Grow Your Business through Benchmarking

by: Kevin Stedman

Experience counts when choosing an accounting firm. Not only should you trust that your accounting firm understands the rules and regulations that apply, but more importantly, that they understand your business and industry.

We have years of experience offering traditional accounting services like tax planning and preparation, accounting and auditing and business consulting. Perhaps one of our most valuable service offerings is leveraging our vast experience to help you understand and grow your business through benchmarking.  Benchmarking is the process of comparing your business’s performance metrics with those of competitors and/or the entire industry.

Over the years, we’ve gained extensive familiarity with various industries and business structures and have seen how powerful benchmarking is as additional support in managing your business. Being able to share that information with you to give a snapshot of how you stack up to your competition is one of the most important services we can provide.  We answer some of those hard questions, like:

• Are your margins where they should be?
• Are your employee wages competitive with your peers?
• Are you paying too much for materials?

Getting answers to these questions is important to understanding your place in the industry, especially if you’re looking to grow.  Our benchmarking service is comprised of 6 simple steps:

1. Define the focus areas – Look at a few areas of your business or a comprehensive review.
2. Collect data from your company and your industry – Identify the trends and use our extensive resources and experience to define the industry standards.
3. Analyze the data – Focus on the areas most critical to your growth that need improvement.
4. Define an improvement process and establish goals – Create improvement goals and lay the foundation of how to achieve them.
5. Implement and measure – Track your results and measure whether your goals are being achieved.
6. Continuous improvement – Monitor and seek to improve the practices defined throughout the benchmarking process to communicate any issues should they arise.

Benchmarking may be a one-time practice, but we treat it as a continuous process at Hobe & Lucas. Using our resources and benchmarking services, we strive to make this process a little easier than you may have thought.

Not all businesses are the same, but understanding your industry can be a critical factor in your success. We know it can be difficult to take a step back when the daily grind is happening, so let’s work on it together.  We have the tools and experience to help you benchmark your performance the right way and find new opportunities to grow.  Contact us today to see if you would be a great candidate for our benchmarking service.  Fill out our form, call us at  216.524.8900 or contact your Hobe staff member to start unlocking this valuable information and get your edge back on the competition.