Benchmarking things like increases in revenue and customer/project count is essential to understanding where your company has been and where it is going. However, whether building strategies for your entire operation or focusing on benchmarks for planning and measuring success for each particular project, your compliance, contracting, and customer issue resolution processes should be an integral part of your strategies. Including these components in your planning and measurement processes will better allow you to control and manage budget and expense considerations. Omitting them could result in unforeseen expenses and throw your entire planning and measurement strategy off kilter.
For big-picture business management, your benchmarking should include how well you’re complying with issues such as legal establishment of your business entity, taxes, insurance, licensing, employment standards, criminal background screening of employees and subcontractors, and adequate subcontracts and sub-management processes. Developing ways to benchmark these processes will allow you to better manage your business and expenses and assure you are properly measuring success.
These items are the foundation and infrastructure of your business that, properly managed, will allow the business to focus on the more exciting aspects of business, such as revenue and customer growth. Failing to include these components in your benchmarking strategy builds a planning process that ignores the essential foundation upon which all potential success builds.
On the project level, it is also essential that benchmarking your compliance, contracting, and issue resolution processes is a key component of your strategy. From a compliance standpoint, proper job permitting is an obvious concern. But did you also know that:
- Regulations in most states dictate many of the terms and conditions that must be included in your customer contracts?
- Proper criminal background checking of employees and subcontractors is not only a safety precaution; it is a great marketing tool for your business?
- Having a consistent process to address customer issues and disputes not only saves money in the long run, it often results in stronger referrals for your business to other customers?
Building these concerns into your success strategy and measuring them pursuant to your benchmarking process will support your planned business growth and help you measure the success of those efforts. Benchmarking is an essential and effective tool to plan and measure your company’s success. Building your compliance, contracting, and customer issue resolution processes into your benchmarking strategy will help to assure that success.
—Attorney Richard Feeley is president of Feeley Mediation & Business Law, which provides legal solutions for remodelers.
