Archive - 02/03/2015

I hope that you are keeping an eye on your business performance. However, even if you are, you may be overlooking several critical factors about how your business is performing, and some of these could be the difference between success and failure.

Most business owners probably keep a good eye over quantitative measurements such as sales, average markup, salary costs and expenses. However some of the most useful measures can be qualitative rather than quantitative, for example staff and client turnover rates or average service-delivery times.

Overall, before you start measuring your business performance, you need to be very clear what “success” means to you so that you can measure and benchmark the measurements that really count toward that success. If you are not clear on what success means in your business, you may be measuring the wrong measurements. For example if you focus on profit, you may actually be driving away customer volumes if your success is based on low margin/high volume.

Having determined what success means to you, you can then choose the metrics, both quantitative and qualitative, that drive that success. As you choose them, always ask yourself: “If I improve this measure, will that improvement lead to success?”