Success is something of a subjective word, and it can be measured in multiple ways depending on your business type or industry sector. It’s important to identify what will make your business a success, and focus on this to drive your business forward. Below we have listed out how to measure success.

The different ways of measuring success

Generally, the highest level of success is measured through profit, depending, of course, on the industry that you are in. But this is not the only way to measure success, and some businesses may find that brand awareness, or if you’re a charity, impact, is what has the biggest benefit to your organisation.

There will also be multiple ways that you can achieve the desired success rates of your company and this will, again, differ from industry to industry. For example, one business ranked profitability as a way that they could measure success. They believed that keeping employee turnover low would help them to increase customer satisfaction and therefore achieve their goal, but quickly realised that some stores with high employee turnover were among some of the most profitable.

It was the businesses that had the lowest manager turnover that had the highest levels of profitability, and so they shifted their focus towards retaining managers. It wasn’t manager retention or customer satisfaction that was their ultimate goals; it was profitability. But they could use manager retention and customer satisfaction as ways of measuring success, which ultimately allowed them to measure the profitability of their business.

It helps to break down the way in which you measure success rather than setting a general aim. “To be profitable” is not an easy goal to measure, and therefore it’s hard to say whether you are successful or not. “To have a 10% profit margin in this fiscal year” is a clearly defined measure of success which you will either achieve or not.

Again, it is important to think about what really matters most to your business, and narrow this down to a few measurements of success. Every business wants to be in profit, have great brand awareness, cause a big social impact, but in reality, it will be hard to achieve all of these aims.

Other ways that you might measure success are through the schedule of a project, the scope of the work at hand, a budget that you have set, team satisfaction or the quality of the work or product that you have produced.

Achieving your goals

To properly measure success, you need to set goals. It may be a small, week-long project, or it may be a five-year plan, but regardless of what it is you want to achieve, you need an effective way to measure success.

The most common way of measuring success is using SMART goals, which are goals that can be applied to however you want to measure success, be it through time, money, social impact, brand awareness, or something else entirely.

Specific – your goal needs to be clear and specific, such as “to have a 10% profit margin in this fiscal year”

Measurable – you should be able to easily measure your goal

Achievable – your goals need to be achievable and not wild

Relevant – make sure that your goals are relevant to your business aims. If you are a charity, then perhaps your success should be measured by social impact rather than profit

Time-bound – set time limits for your goals. This will help you to be more accountable when trying to achieve success

Lead and lag goals

Lead and lag goals, or indicators as they are also called, is another good way to measure success.

With lag indicators, you will be examining things that have already happened and are out of your control. For example, if you want to see how many accidents there have been in a factory, you will consult an accident log.

You can use this for ways to improve things moving forward, which will then impact on your success. Doing this would make it a lead goal. For example, you may increase staff training, and you can then measure the success of this by seeing if there is a decrease in the number of accidents.

Lead and lag goals are useful ways to see where things are lagging behind in your business, and how you can introduce other measures to lead onto greater success.

Measuring success for your business

Every business is different, and you shouldn’t measure success based on how other businesses around you are doing. Every industry has different lead times or profit margins, and it’s important that you clearly define what success means for your company.

Choosing the right supplier for your business is an important process, and involves much more than simply looking down a price list. There are many factors that you need to consider, and rushing into the process could hinder your business and, ultimately, your profits. Below we have laid out a guide on how to choose your suppliers.

Set the criteria that you would like your supplier to fulfil

The first step is to establish the rules that you would like your supplier to abide by in your business relationship. This will help you to narrow down the search early on and will help you to be more structured in your search rather than compiling a huge list of suppliers.

Your search criteria should include factors such as:

• The lead times that you can expect once you had ordered to delivery date
• If you have any minimum or maximum order quantities
• What your supplier’s storage and handling facilities are like
• How your supplier will deliver the goods
• What the supplier’s payment terms are
• What their quality assurance and returns policies are like
• How easily contactable they are

These are just some of the factors that are involved in helping you to choose your suppliers, and being clear on these from the beginning will help you to whittle down the thousands of suppliers available on the market.

How would you like to find your supplier?

