seeing BrightGauge in action can make a huge difference. In our new webinar series, Mastering BrightGauge, we’ll help you really nail down your use of BrightGauge while improving your workflow. This series is meant to give you a deeper training of our BrightGauge features, whether you’re a new user or could stand to use a little refresher. What’s up first? To kick off the Mastering BrightGauge series, we’re going to talk all about building gauges. Lots of our users want to know how they can better customize their KPIs in order to achieve stronger data insights, and this is an excellent place to start. In Getting Familiar with the Gauge Builder, we’ll cover: The basic structure of a gauge Various gauge types (think: number gauge, list gauge, snapshot gauge, etc) How to format your gauges How to filter your gauges to get more granular info Design tricks (like adding thresholds and colors to your gauge) Bonus: our top 5 most requested gauges from customers You’ll walk away feeling a lot more comfortable customizing your own gauges and getting to the data that speaks to you. How do I join? Here’s what you need to know about Getting Familiar with the Gauge Builder: Date: Thursday, April 18th Time: 10AM PDT / 1PM EDT RSVP: http://info.brightgauge.com/mastering-bgs-gauge-builder We highly suggest you RSVP because even if you end up missing the live webinar, we’ll still email you a recording of the training, which you can keep on hand to reference any time you need it. To find out about future episodes in the Mastering BrightGauge series, keep an eye out for emails from us, follow @BrightGauge on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to our blog. As always, we love your feedback and your questions, so shoot our support team an email if there’s anything you need.

RMON Networks, Inc. got its start in 2002, shortly after founder Tim Howard was laid off following the events of September 11th. In a time of uncertainty, Tim jumped on the opportunity to realize his dream of starting his own business. Armed with a background in IT and finance, Tim started New Hampshire-based RMON Networks with a focus on securing his client’s networks, as security became a big issue after September 11th. From the start, Tim wanted to work with clients who placed a high value on technology expertise. 17 years later, that still rings true, and RMON has a mission to deliver unique solutions to their customers. To help them run an efficient organization, RMON Networks recently added BrightGauge to their arsenal. So far, it’s been an eye-opening experience. We spoke with Tim to learn more. How RMON has grown over the years A lot has changed in the technology industry in 17 years. Tim recognizes that he missed the boat with some advancements, but he jumped on one in particular that has made a huge impact on RMON. “We embraced the cloud,” says Tim. “I was at a Microsoft Small Businesses meeting and someone presented about their hosted offering. If there were 50 people there, 49 passed on it. I was the only person willing to try it.” That decision was a smart move. After selling the Microsoft cloud solution to enough clients, RMON was eligible to be part of the Microsoft Cloud Champion Partners Program, where Microsoft sent leads to RMON on a regular basis. Once that happened, RMON started to grow significantly, enough to hire new staff and move to larger offices. In addition to the push from Microsoft, Tim believes that the RMON approach to customer service has helped differentiate them from competitors over the years. “I always tell my staff to be honest. You’ll always remember what you told someone if you tell the truth,” says Tim. “If we’re recommending a solution, you can come to our office and rest assured that we’re using that solution ourselves. We put our money where our mouth is. We’re true to our customers and to ourselves.” Becoming a BrightGauge customer As a Continuum and Autotask user, Tim and RMON attended the Continuum Navigate Conference in late 2018, in search of a better way to look at real-time data. After talking to BrightGauge, they felt it was the right tool to help them get a better handle on the dispersed data they had within their organization. And right off the bat, BrightGauge was eye-opening. “It revealed to me that I had dirty data,” says Tim. “I had stale data around our customers and our configuration items. We had processes that weren’t being adhered to or not clearly defined. BrightGauge gave us the opportunity to really take a look at ourselves again and redefine the way we approached our day-to-day.” When it came to Autotask specifically, Tim realized that he wasn’t inputting data into Autotask in the most efficient way. Opportunities were not being put together correctly, as notes were being left out and contracts were expiring without anyone being alerted. With BrightGauge, Tim and his team can create gauges and notifications around opportunities and contracts so all the right people can come together and plan ahead. It’s allowed RMON to get a lot more proactive instead of reactive. Future BrightGauge uses The RMON Networks team has made great use of gauges, dashboards, and reports, giving them high visibility into their important data and driving them to run a more efficient business. Next up, they want to place a focus on the goals component. “We are going to set goals not only as an organization, but we’ll also have measurable individual goals,” says Tim. “By being measured, the team will be able to see their own stats versus their peers. And healthy competition is a good thing.” We agree! Tim and his executive team plan to roll goals out as soon as possible, sitting down with each member on the RMON Networks team, regardless of their position. What BrightGauge has helped RMON Networks accomplish When it comes to the great communications struggle, Tim leaves us with a final thought: “At the end of the day, I want better visibility into our company and I also want the icing on the cake: better communications with our client. Having the ability to send Continuum executive reports or Autotask ticket reports and giving our clients information that matters to them changes everything. We’re communicating better and building stronger relationships, and I know it’s because of BrightGauge.” Thank you, Tim and RMON Networks for being part of the BrightGauge family!

