Make your business exceptional in 2022 - An easy guide to completing a review of your business.

The purpose of a business performance review is to measure the success of the company and its performance over the past 12 months. It also allows you to monitor and measure data to determine how well the business is meeting their objectives overall.

Has your business performed as expected in 2021?

Many businesses are now in the process of completing their yearly review, and essential to smashing your 2022, now is the time to implement a management and business review. If you’ve never formally completed a business review, now is the time to start reflecting on this. If this sounds like a scary undertaking, I've put together a short guide and annual review tips to help you navigate this process with ease.

How is business performance evaluated?

In simple terms, if you plan to develop and grow your business you need to understand what you are already doing well and what you need to improve on. A business review can be as straightforward as applying a performance management style metric. For a basic 12 month business performance review, consider the following SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats) analysis questions -

● What has gone well? What has the company achieved over the past 12 months and what are your strengths?

● What hasn’t gone well or what are the areas you need to improve? What are your weaknesses?

● What areas would you like to change and what benefits are you hoping to achieve by making these changes? What opportunities can you identify from this?

● What are the potential threats to your business and how can you ensure you are not negatively impacted by them? For example, the impact of Covid-19 for the second year running and the re-introduction of working from home (as part of the government's "plan B" measures to tackle the spread of the Omicron variant).

For an in depth review of business and strategy, including a financial analysis, follow my questions and tips below to easily assess your business structure, operational performance, financial analysis and to complete staff evaluations.

Was your 2021 financial forecast on target?

○ Compare this year’s profits against last year’s. Comparing them as a percentage will identify the costs to the bottom line (which refers to the ‘bottom figure’ on an income statement including company earnings, profit and net income).

○ If your profit margin is too low, where can you save on outgoings?

What has been your biggest expense over the past year?

○ Do you need to be spending money on facilities, buildings maintenance and utilities?

○ Are you reducing the emphasis on office presenteeism and encouraging working from home?

○ Office costs for staff are part and parcel of doing business. Working from home drives down the traditional and cumbersome burden of large office spaces.

Are you utilising technology to its full potential?

○ Is your IT infrastructure fit for purpose?

○ Do you have the right IT equipment to enable your staff to do their jobs efficiently?

Consider upgrading your obsolete hardware to laptops to allow for remote working, using cloud based storage for ease of access and complete regular back-ups to protect your business against a cyber attack. If you have an in-house IT department, think about the possibility of streamlining this with remote desktop support to reduce overheads. Whilst this can all be perceived as an expensive outlay, the benefits over the next 5 years by ‘future proofing’ your equipment can easily lead to an overall cost saving.

● Are you reliant upon a traditional structure and hierarchy? Does that restrict your ability to flex and evolve with the needs of the business?

● How efficient are your staff?

● Have you engaged with your employees and asked for their feedback?

The best way to streamline a process is to engage directly with the individuals carrying out these tasks on a daily basis. They are best placed to highlight areas for improvement or ‘pinch points’ which could have a greater impact on output efficiency and simultaneously improve employee satisfaction. Utilising an anonymous staff survey/questionnaire to ask these questions can generate open and honest dialogue without fear of repercussions at a staff level. I can suggest tools such as Survey Monkey which can be tailored to your specific business requirements.

Assess your employee performance and complete a performance appraisal of all staff (at least a yearly performance review, but ideally a midyear review too). This can be used to identify and quantify sales or contribution/profit per employee. Yearly performance review examples and ideas on how to successfully manage performance can be found in my previous blog post here.

Have your staff already benefited from remote working and have you seen their productivity increase, along with their work/life balance? A happy employee who can work from home around their parental responsibilities may be more of an asset to a company, in turn they offer loyalty and readiness to hit targets.

With Covid-19 and its various mutations now seemingly a permanent fixture in the foreseeable future, it’s wise for businesses to plan and prepare to be dynamic in their approach to flexible working hours, part-time contracts, employees remote working and utilising Virtual Assistants to further reduce staff costs and fill skills shortages.

What does the future look like?

● What are the steps needed to achieve the 12 months plan?

● Do you have a contingency plan in place?

● If you don’t meet your objectives can you stay on track for your long term aspirations?

Make 2022 the year your business sees bigger results!