Are You Running Your Business the Right Way?
When you’re running a business it’s easy to fall prey to anxiety. You are where the buck stops for every decision, with no chance to hand your reasoning upwards to be checked. If your decisions are good, then life is good for everyone! Customers get what they want, your staff get paid and your brand strengthens, bringing more customers to you.
If your decisions don’t pay off, you’ll find costs spiralling, revenue slowing to a trickle and investors getting anxious. The fear of everything going wrong can keep many a founder up at night even when things are on a firm footing.
Today we’re taking a look at how you can measure for yourself if you’re running your business the right way, to keep the anxieties at bay and let you either enjoy your success or spot failure early enough that you can course correct, and solve the problems before they become disasters.
Market Research
If you’re making a success of your business, you should have an army of loyal customers and a strong brand. Measuring the recognition your brand can achieve with the general public gives you a good indication of how well you’ve done at creating an attractive and memorable image for your company. You can also measure what’s known as your ‘net promoter score’ which measures how likely a customer is to recommend your services to friends.
You’ll need help to gather this information accurately and effectively, so partnering with a market research firm makes sense to make sure you’re getting results that you can trust. Click through to find out more about what they can do for you.
Setting Your Own Targets
Another way to set your demons at rest is to set targets for your business that can both drive you towards success and warn you about failure.
Not unlike the regular staff review you may have had to endure as an employee, specificity is important here. Setting a target to ‘raise revenue’ or resolving to panic if revenue falls means pursuing success you can never attain, or worrying about failures which may be trivial.
Work with someone trusted outside your business to help you set some realistic, but inspiring targets and thresholds to shoot for, be they to build your bank reserves by a certain percentage, or to institute crisis procedures if it falls by a certain percent.
As long as your targets are specific and linked to hard numbers or set proportions of your budget they’ll act as a guide, and a check against both your natural anxiety and bullish overconfidence.
