 Hi, I'm Tom Stewart with Cleaning Business Today. One of the main reasons we track KPIs is to make some determination if the performance of our business is improving. When we look at the raw numbers, however, sometimes it's difficult to tell. Here are monthly revenue numbers for 2013, going through January through September. You can see the number starts out at 34, it goes down, it goes up, it goes down, up, down. I'll look at that. I can't tell if we're getting better or not. So what I'm going to do is graph that, and when I do, you can see the numbers are still starting out fairly high, goes down, up, down. I'll look at the graph, and it still isn't obvious if performance is improving. Sometimes the up and down in the revenue numbers doesn't have a whole lot to do with how we're performing as a business, but has a lot more to do with seasonality within our business. And the seasonality can be affected by a lot of different things, and it can vary from one part of the country to another, and one business model to another. But if you want to take the seasonality out of it, one technique you can use is to do what we call a 12-month moving average. Let me show you how we do that. First, I need data that goes back further, so I'm going to pull up revenue numbers that go all the way back to the beginning of 2012. Next, I'm going to go ahead and do a calculation where I'm going to click here next to January 2013, because that's where we're going to start our graph, and I'm going to go back and grab February 2012 and sum up all the revenue numbers through January. So that's 12 months of revenue numbers, and I'm going to take that 12 months, and I'm going to divide it by 12, which gives me a monthly average. Now, I'm going to copy that all the way down, and when I do that, my formula is going to change. So up here, I was going from February to January. This is grabbing from February through March of 2012. So I drop off February 2012 and add February 2013. So instead of comparing one month to a next, what I'm actually doing is getting an average where I took last February's number and dropped it off and added in this February's. And by using that technique and graphing it, you can see that this line here is going up consistently. In essence, what I'm doing is comparing last or this month's performance to the same performance this time last year, taking the seasonality out. So when I look at that green graph, I can be comfortable in knowing that I'm really growing my business and our performance is improving, our numbers are improving, and the numbers I see month to month going up and down is more of a seasonality issue and not really a performance issue. Use this 12 month moving average technique whenever you want to take seasonality out of your numbers. Hope you find this KPI tip useful. Thank you for watching Cleaning Business Today.