How Do You Know If You Have A Successful Business?

There are so many definitions of a successful business. For example, Google’s definition of a successful business is: “Success is running a profitable firm that conducts business with honesty and integrity, makes meaningful contributions to the communities it serves and nurtures high-quality, balanced lives for its employees”.

Business owners need to dig deeper than this definition. They need to understand their why, and where they want the business to be in the future. My suggestion to business owners is to start with the below to assist in identifying their path.

Define your Strategy

Business Strategy is the small choices you make every day that will lead your business to success. The phrase “strategic focus” can help you to understand the things that you do to run your business.

You need to make sure that your business strategy is not based on guesswork. You need to know where your business is heading. It’s like a journey, almost like a lifetime achievement.

Define Your Mission Statement

Every business needs to have a mission statement or vision statement that explains what your company is all about. This mission statement will help define your company’s direction, focus and actions. Defining a mission statement is perhaps one of the most important things you can do to understand the direction of your business.

Define Your Business Goals

You must have clear goals for all aspects of your business, including Personal Development Goals, Career Development Goals, Sales & Marketing Goals and Financial Goals. These goals should be in line with your strategy.

Some of the questions the business owner needs to ask are:

How does your business add value for its customers?

How can your business best serve its customers?

What is unique about your business model?

Do you know the strengths and weaknesses of your business model?

What opportunities does your business have in the market space in which it operates?

How will you successfully leverage these opportunities in a way that will lead to a high growth rate?

Which elements of your business model must be refined or improved to help achieve the above goals? And what is the plan for executing that plan?

Defining the Strategy, mission and goals allows the business owner to create Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) that align with the goals and help guide the business to their overall strategy. These KPIs will be the basis of developing the systems and processes that will maximise your success.

Once you have a clear strategy, you should share this with all relevant team members so that everyone is clear on the direction of the company. Then conduct a monthly review to re-evaluate your strategy against current market conditions and business developments. This will ensure that your plan is still going in the right direction by measuring your strategy against the KPI’s that you have set for your business.

Take action

I can hear you saying that you don’t have time to do this and that this will take you away from day-to-day business. This is where you need to lean on your CFO (Chief Financial Officer). This is what we do best and can help lead the way. The CFO Centre has been assisting SMEs for 20 years, offering highly experienced Chief Financial Officers on a flexible, part-time basis. As CFOs we are qualified CPAs or CAs with extensive commercial experience across multiple sectors, so we know what to look for and how to respond. Learn more at www.cfocentre.com or call 0800 422 121.

Written by Elechia Jones, Regional Director – The CFO Centre