Five easy steps to measurement in your business
Why is it important to measure in your business?
If you want to make sure your business as a whole or any part of the business is doing well then you need to be able to quantify that - that is through measurement.
Management extraordinaire Peter Drucker says, if you can't measure it, then you can't manage it.
Once you have measured an aspect of your business, then you can make a decision on whether you leave it as is or improve it. If you aren't measuring something, then you have no way of telling if you are doing well or really poorly and there no way to compare and track the performance of different aspects of your business daily, monthly or yearly. If something is going really poorly then you want to be able to make sure you stop doing that or if something is going well, you want to make sure you can tap into it and amplify it even more.
How do you measure an aspect of your business?
- 1 - Find something that is important to your business to measure. E.g Labour Recovery if you are a service based business.
- 2 - Quantify and really define what you are going to measure - you need to know how often, how much, what your targets are and how you are going to measure it.
- 3 - Put an easy system in place so you can measure whatever you are doing. If you make it too difficult then you are going to let it fall by the way-side and it's not going to be actioned. You need something that you can do repeatedly and easily in 5 or 10 minutes everyday to begin with and then later on you can move it to weekly or even monthly.
- 4 - Put it in your calendar, or in your diary or even set a reminder on your phone so you don't forget. This is really important to start measuring things in your business, so you can make sure your business is travelling in the right direction and you're going to get the results you want.
- 5 - Pretty simple, get out there and start measuring
- 6 - Once you have measured you can start managing!