When you have a lot of gauges that you are frequently using, it's easy to forget which dashboards those gauges appear on. No worries. We have a really simple tip to help you keep track of your gauge usage - no memorization required. Watch this quick video to learn how to find the dashboards your gauges are on. By the way, are you feeling gauge overload? Try some Spring Cleaning if you will. Here are some tips for cleaning up your BrightGauge. If you've got questions at any time, feel free to reach out to our support team!

There are a handful of business strategies that serve to motivate and align employees in a powerful, palpable way. Our favorite: setting and tracking goals. Goal-setting works because it gives employees a clearly defined target to work towards and removes any ambiguity around what they “should” be doing. Plus, when goals are made visible to an entire company, it drives team members to feel accountable about meeting those goals because, let’s face it, everyone likes to look good in front of their peers. The tricky part about goals is knowing where to begin. How often should goals be set? What should goals be centered around? What if team members miss their goals? All valid questions without black and white answers. It really depends on you. However, we know how much it helps to have examples as a reference. Ahead, we’ll cover the actual goals we’re tracking this quarter, plus tips for setting your own. This is how we do it For us, setting and tracking goals on a quarterly basis works really well. Focusing on a few goals each quarter helps us make steady progress towards the bigger picture. The idea is that every year is treated like a puzzle we are trying to complete. Quarterly goals make up the small pieces that eventually pull the entire puzzle together. So, while we focus on small wins throughout the year, those goals ultimately help us achieve something grander. In addition, we set company goals and departmental goals. Each person in each department gets assigned 3-4 goals to be accountable for. And, you guessed it, they all tie back to our company goals. Not surprisingly, we use BrightGauge to track our goals. We do this for several reasons, including: You can power goals through gauges you’re already tracking It keeps everybody’s goals organized in one, accessible place Week-to-week, we can add context to our goals to explain why we hit or missed our target that week In the goals sheet, green boxes signal weeks where you’re on track, while red boxes mean you were off-track that week; this makes it so easy to glance and quickly understand where there may be problems (i.e., someone’s goal is too challenging/unrealistic or way too easy) We get weekly email reminders to check into our goals, so it’s easy to stay on track We also get weekly email summaries of everybody’s goal progress, so we can understand what our peers have been working on and accomplishing If goals are unorganized or hard to stay on top of, team members will fail to see the value of setting them. So, it’s quite important to make the process of goal-tracking simple, because we’re already working hard to improve and meet our objectives. This is what we’re tracking Naturally, our goals change from quarter-to-quarter, but they are always about improving and advancing our company’s (and our individual) development. We each have a mixture of process and outcome goals. The best way to understand the difference is an outcome goal is something like, “I want to lose 10 pounds this quarter”, while a process goal is, “I want to walk 50,000 steps each week”. Each process helps you meet the outcome. Here are some actual goals we are currently tracking this quarter: Company Goals Hire a new Sales Development Rep Increase the number of Qualified Inbound Leads Launch Embeddable Gauges (yay, we met that one already!) Go live with new integrations (we recently released Basecamp) Sales Goals Alanna: More than 150 dials per week Allison: at least 55% of demos won per week Felipe: schedule more than 50 demos this quarter Support Goals Danny: 1 ticket or less escalated per week Kristian: Average response time at or below 30 minutes per week Michael: Solve more than 1,500 tickets this quarter Hector: Less than 5 negative CSAT reactions this quarter Marketing Goals Jack: Launch 3 new features pages on our site Nat: Update 3 or more marketing resources Susan: Publish 10 videos on our blog In need of more inspiration? Check out 50 goal ideas for every member on your team. What if we miss our goals? It should be a realistic expectation that not every goal that is set will be reached. If that were the case, it would be more than likely that some pretty unchallenging goals were being set. Goals should motivate us to strive, exit our comfort zones, improve upon ourselves, and learn something new. As long as we’re growing, we’re being successful. If missing goals automatically classified us as failures, we’d be hard-pressed to ever strive for something seemingly out of our reach, which means we’d be pretty stagnant. Of course, repeatedly missing every goal can be a problem, but it’s important to put context around why a goal was hit or missed. Was 70% of the goal achieved? That’s awesome! Sounds like a lot of progress was made. Did a new company goal get prioritized? If so, it makes sense that one’s focus had to shift. Reviewing goals really needs to be done on a case-by-case basis, but we’re pretty strong believers in not tying performance reviews to goal outcomes. By the way, at BrightGauge, we meet as a team at the end of each quarter to talk about our goal progress, but we only have formal reviews once a year. Try setting your own goals Hopefully, by sharing what goals we’re currently tracking, we’ve sparked some interest in establishing a goal-setting strategy of your own. If you’re a BrightGauge user, it’s really easy to get going. Here’s a video that shows you how to set up goals. Want to learn more? We’ll be happy to take you through a live demo of BrightGauge. Just contact us today!

