Tag Archives: metrics

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Is Your Business More Like a Lamborghini or a Lada?

A Lada may get you from point A to point B (if you are lucky), but a Lamborghini is a highly tuned engineering marvel! Not only will it get you from point A to point B, it will do it quickly, efficiently, and in style! It is a thing of beauty!

Just like a Lamborghini, a finely tuned, high performance business is a beautiful thing!

Understanding what to monitor in your business to ensure that it is finely tuned and highly performing is not an easy task. As you can imagine, there are as many opinions on the definition of high performance as there are businesses. And for good reason.

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Can You Complete the 15 Minute Business Challenge?

If you cannot write out the plan for where you are taking your business in 15 minutes or less, chances are, you do not have a plan!

If you don’t have a plan then you and your business are just floating through time and you are at the whim of the marketplace and all of your competitors! Basically, if you cannot articulate what you are building or why you are building it then how do you know what you are doing or where you are going?

For those that regularly read my posts, you know that Thinking Business has a very detailed business blueprint that you can download (from our Business Tools) and apply to your business. We call it the Thinking Business Blueprint. It takes you through all aspects of your business to ensure that your business model and strategy are defined clearly at all levels.

However, I was recently challenged by a client to come up with a simple, high level, tool that would allow a business leader to summarize their business and their strategy in one simple page. This one-page tool must be simple to implement yet powerful enough to capture the very essence of an organization. A leader must then be able to take the completed tool and easily communicate it to any and all of it’s stakeholders.

To meet this challenge, I have come up with the “15 Minute” Business Blueprint described below.

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Why You Need To Download This Powerful Strategy Tool

12 Steps to Business Transformation – Step 7

Over the last six weeks, I introduced my Ebook 12 Steps to Business Transformation and I defined the first 6 of the 12 transformational steps. This week we are going to talk about the Strategy Summary.

Completing the Strategy Summary for your business is step 7 in my new Ebook “12 Steps to Business Transformation.”

The Strategy Summary is a tool that records your entire organization’s vision, strategy, goals and key business metrics in one easy to use and easy to communicate form. Basically, you are recording the first six steps of the 12 step business transformation into one powerful tool.

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Why Destroy Your Business By Flying Blind?

12 Steps to Business Transformation – Step 6

Over the last five weeks, I introduced my Ebook 12 Steps to Business Transformation and I defined the first 5 of the 12 transformational steps. This week we are going to talk about Measure, Monitor and Analyze.

Measure, Monitor and Analyze is step 6 in my new Ebook “12 Steps to Business Transformation.”

Measure, Monitor and Analyze requires you to document and understand the key business metrics of your business. These metrics are health indicators for your business.

For example, revenue generated per square foot may be an important indicator for your business if you are in retail or in the restaurant business. If the revenue number per square foot slips too low, your business may be in jeopardy. Similarly, your overhead multiplier (multiplier applied to an employee’s base salary to determine actual cost) may be important to an engineering company. If this number gets too high, you will price your services out of the marketplace!

By measuring the key business metrics, monitoring them constantly and analyzing the results, the business owner is better able to understand how the business is operating and what changes may be necessary in the business to better achieve the mission and vision.

It is kind of like being a pilot of a plane – you need the most important metrics of your plane visible to you at all times while you are flying (speed, altitude, location, etc.). Without these metrics you are “flying blind” and the plane will be very difficult, if not impossible, to fly. Similarly, without proper identification of the key business metrics and the monitoring of these metrics, your business will be next to impossible to run effectively.