While business owners in all industries have different objectives and visions for their companies, nearly all of them share one common goal: to grow their businesses and see them become more profitable.
But as the saying goes, a goal without a plan is just a wish.
In fact, a business owner who isn’t sure how to plan and measure growth is building his or her business on shaky ground. In order to see steady growth, business owners need to create a plan and monitor their progress toward their goals. That's where benchmarking comes in.
Benchmark your business
Benchmarking is essential for understanding how well your business works now and where there's room for improvement. You can evaluate management performance, quality, and effectiveness of your assets. You can also evaluate how vulnerable your company is to downturns. A wise business leader tracks those trends over time and calculates how the metrics impact the overall business.
The big question is, what metrics are important for your business? And how can you know what you’re looking at?
At June’s lunch and learn event, financial expert T.D. Winters explored how you can effectively manage and measure growth for your company using the metrics that matter.
In this presentation, T.D. covers:
- What benchmarking is and why it matters to your business
- How to calculate different financial ratio categories
- Useful metrics to track business profit as well as any masking inefficiencies
- What tools and resources are available for benchmarking
T.D. Winters' presentation - Benchmarking Your Business
A good example of an industry financial data and general ratios can be found here. You can use the information found in the datasheet to compare your numbers to your peers, pinpoint where you need to improve, and how you make better business decisions.
We hope you find this presentation useful to measure the growth of your company and to keep it thriving for years to come.
