As we count down to the end of the year. It is time to reflect on the growth of your business. A common mistake by most business owners is confusing the continued existence of a business with growth. As long as the business stays open it is a win.
While this is commendable, it limits your ability to plan, expand, correct mistakes and implement new strategies.
Today, we are going back to the drawing board by exploring 5 ways to measure the growth of your business. Plus we let you in on an easy way to measure your progress at the end of the article.
Sit tight!
How much profit did I make?
This is often the most revealing question for business owners. This is because most people confuse revenue with profit giving a false picture of progress.
To calculate your profit as a business, you need to find out how much money is left when you take away all your expenses like taxes, rent, salaries, advertising, production e.t.c
The amount before you make all those deductions is called REVENUE. After all these deductions, what you have left is called a PROFIT.
Your profit is an important indicator of growth because increased profit means that you can dedicate more money to expansion, attracting more customers or hiring new staff.
How many products have I sold?
From clients who want to get back to you later to dispatch riders who raise your blood pressure, it’s time to find out how many products you sold in the year. Getting the numbers to this question provides a lot of insight you can act on.
If customers have shown strong demand for a particular product, it may be time to expand the production or supply of that product. If you can, also monitor particular months where demand for some products was high. This way, you can prepare for this demand next year and cash out well!
Are my customers satisfied?
An often underappreciated way to measure your business growth is by getting feedback about your customer satisfaction. Most business owners neglect this because it is difficult to measure. However, a great tool to help you get the data you need is Google Forms.
With Google Forms, you can send an easy-to-fill review for your customers. This review should contain questions about how accessible your customer service is, a rating of your business on a scale of 1 to 10, what they want you to improve on, favourite products, what they would like to see you keep (and/or stop) doing and if they are likely to recommend your business to a friend.
The data from your review will provide interesting results that you can use to improve your service, introduce new products or shut down some products as you approach 2025.
How many new customers did I gain?
Understanding and tracking your customer base is an important way to measure your business growth. You need to know if you spent the year serving the same set of customers or if you expanded your customer base with new customers across different locations.
An easy way to keep track of your customer growth is by maintaining a database of their emails or phone numbers. With a simple Google Sheet, you can input customer numbers and emails tracking growth over the course of the year.
Seeing the growth of your customer base also allows you to analyse how these new customers affected your business. Did they order in bulk or in small units? Are they repeat customers? E.t.c
How well did my employees perform?
If you’re looking to expand, then you will have to gradually move from running your business alone to trusting a team to help you run it. As you end the year, it is important to reflect on the performance of your staff throughout the year and also find out what support they need for you.
A sign of a growing business is one where your staff is able to take initiative and act independently. Your current staff are also able to train new staff effectively on your established business processes and tools.
Conduct perfomance reviews asking your staff for an honest assessment of their performance over the year plus areas where they think you can offer support.
Tracking growth has never been easier!
It’s easy to get carried away with all the moving parts of your business that you forget to track the numbers that matter. That’s why the BrandDrive app helps you to see all the numbers that matter at once with customized reports that can help monitor your cash flow over any period you choose.
