There are multiple approaches to gauging the health of your business. There are the KPIs you’ve established to maintain ongoing measures of your business’s performance in all the essential areas of operations and financial outcomes for a period. There’s your average cash flow percentage calculation. There’s the measurement of your profit margin. Then, there are, of course, the many nuanced critical factors that generate all of the above numerical reflections of your success. Some of those are highlighted in the questions below.
Below is a 10-question (YES/NO) quiz for small sweeping company operators to help you track general management performance in key areas.
10 Questions About the Health of Your Small Business
Some of the nuanced success factors mentioned above include forms of satisfaction, engagement, brand reputation, digital maturity, innovation, growth strategies, and so on. These 10 questions can help you identify and strengthen the key contributors to the sustainability of your enterprise:
1. Is your average cash flow within healthy margins?
Use the 10% method to calculate your average cash flow rate. Divide your annual net total cash flow amount by the total amount of your expenditures. If your net total is 10% or more, that indicates a good average cash flow rate.
2. Have you conducted these 3 analyses to determine your business’s position?
Perform an operational needs analysis, a market share calculation, and a competitive analysis. TIP: To calculate your national market share, divide your total sales revenue for a period by your industry’s total sales revenue. For your local market share, divide your total revenue by the total revenues reported by your competitors and your total combined.
3. Is your local employer brand strong enough?
Do people in your area want to work for you? If not, why not? Do some of your competitors seem to have better luck attracting and retaining top talent? If so, what do they appear to be doing right? Do you need to improve salaries and/or benefits to increase your profits? Do you need to create a more conducive internal culture or improve the physical work environment?
4. Do your field employees deliver a strong total number of sales leads to you monthly?
The commercial pavement sweeping business is an especially conducive one for employees to handily identify and deliver sales leads to help the company grow. Even the office and shop workers can easily provide some leads. It’s a simple matter of noticing unkempt pavement on parking lots, city streets, HOA neighborhoods, highways, empty lots, and construction sites.
Your staff can snap a picture or two and send them along with the address and business name to you or into your designated system for sales processing of such leads. Incentivize this system!
5. Do you have at least one Business Process Improvement (BPI) initiative underway?
There’s a major process or procedure that your team performs routinely that can be improved. If you think it takes too much time to deal with that right now, consider how much time can be saved over the next month, 3 months, or 12 months by cutting wasted time from the schedule. There’s never an ideal time for a busy team to make adjustments that distract from the headlong rush to get the basics done every day. So, pick a day to bite the bullet and just make it happen.
6. Have you made a significant improvement to your website in the past year?
Your business website is the first place your current and prospective customers go to get information about your business. That’s the way choosing a vendor works these days. Even though you may be located just down the street, a business manager who is interested in your services is likely to check you out online before calling to inquire. So, be professional online. Make your very best impression there. If you haven’t made any improvements lately, think about what could be improved.
7. Can your team run your business effectively in your absence?
Do you have one or more employees groomed to take your place during hours, days, or weeks when you cannot be at your office? If you become ill, need to go out of town on business, or want to take a family vacation, what do you need to do to get one or more people ready to manage various parts of your operations effectively while you are away?
8. Do you have a schedule for sitting down with each of your employees for 1-on-1 time?
If you’re experiencing difficulty in attracting and keeping talented employees, review your overall way of managing your team. There are many things you can do to increase your appeal as an employer. But, few approaches are more impactful than giving every employee in your business dedicated time to talk with the boss directly. Discuss their work assignment load, equipment, tools, training, development, issues, areas of needed performance improvement, and their ideas for improvements.
9. Do you have a viable strategy to achieve digital maturity?
The future is for digital business competitors. Achieving digital maturity must be a priority for all small business operators with plans to grow in the modern environment of remote ordering and payment transactions. The efficiency of everything you need to do is best facilitated by digital systems. That includes responsiveness to customers’ needs, scheduling, processing workflows, billing, payments, quality management systems, repeat sales, referral gathering, equipment maintenance, employee development processes, and on and on.
10. Do you have an emergency management plan?
This may seem, comparatively, like some busy work that you don’t have time to do anytime soon. But, emergencies do not allow you to go back in time and properly prepare for them. So, the time to make time to plan for the unexpected is always now. At a minimum, get a plan in place for what you will do to protect the future of your business in a few scenarios, like a natural disaster, external economic disaster, or loss of a key person in your business.
For Long-Term Business Sustainability
It’s an uncertain world in the business sector. Yesterday’s best ideas are tomorrow’s obsolete notions. But, keeping up is not a mysterious or elusive state. Strengthening the core of your business by improving basic processes and methods, tracking performance, and managing issues cover the big priorities. These management essentials coalesce to improve operational soundness and increase long-term business sustainability. So, the takeaway message is just consistently track your status and remain committed to analyzing and improving.