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If you’re running a business, and even more so if it’s one you created yourself, its success is vitally important. It’s not just the money – though you are providing financial security for you, your family and anyone you employ – the success of your business shows that the decisions you make are paying off. Your business becomes the way you measure your professional skills or even personal worth!
Taking that into account, it’s important to ensure you’re measuring the success of your business accurately. If you can’t quantify that success and measure it, your business could be sleepwalking into financial failure and closure. It also means you can never adequately lay your worries to rest: without definitive statistics telling you how you’re doing, you can never quite relax.
Today we’re taking a look at some of the things you can do to measure your success and make sure you’re hitting the targets that will see your business surviving and thriving in the long term.
Setting Targets
If you don’t know what constitutes success for your business, then it doesn’t matter what or how you measure it. You need to look, very specifically at what makes your business successful, and how you can set targets that will push you to go further and that you might realistically achieve.
Holding yourself to the targets of other companies is simply setting yourself up for failure: the best year you could possibly achieve might not even register as a rounding error on Google’s balance sheet. Talk with a business advisor, a mentor or trusted expert to come up with targets for achievements (financial and otherwise) that you can use as motivation, and ensure they are quantifiable. “Increase footfall” isn’t a good target: how much increase is enough? The increase compared to what? “Double footfall month on month for November and December” is a clear target.
Monitoring Success
You need specialized tools to monitor your business in a helpful way. While you know how much money you are taking, and how many customers you have, there is far more to understanding how your business works. It’s well worth finding a market research agency to help you here: they can offer services like Brand Tracker surveys that tell you how the decisions you make affect the wider perception of your brand.
The strength of your brand (how many people have heard of it, what qualities they associate it with and where they rank in comparison to others in your industry) is a useful way to quantify how your decisions are affecting the public perception of your business and track the success of issues that it’s hard to tie directly to increases or decreases in revenue and allow you to know, definitively whether your business is successful, and if not, why.
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