This week’s Entrepreneur University comes thanks to Dave Turkin. Dave is the president of Accessible Business Consultants, a full service business consultant that has over 32 years of experience working with small-medium size businesses.
Dave shares his advice on how to perform an annual checkup for your business:
“It is important to do a Business Check-up annually and to do quarterly check-ups to continue to monitor progress and increase your potential for success.
Just as doctors encourage us to have an annual medical exam, your business should undergo a check-up too.
How can you possibly gauge the effectiveness of your business operational policies and procedures or your marketing campaign without analyzing the benefits of the bottom line.
Here are some of the questions you should be asking yourself to get started in analyzing your business:
(1). How do your sales for 2006 compare to 2007 and currently for 2008?
(2). What percentage of your business is repeat customers?
(3). How long has it been since you offered a new product or service?
(4). Do you consider your Marketing Program an expense or an investment?
(5). Do you use PR to portray a positive image of your company?
(6). What forms of advertising do you use and what are the results?
(7). Do you treat your regular customers better than one-time customers?
(8). How do your customers rate your company?
(9). How does your company rate against your competition?
(10). Are your employees happy and what is the turn-over rate?
After considering the above questions how do you rate your company on a scale of 1 to 10.
The first number that comes to mind usually is the correct one.
Anything below a 9 means there is need for improvement.
Now, do a survey with your customers and employees to determine their perspective and then design your strategy for the rest of the year.
It may also be more productive to have the survey completed by an outside independent company.
Never settle for no improvement is needed. Here’s to your good health in business.”
What do you think of the annual business checkup? Do you currently do anything in your business to keep track of its health on a regular basis?
I think another good thing to list would be to “audit” some of your expenses. When I took over finance for my family’s firm, I uncovered hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars in wasteful billing that had gone on for years. It makes me sick to think of the thousands wasted. This includes: long distance companies billing us at the wrong rate, paying $15.00/mo. for two 1-800-numbers we were unaware we owned, “minimum order fee”s that our long-time partners were more than happy to remove/waive permanently, etc.