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As a business owner, it’s vital to monitor the performance of your company on a regular basis. Staying on track and meeting performance targets is essential. But, of course, every business is different. There is no one test to measure how well you are performing. Only you can set those goals and answer those questions. For a small bedroom company, one or two sales this month might be a fantastic achievement! For a corporation like Apple, their definition of success is very different.
So, the first thing to do is define your unique interpretation of success. What counts as a ‘good month’ for you? What would be a great achievement? Only then can you begin to measure your performance and analyse your progress. Once you’ve done that, there are a few tangible ways to measure your success. Let’s take a quick look.
Setting goals
Before you can measure your progress and success, you need a marker. By setting goals and objectives, you give you and your company something to work towards. Reaching these milestones is a clear sign of success, while falling short suggests there is more work to be done. It’s important to set realistic, achievable goals with strict timelines and end-dates. That way you can make step-by-step progress and analyse your progress.
Tracking data
Data is one of the best ways of measuring progress with cold, hard numbers! Within any business, there are thousands of numbers to crunch and data to analyse. So, it’s important to choose what’s most important to you. You can use in memory databases to keep track of every aspect of your business. From there you can highlight the most important parts and analyse them. Whether it’s web traffic, sales or customer data, it’s all in plain sight.
Assessing employees
Your company doesn’t just rely on your judgement or ideas. It also needs hard work and productivity from your employees. As a manager, it’s your job to give them clear benchmarks and goals to reach. You can assess your sales team on their commission or products sold for example. You can also measure their success by how many new clients they brought in.
Sales
Tracking your sales is one of the easiest ways of measuring your success. If you’ve made lots of sales, then congratulations! Of course, this is a very broad way of measuring progress. High sales figures are fantastic, but it’s crucial that you dig deeper and understand why. What products were particularly successful?
Value of the company
For some larger companies, success is often defined by how much the business is worth. Getting a valuation of the company can help identify your place in the market. So long as your value is increasing, you are moving towards success. It’s a particularly important metric for public companies who trade on the stock market.
Reputation
For others, it’s not about numbers or profit at all. Instead, it’s all about perception and reputation. Thousands of positive reviews online suggest a strong reputation. Your small business relies heavily on building a name for itself.
If you’re a business owner, let us know how you track the performance and success of your company!
Featured image credit: ShutterStock
