KPI's (Key Performance Indicators) will completely change your business.

How?

You have all heard the old saying what you can measure you can manage. Well it tends to also ring true that what you measure therefore manage improves. Why? It's called focus.

Last week I talked about how Important your team is to your business. After all they are the ones who have the ability to help drive the business in the direction you want it to go. So if they don't know the direction and what you want out of the business things can get quite messy.

Enter KPI's.

Setting some really clear KPI's for the year and sharing them with the team (as well as making these part of each team members personal KPI's) will help steer the direction of your business and keep you on track.

Let's look at some examples.

Let's say you are interested in growing the top line revenue in your business. You might set a turnover target for the year. If you have salespeople you may set an individual target for each salesperson. Or alternatively you may set a certain number of new clients that you would like this year. You can then break these down into monthly, weekly and daily turnover. Or a number of new clients that you need to bring on each month. You may even be able to break this down into the number of new potential clients you need to see each week.

So whatever you want to manage needs to be broken down not only to the KPI you want to measure but then the activity as well.

Let's take another example.

Let's say you want to concentrate on systemising and streamlining your business for the year. You may have certain targets that you want to reach........to cut down on processing time by 25%, to eliminate the need for a person to be involved in one part of your process, to streamline your workflow. Whatever the target you need to set clear KPI's so you can manage and measure your progress. It might be as simple as setting a target for the week to document all the unneccesary tasks that you do. Then you can set a timeline for eliminating them over the next 12 months.

You can have the best team in the world.....but without some clear KPI's for the business and each person, your team could be steering your ship in completely the wrong direction.

So this week's challenge. Set some KPI's for the business and the team, put in place a monitoring system, and watch the results.