Growing The Value of Emerging Business    

How Do you Know What You Don’t Know? – Get A Business Health Check

All businesses have weaknesses and if you want to sustain and grow your business, it's vital to address them before they threaten your chances of long term success.

In many businesses, management, while usually acutely skilled in their particular profession, has only a problematic understanding of the wider range of management skills that are essential to business continuity and growth such as strategy development, financial forecasting, marketing, information technology and so on.

While their own specialist skills often provide the major strength of the business it’s the lack of experience in all those ancillary aspects of management that create dangerous vulnerabilities and that can bring a business undone. For a business to survive or grow, all the different parts have to be working and meshing smoothly.

Management often become aware of their limitations only when something starts to frustrate their plans or a crisis looms up. The business has grown to a certain point and now there is a lack of focus or strategic direction and they don’t know where to take it next; or operational inefficiencies are starting to show and there is increasing waste and delays in production; customers are leaving for no apparent reason and they can’t seem to win new ones; there are performance issues with employees that they just don’t have the knack of coping with to get things back on track; there’s confusion about what technologies might improve production or how to implement them.

Since no business management can be expected to be on top of all the managerial skills that go towards making a business operate profitably what they can do to know what they don’t know.

Working with a business advisor to help them analyze how the business is currently performing over all its critical operations – often referred to as a business health check – is an essential first step. A business health check is a short, highly focused question and answer review. A comprehensive diagnostic survey will enable you to identify the areas of your business that need improving and the areas that offer the best opportunities for profit growth. A good business advisor should be able to perform this service quickly and provide you with a detailed report on areas that need attention.

At this stage, you have the equivalent of a diagnosis – you have identified what’s wrong and put a name to it. But as with your personal health checkup, while there is some comfort in having identified exactly what is wrong, what you really want is a cure. Good advisors can do more than just diagnose. They have enough knowledge of business basics to be able to offer advice and suggest specific actions to improve the areas of weakness whether it is how to improve the return on investment in marketing spend, improving customer profitability, reducing waste or improving cash flow. And as a bonus, along the way you become more familiar with general management principles and gain more insight into how your business works. Being able to make informed decisions hands you more control over taking the business where you want it to go and improving its competitiveness.

There are many facets to managing a business successfully and you really can’t afford to ignore any of them. A business health check is a painless exercise that can identify your operational strengths and weaknesses and the opportunities and threats that exist in your industry and market. An objective assessment by our experienced business advisors could make a huge difference to your business. It will provide a greater understanding of the issues underlying poor performance and deliver concrete suggestions for how to go about improving things.

Source: Ran One

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