Are you driving your company by the numbers? Sales, profitability, productivity, overhead, cost of sales, cost of goods, and on and on and on. There are certainly no lack for areas of measurement in any business.

How’s that working for you?

Speed DialRecently, a business owner was describing his business and future plans to me. From scratch, over the last 20 years he had created a $20 million landscape supply company. Obviously, he was very proud of this accomplishment.

Over the next five years, he wants to double the business to $40 million. Quickly, I did the calculation in my head, realizing this is a 20% growth rate year over year.  I knew this would be extremely difficult to achieve.

I asked, “Why do you want to double your business?”

“Because it’s there,” he replied.

Yes, it was a big hairy goal. It was a challenge, a personal challenge.

“So how’s it going?” I asked.

“Not so well,” he replied, “I can’t seem to get my key employees to embrace it. I just don’t understand why.”

“I’ve put a very lucrative financial incentive in place,” he continued. “But they just don’t get it.”

Of course, they don’t get it. The employees are fully employed already, maybe even over-employed. All they see is more work and, frankly, they don’t want any more work. They already have more work than they can handle.

Every consultant has their own, Business Performance Measurement system:

Key Performance Indicators…Dashboards…Balance Scorecards…et cetera…

However, in organizations of all kinds, problems in creating performance measurement systems make it damn near impossible to implement, and there are always unanticipated outcomes.

Are you driving your vehicle without any gas?

The best-laid plans will never get you where you are going if you don’t have gas.

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