Benchmarking Against Your Industry Peers
Knowing how your business is performing against your industry, or effectively your competitors, is important to determine where you should have the capacity to improve. At Bentleys, we have access to Key Information on over 100 industries.
The following is a list of some of those industries:
- General Medical Practitioner
- Dentist
- Architect
- Building Construction
- Butcher
- Café/Restaurant
- Allied Health
Utilising the data that is provided from an Industry Benchmark enables your business to not only compare how it is performing against its own past results, but also use other business’s financial information to ensure you are on track. It could be that whilst you have improved against past results, you are still not at the level other businesses are achieving in your industry. Hence this lack of potential opportunity may never be realised.
A common example of a statistic provided by business benchmarks is the Gross Profit rate. In noticing that your gross profit rate is less than other businesses in your industry, you can then start to implement a plan to increase it. This can mean looking at any or all of the following three areas:
Changing the mix of what you sell to a greater volume of those items that provide a higher Gross Profit rate. This, in turn, requires you to have an understanding of which products are providing what level of gross profit rate
A review of any of the above on a regular basis can provide you with a basis to determine if the strategies you are putting place are effective.
At Bentleys, we have the ability to Benchmark numerous types of businesses, we would be more than happy to help your business with this service.