Identifying Your Business Drivers

Identifying and monitoring the key drivers of your business will help track what's happening in our business and trigger red flags for when remedial action is needed. A whole range of internal and external factors can affect the performance of every small business, so the secret is to focus on a handful of key drivers that:

• Reflect the performance and progress of your business.
• Are measurable.
• Can be compared to a standard, such as a budget, last year's figures or an industry average.
• Can be acted upon

Benchmarking

Use your historical figures as a benchmark for your current performance. Past figures provide hard facts and established patterns for your business while also identifying potential problems and opportunities. In addition to your internal benchmarking, try to compare your business with similar businesses in our industry.

Key drivers

The range of business drivers varies enormously from business to business. For example:

• Sales leads in a capital goods or service business
• Sales per market in a retail business
• Machine downtime in a factory

Even direct competitors may use different drivers to improve their business performance. For example, prime location is not a key driver for an internet-based business, but it can be for a brick and mortar competitor that relies on well-located retail stores to attract foot traffic. The following are some drivers that could be relevant to your business.

Online presence

The amount of online activity can also be a key driver if your business relies on the internet. Increasing web traffic, more online queries and an increase in social media followers or activity can all lead to signaling that all is well.

Enquiry levels

Enquiry levels (or number of leads/quotes given) can provide an early warning of peaks or troughs in your sales.

Monitor where the enquiries come from to establish which marketing campaigns work. If you have an established enquiry-to-sales ratio and know the size of an average sale, you can use the enquiry level to forecast turnover.

When you review sales, monitor:

• Which categories of product are selling well.
• How your priority products (those with the best margins and the best payment terms) are selling.
• If conversion rates (the ratio of leads to sales) are changing.

If you don't know where your queries are coming from, now is the time to find out so you can assess if there are more where they came from.

Your costs

Like sales, costs (and therefore profit margins) should ideally be tracked every week. Focus on the key variable costs (the cost of materials or inputs to make products) and what causes them to increase or decrease.

Maintaining a healthy gross profit margin is critically important. If your margins are falling, then you need to pinpoint why this is happening so you can take corrective action. The cause could be any number of things, such as higher input prices, a changing product mix, production inefficiencies or offering too many discounts.

Collecting debts

If you have overdue debts, this could pose an issue, especially if any of your customers are likely to default and leave you out of pocket. If your debtors' book is large and bad debts could place your whole business in danger of going bust, then it's a key driver to monitor. Pay close attention to your debt collection system and implement necessary improvements immediately.

An effective way to control debtors is to produce an aged list of debtors every week, showing which bills are overdue and by how many days. Any payments that are overdue, or simply large, should be highlighted and tracked so you can take prompt action. The key is consistency—late payers should know that you will continue to contact them.

Your inventory levels

Good stock control allows you to keep relatively low inventory levels while still keeping customers happy.

Your stock turnover rate is the ratio of cost-of-sales to stock. Most businesses aim for a high stock turnover rate because it indicates an efficient use of capital resources. If the ratio decreases, find out why. For example, you may be overstocking or purchasing stock that you can't sell. The more you break down your stock figures into separate product categories, the easier it will be to pinpoint problems.

Summary

For most businesses the key drivers include major cost-efficiency items, but drivers often include "soft" factors. For example, effective networking (the ability to build new business relationships) has proved to be the key driver for many small businesses.

The measurement of drivers is sometimes indirect. For example, if you have identified employee morale as a driver, you could monitor it by tracking voluntary overtime, absenteeism and sick days. The drivers may change with time due to the growth of your business, changes in your market or simply seasonal changes.