Cumbria Business Growth Hub is offering an exciting new service to all businesses in Cumbria: business performance assessments. Successful businesses regularly use these types of tools because they provide objective insights into strengths and areas for improvement, drive performance gains and underpin informed decision-making using data. This is proven to lead to improved competitiveness, accelerated growth, greater efficiency, and increased profitability.
The many benefits of the BenchmarkIndex® tools include:
- Performance Improvement: Compare your performance against industry standards to identify areas for improvement and insight into best practices.
- Develop Fresh Strategies: By understanding how well firms perform, you can make informed decisions in areas such as resource allocation, investment, and market positioning.
- Competitive Advantage: Identifying and adopting industry best practices can help you stay ahead of the pack in disciplines such as quality, customers service and efficiency.
- Cost Reduction: Benchmarking highlights areas for cost reduction and process improvement.
- Risk Management: Understanding how others handle challenges and risks can help you to prepare for potential challenges and proactively develop risk management strategies before problems strike.
- Investor and Stakeholder Confidence: Showing your performance against industry standards can inspire confidence by spotlighting the areas where you excel.
The assessments tools are user-friendly, with the associated questionnaires usually taking between 10 and 30 minutes to complete. The questions are designed to get you thinking about your business, and once they have been answered, you will be presented with a report that feeds back results demonstrating performance levels.
You can choose to work with an experienced business adviser who has been trained to interpret the results. They will help you analyse the findings, placing these in the context of your business, and, most importantly, support you in developing improvement plans to help your business to improve. They will also help you source relevant resources, such as funding, business support services and suitable events. Alternatively one of the team at Cumbria Business Growth Hub will be on hand to talk you through the tool so you can have a go on your own.
We’re currently offering the following three assessment tools with further tools being added over time. You can choose to use one, two or all three.
Business Model Diagnostic: this tool helps to analyse your needs by understanding where you are now, your business model and opportunities for growth. The tool looks at a 10 business operations areas – Leadership, Finance, Value Proposition, Customers, Markets, Products, People, Operations, Sustainability and Innovation. This exercise will provide a firm foundation to complete a strategic review of your company.
Supply Chain Resilience: this tool provides a foundation for you to complete a supply chain review of your business across 10 key dimensions – Leadership & Management, Resources, Relationships, Regulatory, Sustainability, Operational, Digital Competence, Commercial, Innovation and Finance.
Finance Benchmark: this benchmarking assessment enables you to undertake an in-depth review of the financial health of your business. It compares your performance with that of similar enterprises and the financial results are presented graphically, covering Returns Generated, Stability, Productivity and Growth.
Finally you can access a growth assessment tool via https://cumbriagrowth.benchmarkindex.net. After providing a few basic details you can access the tool, answers a handful of questions, and literally within a few minutes, you will have a report showing your current and future growth characteristics.
Anyone interested please email info@cumbriagrowthhub.co.uk or call 0844 257 8450.