Measuring results is important for any organization to have long term sustainable success. Before you can understand what results you need and why, you need to make sure that you understand your business at its’ core. Before you mearsure results, you mist have clarity in place.
I have already talked about why mission, vision and values are important to your business. They really are the foundation for everything that you do and your results are no different.
Many small business owners wander ahead with their business without understanding the fundamental questions about their business. Questions such as: Why do I exist? Where do I want to go? What’s most important to my business? Knowing these questions will then allow you to create the results that will make the answers to the aforementioned questions a reality for your business.
To be sure, your business can have success without having solid clarity behind it…in the short term. Businesses who have success without defining mission, vision and values do one of two things. They either realize that to sustain the success, they are going to need to understand their business better because they aren’t sure why they were successful or they end up failing because they can’t duplicate the success in the long term.
Business can even have success without defining results…also in the short term. The reason businesses don’t define results is due to the lack of clarity or for other reasons that I will discuss later this week. Having success without defined results or an understanding of why results happened is the most dangerous kind of success because at that point you have grown your business which means more liabilities and more customers to answer to. Not having a plan in place to manage your results then becomes suicide for your organization.
What’s the first step? Get results defined for yoru business but before you do that make sure that you understand why your business exists in the first place and where you want it to go. The long term success of your business is counting on it.