There might not even be any shortcomings or problems, but it may feel like your business’s growth has hit a plateau. You know your business hasn’t reached its full potential yet, but you might not be sure where to start to get it moving again.
As a business owner, you know there are a lot of moving parts when it comes to running a business. There are also a lot of responsibilities. That means that you need to ensure that time and resources are well spent, but with so much going on at once, it can be overwhelming to keep track of it all. You want to focus your efforts to pay attention to what matters, but you may not be able to zero in on what really does matter.
Many Small Business Owners Face This Same Dilemma
This overwhelm isn’t unique to your business; business owners of all industries go through the same thing. Not knowing where to make improvements leaves business owners frustrated and confused.
InTouch Marketing outlines some of the common questions that many small business owners face: “How does a small business owner really know how well they are performing in various areas of their business? What criteria do they use to figure this out? How do they know what to really look for to measure success? What does success look like?”
What are the answers to these questions?
Get the Answers You Need for Your Specific Business
There’s a way to stop this overwhelm before it hurts your business. All you need to do is determine and start monitoring KPIs (key performance indicators) of different areas of your business so you can easily see where you need to make improvements.
As the famous business author and philosopher Peter Drucker once famously said, “What gets measured, gets improved.” When you have the numbers directly in front of you, you can easily trace the steps back to what’s hurting your cash flow and what’s helping it.
As Determining Your Business’s KPIs puts it, “Using KPIs aligns team members around common goals, allows you to continually gauge progress toward those goals and spot weak points, and equips you to optimize areas of the business that aren’t performing to your standards.”
How Measuring What Matters Can Transform Your Business
It’s easy enough to start taking note of payments, email open rates, etc., but how can you be sure it’s right for your business. As marketing expert Bernard Marr says, “When it comes to marketing metrics it’s never one size fits all. The right metrics depend on your marketing goals and your business model. And those goals are different for each business.”
Ensuring you find the right metrics for your business is a crucial part of the puzzle. Working through the process of finding out what you need to measure for your specific business is essential to making improvements.
The Benefits of Identifying Your KPIs
When you break down your business into chunks and make sure each one matches your business’s goals, KPIs are much easier to determine. After you determine your KPIs you’ll find:
- Your employees will have a clearer understanding of what’s expected of them, resulting in more productivity and better performance
- Which elements are most important to your business so you can spend time and resources on those that matters (and take time and resources away from those that don’t)
- Where you need to make adjustments in your marketing and sales strategy so you can make data-based decisions
- How to detect problems early before they hurt your business and take measures to stop them
- Insight into the inner workings of your business and employee performance so you can reward high-achieving employees and put measures in place to set up lower-performing employees for more success
- How you can align your team on a central goal so everyone has a better picture of what they’re working towards
If you want to learn more about the process of sorting through which KPIs to measure and monitor for your business, use this Determining Your Business’s KPIs worksheet as a reference.
