A numbers game: Why your business needs a weigh in

I know someone who recently underwent the Michelle Bridges 12-week program, and every Wednesday she had to weigh herself to find out how she was progressing. Other weight loss businesses have a similar processes around a regular weigh-ins so you can track your progress and alter your activity if the desired weight isn’t being shed.

I’m sure the participants of these programs have a love/hate relationship with those scales every week, but they choose to step on them regardless. That’s because, the program creators understand the importance of regular assessment, celebrating small wins, and keeping on track.

It’s no different for your business.

Goal setting, creating plans, checking in and altering your business activity all enable you to engage with small wins and recalibrate your business direction. Whether it’s kilos lost or profit increases, it’s really just a numbers game; which means that at some point you need to be looking at the numbers to decide if your business is on track.

For some businesses this might mean a daily check of critical numbers, and for others it might mean a weekly workflow or sales meeting. What’s important, is that you are assessing how your business is performing regularly.

Why bother?

To continue with the analogy, if I don’t monitor my weight, I might end up having to buy a new wardrobe. Similarly, if I choose not to monitor my business, the results can be incredibly costly.

For example, let’s look at a manufacturing business with annual sales of $5million and Net Profit of 5%. The directors might determine they want to hit a sales target of $6million dollars in the next year, but instead of tracking their numbers, they simply put their heads down, bums up and work really hard. Twelve months later they take a look at their financial reports and eureka, they hit $6million worth of sales. A great result, right? Not necessarily. Instead, the business has no money in the bank account, they made a loss for the year and there’s a lot of finger pointing over what went wrong. Instead, if the directors had decided to understand their numbers, hold regular weigh-ins (at least monthly) where they looked at their critical numbers and adjusted and altered their activity, then they would potentially have hit their sales target with a much healthier profit.

Regular monitoring is not a difficult thing; it usually involves a quick check of the most important numbers in the business to make sure everything is on track. It also means you can be proactive about solving small problems before they become large problems.

How do you start?

That’s the easy part. Work out the most important things you need to be monitoring in your business, set a date and simply start your regular ‘weigh-in’. It might feel unnatural at first, but just keep going.

Many people probably don’t love their regular exercise routine. What they do love however, is the effect that regular exercise brings and the motivation they receive when they start to see positive changes in their body and on the scales.

The same goes for your business. Regular monitoring of your critical numbers will probably not be the thing you enjoy doing most, however the motivation you will receive from the financial health of your business will be.