What is Benchmarking, and Why Is It Important?

There is a topic that we do not hear a lot about when we meet with businesses, and that is the simple topic around benchmarking. Benchmarking is to determine where you were in life or business and having something to gauge your goals towards in the future. You will data and a lot of it to move forward. If you have nothing to look back on, how do you gauge your success?

Business Benchmarking

Businesses are usually very good at looking at financial statements, cash flow statements, budgeting and so on. These tactics are beneficial when trying to get the pulse of a company on a monthly, quarterly or yearly basis, but what about the tasks that build up into these documents?

When we consult with businesses about benchmarking, this is how we tackle the subject and basing it all around the tasks business conduct to make money. When the business breaks it down to this level, statements become much clearer when making business decisions. How does a business know where it is going and make the right decisions if they don’t know the benchmark of each task?

If you study the past and find out that a task was taking you an average of 4 hours to complete and now it is taking you 6, then what happened? This is the critical discussion that many businesses need to have, the process of benchmarking.

Personal Benchmarking

Personal benchmarking is the same thing as business benchmarking, where a person will take inventory of what they are doing, but as a singular item. Businesses will look at variations of tasks they complete. A person will have variations, but it only affects one person. A business can impact many people.

Without spending a lot of time on personal benchmarking, we wanted to take the time to stress the importance of people ensuring they are taking inventory of their personal lives and determine how they can do things better in the future. Without knowing where you have been, how will you know and scale where you are going. Lessons learned about your own life, will give you the wisdom to move forward.

Future Goals

So, what is the purpose of discussing benchmarking in business and personal? Goals! Big goals and small goals. Business goals or personal goals. In the following discussion, goals will mean one of these. We all need goals in life and a plan on how to get there. Our recommendations are always as follows;

Start with one large goal created every year.
Break down that large goal into smaller goals. These smaller goals can be structured however you see fit. They can be daily, weekly or monthly.
Develop tasks that achieve all goals. This is where benchmarking comes in. You need to know where you have been to make these tasks more efficient and profitable.
Structure of your life. You will need some form of scheduling to achieve the goals you are after. Phones, paper, computer scheduling and so on are all ways of doing this. Just ensure it is something that you can put into a document for future reference.

You need goals in life and benchmarking will help you get to the place you want to be. If you are not striving for more, whatever your definition is, what are you doing? Just sitting around wondering and not doing anything about it? Get up and get started. Take it one day at a time and move forward to a goal.

Businesses and people struggle with benchmarking. If you do and want more direction on this, reach out to us at Future To Now Consulting to discuss more.