Another part of the criteria selection process is deciding how you would like to go about finding your supplier. There are multiple ways of doing this, such as by publishing ads in trade magazines or researching and approaching suppliers directly yourself.

Remember that each different avenue will capture a different audience, so it may be worth having several different approaches to try and get as large a selection as possible. Have qualified members of your team review and narrow down the shortlist of suppliers to those that are best suited to your company.

What should you be looking for when choosing your suppliers?

There are several factors to consider when choosing your supplier, and much of it will depend on your business model and how it fits in with your company culture and ethos. However, there are some areas that businesses look for consistently among suppliers:

Price

Price is perhaps the biggest factor to consider when choosing your supplier. You need a supplier that is going to be able to offer real value for your business and offer you the most profitable margins possible. The price will obviously vary from business to business, but be sure that you find one that will still leave you making money while not sacrificing on quality.

Quality

This leads onto another extremely important factor; quality. Quality covers a large range of factors, with everything from materials used to packaging to labelling. You need a supplier that can deliver consistent quality across each and every product. Poor quality will lead to negative customer reviews, and it’ll only be your business that suffers.

Ensure that the quality assurance processes that your supplier has in place are sufficient enough to match the level of product that you want to put out to market.

Service

You need to look for a high level of service and reliability when you choose your suppliers. This includes things such as fulfilment rates, late orders, and how quickly a supplier resolves an issue. If a supplier falls down in these areas, then it will have an impact on customer satisfaction too.

Some businesses have noted that they can see a direct correlation between customer satisfaction scores and supplier scores.

Alignment

Finally, how well do your businesses align? This will come down to multiple factors, such as does your supplier speak the same language as you? Do they have the same ethos as you? Some suppliers will visit your business, get to know what you’re about, and be as passionate about making your customers happy as you are.

It’s much better if you can be partners with your suppliers, rather than just people who do business together.

Choosing the right supplier

Once you have considered all the above factors and whittled down your shortlist, you’ll need to get quotations from your potential suppliers and compare these against each other. Consider what is most important to you; is it price, quality, location, or another factor entirely?

Be sure that the supplier you choose is the one doing the work, as some will outsource the work to a third party. Once you’re happy with your selection, begin to negotiate terms and conditions with the supplier and then you can push ahead with your new profitable partnership!

We are seeing an increasing use of freelancers within the business world for a range of different jobs and tasks. While it is a fairly new phenomenon and some businesses are reluctant to outsource their work, the freelance community represents a reliable and robust group of workers that can have jobs completed efficiently and effectively. But there are, of course, bad freelancers out there, and so below we list out a guide on how to work with freelancers.

The rise in the number of freelancers

The number of freelancers is increasing rapidly, with over 55 million freelancers now existing around the world. While it isn’t possible to explain exact reasons for this rise, workers seem to be wanting to move further away from the office 9-5, and more towards freedom and remote working.

What benefits do freelancers have for a business?

Outsourcing work to a freelancer is not laziness or representative of inability within your own organisation; it is a savvy business move that can allow you to half your workload for half the cost too.

Freelancers are much more flexible than other employees; their work is their livelihood, and they can’t always rely on a steady salary every month, and so you’ll often find that a freelancer goes the extra mile for you. This may be through the quality of their work or the fact that a lot of freelancers work weekends too.

It can be great for SMEs or new startups where the employee headcount is low, and you simply just don’t have the staff who are skilled in a particular area. You can find freelancers for almost any task, whether this is copywriting, photoshopping, research, social media management or some other task that you may have in hand.

The other huge benefit for a small-time company is that cash flow is likely to be an issue during the early years. Using a freelancer will mean you only have to pay them per job rather than a full-time salary. And you’ll also find that typically freelancers charge a lot less than if you had to pay a full-time employee, simply because their overheads are lower.

What are the drawbacks of using a freelancer?

There are some drawbacks of using freelancers; you can’t be completely guaranteed of the work that you will get, particularly as you are unlikely to meet them before completing a job. Some businesses may find that they need that face-to-face contact before getting into a business relationship with a freelancer.

