Is your business average?

“The average SME does xyz …”

A lot of articles, reports, infographics etc., use this sort of title in order to persuade us to use a product or take action on something.

All it really does is raise a lot of questions.

If SMEs were surveyed we need to know how many and what sort. It could have been five or five hundred.

SME is a catch all for companies with up to 250 employees with a turnover of less than £40 million. To know if this survey is useful we need to know the spread between small, medium and micro businesses, the split between B2B and B2C, sector, geographical spread, age of the business or any other crucial factors that could affect or skew the results.

Without knowing the raw data and how the questions are formulated and asked, surveys like this are worse than useless. They deliberately mislead.

There are three different ways to calculate an average and more ways to present data than there are bad infographics on social media.

That’s why the phrase “lies, damned lies and statistics” was coined.

Don’t believe anything until you see the data.

If you’d like help working out what really works for your business contact me now and we’ll have a chat about it! 

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