In the business world, what does success mean?
Does success mean making a profit? It’s probably the first thing most people would say: if the business is making money, it’s a success.
How about a growing customer base? After all, this means you are effectively reaching your target market.
Customer satisfaction is another strong indicator. Understanding your customers and being able to satisfy their needs is crucial. And having strong customer service polices will also add to the success of your company.
Every business owner has to decide what their critical success factors are— Quality? Profit? Customer satisfaction?—and create an overall strategic plan that will help them understand where the business is now and where they want it to go in the future.
External Critical Success Factors
To create your strategic plan, you need to evaluate how your company compares to others in the market, why customers or clients shop at your company or work with you, and how they feel about your company and products. Then decide what actions you can take in order to achieve those critical success factors.
Critical success factors are measured with key performance indicators (KPIs), which are financial and non-financial metrics that define and measure the progress of a company toward its goals. A good business is able to identify, define, track and act on their KPIs.
Typical external critical success factors include:
- Customer service
- Product quality
- Complaint resolution
- Product service
Once you have identified your business’ critical success factors, measure them against your expectations. For example, you can set a critical success factor to “achieve 100% sales for returning customers for this month,” using last month’s returning customer sales as a baseline.
Internal Critical Success Factors
Employee satisfaction is one measure of success that isn’t as obvious. But developing a work environment that rewards people for their hard work is imperative in attracting and retaining quality employees. And quality employees are essential.
Creating the right mix of people, with the right skills and the right personalities, is crucial to the success of any business.
How do you find the right people? Working with a reputable staffing or recruiting firm is an excellent place to start. They can find the people with the skills you need, then evaluate them for culture fit. Employee referrals are another.
You need to define success to figure out if you’ve achieved it—and Employment Professionals Canada can show you how. In addition to years of experience providing strategic, custom-tailored staffing solutions, they can also help you evaluate growth opportunities and design your workforce plans. Contact us todayto see how we can help build and measure your success!