Why better reporting transforms business outcomes: a conversation with Vizora director, Sean Gorman

Watch the video of this conversation

A pattern spotted across thousands of businesses

Sean’s career began in corporate law, where he was exposed to the inner workings of thousands of businesses. That vantage point gave him an early and unusually broad view of how companies approach reporting. Some relied on nothing more than a standard set of accounts from their accountant. Others maintained detailed, in-depth reports showing exactly how each part of the business was performing and what was driving that performance.

The correlation was hard to ignore. The businesses with richer, more detailed reporting tended to be the larger ones, with higher revenues and the bigger sale valuations. Reporting wasn’t just admin; it tracked with success.

Reporting in practice: the balanced scorecard

In the early 2010s, Sean left law to become a director of a national construction company in the middle of a rapid growth phase. Revenue doubled twice across two years. But with more people and more projects, it became genuinely difficult to know what was happening day to day.

The answer was a balanced scorecard. The leadership team identified the key things that drove performance, the factors that determined whether things went well or badly, and reviewed them in monthly board meetings. The shift was significant: they could now see not just the outcomes of performance, but the inputs driving those outcomes, and act to improve them.

The hidden cost: hours lost to manual reporting

The system worked, but it came at a price. Sean had implemented a CRM to track leads and understand the sales pipeline, yet its built-in reporting was limited. He was manually exporting data, applying formulas to wrangle it into shape, and transposing it into the scorecard spreadsheet. Every co-director was doing the same with their own reports.

The problem followed him. When he became managing director of another business in 2019, the lack of insight was stark, and the timing was brutal. Covid arrived in 2020, and with it total uncertainty over revenue. Sean had plenty of data but little insight. So he began a punishing manual routine: every single morning he’d spend half an hour to an hour building a spreadsheet by hand, pulling together time reports, project reports, billing reports and lead reports, all living in different systems and different formats, some PDFs, some spreadsheets. It was the only way to get the visibility the business needed that week, that month. There was no real alternative.

Finding a solution he didn’t know existed

By the time Sean was CEO of a private equity-backed business, automating this reporting had become a priority. After several acquisitions, the company was running six or seven different systems, all producing reports that needed integrating. He worked with his finance manager through various attempts to automate the process, and concluded there simply was no solution to the problem.

Then, while actively looking for a business to invest in, the very first thing he found was a company doing exactly this: reporting. He was staggered. It was a solution he hadn’t known existed.

What stood out about Vizora was its approach. You keep using the software you’ve already chosen, because it suits how your business operates. Instead of your team producing endless reports, Vizora does it for you. The reports are built around your KPIs and custom to your requirements, so it’s never one size fits all. Everything is available 24/7 through the portal, kept up to date, and delivered for a fraction of what manual spreadsheets would cost to maintain. The result is both money saved and time given back, time that can go into growing the business instead. For Sean it was a no-brainer; he says he’d have bought Vizora on the spot at that first meeting with Andrew.

What it would have meant: the cost of doing it manually

Looking back, the numbers are striking. Sean estimates that he, his senior finance manager and later his finance director collectively spent around three weeks every month simply producing reports, and across the wider senior leadership team the figure was greater still.

He sees two sides to this. First, there’s the obvious cost saving in the time spent producing reports. But the second point matters more: those people weren’t employed to produce reports. Their job was to proactively improve the business. Reclaiming that time from capable people, and pointing it at work that actually grows the company, would have made a substantial difference.

Sean’s top three reporting tips

To close, Sean shared the three principles he keeps coming back to.

Start small. Identify the three to five key numbers that drive performance in your business. Know what they are, know where the data lives, and make sure there’s clear ownership for tracking it and keeping it current. Don’t review it monthly, review it daily. If you make sales every day, look at what you sold today and how that compares to last week.

Measure inputs, not just outputs. Most reports Sean sees focus on outputs, the things you can’t directly control, like your sales number. What you can control is the activity that generates them, such as the number or value of quotes you send. Track the inputs, not only the results.

Know what good looks like. A number in isolation means nothing. Sean is often emailed a report showing yesterday’s figure with no context, and he’s left wondering how it compares to last week, last month or last year. Put a benchmark or target right next to the number, so the whole team can see at a glance whether they’re on track.

In short: start small, measure inputs not just outputs, and always know what good looks like.

If you’d like to see how Vizora could automate your reporting and free up your team’s time, contact Vizora directly to arrange a conversation or book a demo.