Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Tracking Performance

It is always important for us to track performance regardless of the task. We watch overall gross income performance, profit and loss, inventory costs, expenses, and all sorts of other performance indicators. We also watch job performance. We track tasks like phone orders taken per person, number of customer service emails sent, and number of web site updates made. It’s extremely useful to know what jobs are being done and how efficiently they’re being performed.

There are drawbacks to all this tracking though, and I didn’t understand much of it at first. I’m still learning too, but I’ll mention a couple of lessons that I learned here. For instance, I had to learn to really analyze the numbers to get the whole story. We started tracking our shipping workers’ numbers so that we would know how many packages they ship out per day per person. Sometimes a shipping worker’s numbers would be far lower one day. They might have been taking inventory or working on something still important, but not related to the single number we were watching. It was a problem. We’ve since learned to judge performance based on a number of factors, not just one.

Another issue with performance tracking is deciding how much information to provide to employees. The whole objective is to improve performance by tracking it, not to create contests or destroy quality in a wild dash for higher numbers. I’ve found that it’s best to track and privately review performance with employees instead of having the performance numbers sitting out there for all to see. We’re also trying to avoid the phenomenon where an employee hits their usual satisfactory target number and then slows down for the rest of the day.

It’s difficult to know what performance benchmarks to track and how. Every company is different and I won’t assume that your company works just like mine. I do think that performance tracking is valuable and necessary, but figuring out how is completely up to you.

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What’s in a Name?

I don’t remember exactly when the name Alice emerged as the winner. I know I put friends through tedious brainstorming. I know at one point I decided it should be a proper name rather than a “beauty” phrase, and I recall deciding to use “cosmetics” rather than “mineral makeup” because I didn’t want to limit myself, even though using the phrase “mineral makeup” would have worked better vis à vis the search engines. Thousands of women search for mineral makeup each day on the internet, and the numbers are growing . . . pray the numbers keep growing!

My funny and indomitable mother was named Gertrude Alice Keebler. Of course she hated that. So she set about changing her identity and became Kay (for Keebler, her last name). I’ve always admired her for that – to be a young woman in the 1930’s and make such an assertion stick was no minor accomplishment.

Though happily known as Kay by friends and family all her life, she did concede a bit to officialdom by signing checks and other legal documents as G. Alice Keebler, then after marriage, G. Alice Gray. When choosing her headstone, her heirs felt a moment’s indecision, but in the end, we opted for what we knew she would want, G. Alice Gray.

So what about Alice? A perfectly nice though under-used name. An accessible, welcoming name. A name that took second place to an initial! Alice it was.

Of course there is that other Alice—the one created by Lewis Carroll in 1865 and the one I studied as a graduate student in Oxford once upon a time. Clearly books for adults as well as children, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are classics along with their beloved namesake. Carroll’s Alice is always curious, always adventurous, always undaunted.

Not a bad thing to hitch our wagon to her star, linking our search for beauty as we age gracefully with her enchanted travels through the looking glass.

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Outsourcing Woes

Outsourcing the tasks or things in your business that you are not very good at or that are just too time consuming is a great idea. Most of the time this can be an awesome decision and can free up valuable time and energy to pour into the important things like generating new business and customer satisfaction.

Though I am great with photography, I am not much of a web designer. I even took classes on HTML and Flash in college but found it incredibly time consuming and couldn’t personally translate the “numbers and letters” of HTML into photos, colors, and design elements. In comes my web designer specific for the photographer’s needs! They do all the design but I can customize the sight on a daily basis by changing text, photos, and colors whenever I want! It’s been really great…until this week! This week I was informed that my site was accidentally deleted along with all the photos and info as it was being transfered over to a new server. What!? All gone?! I have to start from scratch at the beginning the summer wedding season?! Yep. The positive spin on it is that I will get a shiny new updated website with all the bells and whistles with great customer service!

I was frustrated at first because I am thinking of all the hours of work that will have to go into this remodel that I wasn’t really looking to do right now. In truth, it will probably be really good for my branding. I had a website before I had a clear brand. Now that my brand is better understood and established (with the help of Logo Works!) I will be able to design my site more specifically around it. Hopefully you’ll be able to check out the new and improved site before the end of this month!

Jason

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Learning to Give Responsibilities to Others

Being a (very) small business owner, I’ve experienced a trend over and over again that never seems to get easier: giving up responsibilities, duties, and decision making to employees.

When we started eReplacementParts.com every responsibility fell directly on the owner’s shoulders. We were in charge of building the site, writing all the content, taking all the orders, and shipping all the tool parts. Just from talking to other small business owners I know, it seems that lots of companies start this way. Perhaps yours did as well. Maybe it still operates that way.

For us right now, growth is our focus. We work hard to sell as many parts as we can and not be content with simply maintaining sales levels. As we grow, we need more people to make the company work and that means I have to give some, and then eventually most, of my responsibilities to others. To be honest, it’s tough to let go. Now we have entire departments dedicated to shipping our packages, taking customer phone calls, and building the website. When I walk through our building, I pass many people and their jobs used to be my job. I took a lot of pride in doing those jobs and it’s hard to really let go and trust that my employees will handle things as well as I did. And while they’re not clones of me, they’re able to handle their individual responsibilities just as well as I can and they’re far more specialized.

I think giving up responsibility is a tough thing for any business owner. For some small companies, the goal is to maintain size and perhaps the owner prefers to retain a large share of the load. That’s fine, but I believe that a small business will remain a small business as long as the owner is the primary worker. Potential is limited. If the goal is to grow, a business owner must give up some responsibilities to employees so that he/she can focus more on the company itself.

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