Business Questions

I am blogging with Dragon speak.  This is a new form of blogging for me.  I would like to talk about a business questionnaire.  If you run your own business you must project numbers for next year but that is not all you need to do.  Part of your projections are questions that need to be discussed.  The first question is, conviction: If this business were for sale would I be willing to invest my own money to buy it?  The answer to this question must be investigated thoroughly.  Looking at your business numbers will allow you to to see if the business is viable.  Question number two customers: We know why people buy or don't buy from us and we are not dependent on any one customer for revenue. This takes some investigation and effort on your part to find out what your customers want and be ready to supply them with what they want.  Question three innovation, we implement at least five new ideas each quarter.  Whether or not, you are implementing new ideas is up to you but you will want to keep your customers coming back and seeing new things.  Your new ideas could be bookkeeping, or how to manage money or a new way of advertising.  They could also be repainting cleaning, rearranging furniture, or simply the new way of doing business.  Each of these questions is meant to help you analyze your business.  Analyzing of these questions goes deeper than just the question sort of like peeling away layers of an onion.  For each question we must go deeper.  Question for intelligence, we know how we stack up against our competition and why.  Note to analyze this question we must go into the background of the business and who the competition is if we do this.  Then we will have the answer to how we stack up.  Question five management our managers are excellent communicators, performance managers and people developers.  As we hire managers we need to have a list of questions that will enhance our source of people.  Each manager should have special qualities to help develop our company products and people.  In question six measures, we planned and measure our processes.  We have goals and metrics for financial performance, operational effectiveness, customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction.  Each of these should be set to get feedback from customers and employees.  This way, you will have everything available at your fingertips.  Question seven people:  We have energized and talented people who could replace key corporate positions and can easily recruit talented new employees to support business growth.  You must really look deep into this question.  Do you have the proper people in place to take care of business if a major player drops out?  If the answer is yes then you are already set.  If the answer is no then you need to review your employees and prepare some to be ready to take over in case of disaster.  Question eight rest and relaxation, managers can really "unplug" at least two weeks each year and the business runs well.  This question is not only in relation to managers, but to all employees.  No matter what employee takes vacation.  There should be back up employees to take their place.  Question nine strategy: we have a written strategic plan that includes mission, vision, short and long term goals; it is communicated to all employees, and they know what they need to do to execute.  If you have a corporate policy manual each employee should have a copy.  If you don't have a corporate policy manual, you must explain to each employee what the expectations are.  This way, each employee knows what their obligations are.  Question 10 supplies: we have contingency plans for our sources of supply.  These questions can be applied companywide or in a department constructive probing of these questions can spur new thinking identified business strength and weaknesses; prioritize actions, a sign accountabilities and reports on progress.  As we ponder each question, the realities of how our business is doing come about.  Thank you for your time today, and I hope these questions have helped you in your search for making your business better.

Comments

[betsy]

These are all good questions and they are very time consuming to answer unless you are keeping accurate records and know who your customers are and know how to track all the information that you need to do business. Some times when you first start it feels like there is not enough time in the day to cover everything that needs to be covered. In a massage business you can acquire alot of this information on the intake form. Asking pertinent questions about how they found you, what advertising has brought them to you, what are their likes and dislikes of a particular product that you sell. Whether they would like to see a certain product on your shelf. I think gathering the information and then using it is your best avenue of running a productive and profitable business.