Evolution is an essential part of continuing to grow your business and surviving in the competitive professional landscape. You can’t afford to be comfortable in your current state and let others pass you by in your industry. At KRD Tax & Consulting, we offer business advisory services that are available for helping you set benchmarks within your business relative to your competitors. If you’ve never done any kind of benchmarking before, we have three tips to help you prepare before you do. Read this short guide below to get started.

Decide what kind of benchmarking you want to do.

The first step you need to take before doing any benchmarking is deciding what kind you’d like to do. There are four basic types of benchmarking that are common in the professional world. They are:

Performance benchmarking - This is the first step to identifying performance gaps between your business and those of others in your industry. By using qualitative data analysis, you can compare how your performance indicators match up to your goals.

Practice benchmarking - Through qualitative information, you can understand how your processes, technology, and people are meeting your daily, monthly, and annual goals. If you find that there are performance gaps, this will help you identify ways that you can update your practices to match the industry standard as necessary.

Internal benchmarking - You can compare departments within your company to more easily identify where there are lapses in performance and practice. This might include anything from your production line to your fulfillment team. Internal benchmarking is a great way to find out who’s not pulling their weight in the company.

External benchmarking - Unless you’re absolutely the only company that does what you do, you’re going to have competitors. External benchmarking is a way that you can measure your performance against those who are ahead of you in business so you can catch up to them, or those behind you so you can maintain your distance in the market.

You can perform one or more of these types of benchmarking to effectively evaluate the state of your company and where you want it to go.

Collect data on your current processes.

As we mentioned previously, you need quantitative and qualitative data to ensure that you’re meeting your current key indicators and KPI targets. Gather data from team leaders, department managers, and others that you can effectively extrapolate into easily discernible information. This will make your job easier as you try to compare departments and companies as you see fit.

Create a plan for changes.

Once you have an idea of where you want your company and its individual entities where you want it to be, you must put together a goal-oriented plan. Your plan should include how you want each piece of your company to work together to achieve your goals and get to where you want to be. Keep in mind that you can pitch grandiose goals and ideas to your employees, but if you don’t have a way to get there, it’ll all fall on deaf ears. The same goes in reverse. Let your team know what the end goal is for the changes that you’re planning to make. It can be difficult to get significant buy-in with sweeping changes if your employees can’t catch the vision. Put together a plan from start to finish and present it with your vision for the future of your company.

Book an appointment with us.

Setting effective benchmarks and creating goals to improve on them isn’t an easy process. Get in touch with our team at KRD Tax & Consulting to learn more about our business advisory services so you can get started with effective benchmarking. Give us a call at 720-524-4063 or send a message using our online contact form to book your appointment today.