Part of the signature way I manage projects, teams, and businesses is to set out benchmarks and see where we are moving the needle and how quickly! This is both an art and a science, but monitoring your benchmarks can reveal truly important info about how your business operations are operating.
There are a couple key areas you need to be monitoring that will show you how well you are managing your resources (time, money, and energy). Some of these are numbers and metrics, while others are a more general sense of how your chugging along in your business.
You want to start with a solid baseline- your beginning point. That could be a specific number or metric, like your email list, or a general timeframe, like how quickly an email sequence is put together. This will help you define your next benchmark (or goal) and how you are improving the metric along the way. This sounds like a similar principle as managing velocity <<link to blog post or velocity pdf download>>, but setting benchmarks is the mark you set so as you improve velocity of tasks you can see how you are improving (or not) the benchmark.
Establish a baseline benchmark for these areas:
Email list growth
Social platform growth
Benchmarks specific to launches or promotions
Timetable for typical content creation / social planning / misc content
When someone hires us to do a Progress Test or books a VIP Session, setting benchmarks it one of the first things we do as we analyze. Point A is so important to establish so you can get to point B, C and beyond. I want to see where you are at, then we set benchmarks based on how you got to point A and what we can forecast as your next goal.
I like to set both monthly and quarterly benchmarks so we can drill down to specifics and also see how all the benchmarks are working together during regular reviews. Like how did launches or evergreen promotions do each quarter compared to each other or the previous quarter? Or how engagement or growth of this particular month theme do compared to last month’s? How did our team react to increased (or decreased) workload?
Once we analyze all the factors and start to establish the baseline, setting the next benchmark or goal is fairly easy. You want to set the new and improved benchmark as a mark that will stretch your team but be attainable in reality. For instance, you’ve been sitting at 20% list growth, but with the right promotions this quarter your next benchmark is 35%. This helps you set your goals and helps break down what tasks or project planning needs to happen to exceed the benchmark.
You can do this a million different ways, but I find by hand or spreadsheet is the easiest. Nothing fancy, no tools or tracking devices. Just simple math and analysis.
In a nutshell, setting a benchmark gives you the mark- we make the plan of attack. As you start monitoring your benchmarks and setting new (or different ones) you’ll be able to see clearly where you need improvements and what, if any, blindspots are preventing you from exceeding that benchmark.
If you want to start getting in the rhythm of consistently analyzing your business, take this Sprint Review & Planning worksheet. You can set benchmarks on your own, but this worksheet will help you dive deep into your tasks to make sure you are staying on the right path (and make any adjustments as needed)!
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