DO YOU KNOWTHE
By Marla Mock
OF YOUR BUSINESS?
W hen exercising, it’s imperative to maintain a target heart rate. Your Beats Per Minute (BPM) is the number of times your heart beats per minute - simple enough, right? While exercising, you should maintain a certain level of BPM. If too low, you are not burning enough calories to achieve weight loss. If too high, that’s dangerous as you push your body past its fitness level, putting your health at risk. You can go down to any sporting goods store or Best Buy to buy a gadget that will assist in measuring your BPM; however, if using it improperly, there is not much good it will do. Or worse, if using the tool properly, you ignore the signs as you think you are immune to the consequences. What do you do on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis to track the health of your business? Ray Kroc joined McDonald’s in 1955 and built it into the most successful fast food corporation in the world. He would say “When you’re green, your growing. When you’re ripe, you rot.” Currently, is your business green or ripe, and what tools are you using to measure it? Are you only monitoring increased revenue dollars, and if those are increasing year over year, do you consider your business healthy? How about employee turnover? If your employees have been with you long term, is this always a positive? What about your customer mix? How long have your customers been with you, and when is the last time you added a new, recurring customer to your revenue stream? How long have you had your equipment, and when is the last time you have invested in maintenance, or upgrading? Successfully running a business can be overwhelming, or, with the right tools, it can be fun and exciting. I cannot tell you how many times business owners, when asked how the business is doing, tell me GREAT!! But, when taking a closer look, there is cause for concern. Not because of one single thing, but because of a variety of items. The number one cause for concern is when the deny factor has set in, and monitoring of the business on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis has ceased. How can you fix something if you are not aware there is a problem? This occurs because they are afraid of what they will find, or when they do identify there is a problem, that means they will have to address it.
Let’s look at revenue for a moment. Since your business has begun, what is your year (YOY) over year revenue growth percentage? Has your revenue trended in the right direction? Has your profitability trended at the same rate? Are the profit centers you are investing your most sales and marketing dollars in yielding your highest return on investment ROI? If not, do you know why? Let’s drill into employees. Ray Kroc also said, "You're only as good as the people you hire.” Have you ever settled on hiring an employee because you had to quickly fill a position, or worse, kept someone on the team who no longer fits the culture or added value because you didn’t have someone “on the bench” ready to hire? Long term, what has this cost your business? Customers were always an item I enjoyed tracking. I tied them directly back to sales and marketing dollars, as well as revenue growth and gross profitability. Why? I needed to know if they were worth it, and if they were, how could I drive more revenue dollars from them? What about equipment? If my equipment was not well maintained and ready when needed, I was sunk. No matter how well I marketed, how many new customers I signed, or how well prepared the staff was, if my equipment was not ready, I might as well not have gotten the job since I was ill- prepared to perform. If any of the questions above are difficult for you to answer, you need to make one phone call to your Franchise Consultant (FC) and say, “Please assist me in tracking the pulse of my business.” But, may I remind you, we can only assist if you allow us. Michael Jordan, arguably one of the best basketball players who has ever played the game, had coaches. Were they people who could beat him on the basketball court? Absolutely not, that wasn’t their role. Their role was to observe from the sideline and point out what he couldn’t see while he was on the court playing the game. Your FC is your business coach, available to help in reviewing all available tools to reach your personal and professional goals.
8 STORMSURGE TM | E1:2017
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