We get asked a lot about the best way to keep track of past due schedules. When running a service desk, it can get a little tricky to see if your resources are working on/completing a project when they say they will (aka, on schedule). Of course, this is important data to know as it helps you assess how you're doing with your SLAs. With BrightGauge, you can easily track this KPI by building a really simple gauge that returns the number of open schedules that are past due. It only takes a few minutes to set up and we show you just how to do it in this video. If you've got any questions at any time, please feel free to check out our knowledge base or submit a support ticket.

We’re so excited to announce that we now offer Basecamp as an integration for our customers! Basecamp is currently live and available to connect with. We are personal users of Basecamp here at BrightGauge. We find that it’s a really efficient way to track and manage projects, see what everyone’s working on, know who is responsible for which tasks, and keep all important communications in one central place. The positive impact has been awesome, decreasing our number of meetings and practically eliminating the need for email (yay!). When you integrate BrightGauge + Basecamp, you’ll get visibility and details about your Basecamp activity, so you can see what your team’s been working on and how much has been accomplished at any given time. How to connect to Basecamp If you’re a Basecamp user and want to start viewing your stats on BrightGauge dashboards, you’ll be up and running in just a few minutes. When you’re logged into BrightGauge and are on your overview page, click on the green ‘Add a new Datasource’ button. Find Basecamp under the ‘All’ or ‘Other’ category, click on it, and follow all the prompts. Within a few minutes, you should be good to go. If you need further instructions, check out our Basecamp support doc. Not yet a BrightGauge customer? Contact our sales team today and we’ll be glad to walk you through a live one-on-one demo. What do I get out of the box? We know how helpful it is to have access to your data as soon as possible, and you may not have time to build out custom gauges right off the bat. Instead, we’ll help you get started by providing pre-built gauges, dashboards, and reports with every datasource we offer. With Basecamp, you get 15 gauges, 1 dashboard, and 2 reports right out of the box. Gauges With your 15 default Basecamp gauges, you can easily keep track of all activities taking place within Basecamp. Get a look at comments on todos and projects, open and completed todos, project overview, total todos by assignee, overdue tasks, uncompleted todos, and more. Dashboards One default Basecamp dashboard will help you get an overview of all your Basecamp activity, but you can feel free to customize this dashboard to your preferences or build your own! The default dashboard will show todo stats (completed vs open vs uncompleted), a projects overview, and an open todos overview. Reports Custom reports are so great because they show a real sense of transparency between you and your team members, and transparency = trust. With Basecamp, we’ll give you two reports to get you started. Feel free to use these as a jumping off point to customize the reports the way you’d like. One report template gives you a monthly overview of your Basecamp activity, while the other one gives you a weekly summary. Anytime you’ve got a question about Basecamp, please submit a support request or contact us and we’ll be ready to help!