However, websites such as PeoplePerHour and Upwork are good freelancing platforms which are built around reviews and feedback systems. You can carefully review a freelancer’s past work history, and then you should be guaranteed the quality of the work that you expect.

Another drawback is that you may find it hard to build up a company culture if you outsource a lot of your work to freelancers. However, this will be entirely dependent on your business model and what you are after with your employees. There are many highly successful distributed companies that have built up a good company culture.

How can I get the most out of using a freelancer?

If you are worried about using a freelancer and not being able to meet them beforehand, although this could be arranged, then there are ways that you can manage the process. Be sure to be super clear in your brief, keep constant communication throughout, and offer good and detailed feedback on their work.

A freelancer won’t understand your business in the same way that you do, so you may find that the first piece of work doesn’t quite fit the tone or ethos of your company. Agree before any work is started on how the process will work if you need revisions made; some freelancers will offer free edits on work provided you aren’t asking them to make edits that weren’t made clear in the original brief.

You will find that if you do everything to improve efficiency at your end, and you do sufficient research on a freelancer beforehand, that you can build up a solid and long-term relationship with workers who will strive to produce consistently high-quality work. The longer you work with a freelancer, the more embedded they will get in your business and the better understanding they will gain from your company; meaning it’ll be as though your freelancer is almost another employee.

Apps can be both an extension to an existing service, or in some cases, such as with Uber, are the service themselves. But for products and services that exist without the need for an app, creating this extension can be either beneficial or detrimental. Below we examine whether it is worth having an app for your service.

How having an app will add value to your service

With over two billion people using smartphones worldwide, the app market is huge. It can be worth capitalising on, and having an app can allow you to reach out to a new audience that you may not have been able to target otherwise.

It is necessary to have a mobile-friendly website nowadays, but a dedicated app can offer a lot more to customers than a browser version, and no matter how mobile-friendly a website is, it still isn’t as easy to navigate as the app equivalent.

Your app will allow you to create a direct marketing channel to your customers, provide value and can increase your brand image, connectivity and customer engagement. You can create more features for your users to get involved with, and can even generate revenue through the app to cover the cost of the development of it.

Apps like OpenTable allow you to book a restaurant with a few clicks of a button, rather than having to call the restaurant yourself. Other apps, like HelloFresh, are useful for helping the accessibility and delivery of products and services.

Having a mobile app can help you to stand out from the competition, especially if your competitors do not have one. It can be a forward thinking approach, and almost any product or service can be turned into an app in some way.

How apps could be detrimental to your service

However, despite the amount of people that use apps, it does not mean that you should automatically have one created for your service. The first thing to consider is whether you truly need an app.

If not, then the high cost of development for the app is most probably not worth it. They can take a long time and a lot of money to develop, and you’ll need one version for iOS and one for Android. Some place the cost of developing an app at around $10,000, while others put it more at around $20,000 depending on the number of features that are going to be used. Can your service really suffer these costly setbacks?

It can also be costly and timely to continue to maintain your app, and according to some articles, places like the Apple Store take around 30% of your revenue for each app purchased; another setback if you’re relying on paid downloads as part of your profits.

Further costs will need to be considered when marketing your app, as you’ll need to show your customers that you have a presence on the app stores. Once you have tallied up all of these additional costs, will you still be able to make a profit from the app?

For some businesses and services, an app quite simply is not needed. An example is the PlayStation App, which numerous people complain about. The features you can actually use are extremely limited, and the service that is being offered on the PlayStation cannot really be extended in any useful way through an app, except for the messaging service.

What’s the solution?

Carefully consider your business aims and objectives. Who are you trying to reach and what do you want them to do? Is an app totally necessary, or just an after-thought (and a costly one at that!).

Think:

• Will having an app solve an existing problem of yours?
• Will it enhance a customer’s user experience to a good degree?
• Can you both afford and justify the costs of developing the app?
• Will the return on investment for the app be worth it?
• Are there already apps on the market doing what you want to do, and if so, can you offer a better alternative?

Consider the above steps carefully with proper market research, and once you have done this you should be in a much better position to decide whether or not it is worth having an app for your service.