Situation: A CEO wants to establish baseline metrics to evaluate company performance, and guide both planning and operations. Without baseline metrics it is difficult to compare the impact of options that the company faces. What are the most important areas to analyze, and what do other companies measure? How do you establish performance metrics?
Advice from the CEOs:
- Start with the basic divisions of the business. As an example, take a company which has three arms to its business – products that it represents for other companies, products that it distributes, and custom products that it manufactures to customer specifications.
- For each of these lines track gross revenue, profit net of direct costs, FTEs necessary to support the business, number of customers, net profit percent, net profit per employee and net profit per customer.
- Calculate these metrics on at least a quarterly basis for the past 2-3 years to set a baseline and a chart of historic trends.
- Once you establish a baseline, chart current performance on at least a quarterly basis and look for trends and patterns.
- Where is your greatest growth and greatest profitability – not just on a global basis but in terms of profit per customer and profit per employee?
- If you’ve included your full costs including the costs of the FTEs to support each business, then the analysis should show you where you want to invest and what it will cost you to support additional investment.
- Do a similar analysis of costs per line to further support investment analysis.
- This analysis will help to evaluate whether it is better to purchase another rep line, or whether you would be better off investing the same funds to grow custom business.
- Similarly, it will demonstrate on what kinds of customers and products you want your sales force to focus to grow profitable business and will help you to establish objectives based on anticipated revenue or profit per new customer that sales closes.
- Finally, it will highlight potential vulnerabilities such as the impact of the loss of a key customer in one portion of the business.
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