Employ a plan do check act cycle in your business systems and track everything.
"How will this help make my business more valuable and more saleable?" you ask.
Back in my engineering days before becoming a business owner, we were trained to measure and track everything we did. The philosophy was that if you have the data you can make good decisions for continuous and never ending improvement.
Exactly the same principle applies to growing a business and making it more profitable.
First you start with a goal or goals. Could be your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or targets and strategies. What do you want to achieve and how are you going to measure if it is achieved?
Next, you create a PLAN. Decide who is going to do what in the plan and assign roles and responsibilities to DO (action) the plan.
Now agree how success will be measured and set up a review process to CHECK the plan is on track. This part - the measurement - is crucial. If you can't measure something then how can you improve it. Track everything and collect the right data.
Having collected good data and checked the results of your actions so far, it's now time to ACT on the results, modify the plan if necessary and continue around the cycle. Make these plan-do-check-act cycles the heartbeat of your business. Buyers love to see these systems and processes in a business. It looks like this:
The usual question I get at this point is "How do I know what is the right data to collect?"
The answer is "Track everything and over time it will become obvious which is the right data." We are drowning in tools these days that collect data. In the online world they are often called "analytics" or "insights". Learn to read and understand the data and then you can make impactful decisions that will enable you to grow your business, improve profit and thereby increase it's sale value and make it attract buyers.
Remember that in the business ready for sale world, increasing the profit also increases the ROI (multiplier). This means that you get double the benefit from growing the business and increasing the profit. It means more money for the business owner as well, of course and so it is a win all round.
Want to know if your business is saleable and worth something in today's market? Then complete the free online business review or schedule a call with me.