Cumbria Business Growth Hub is really pleased to offer Cumbrian businesses access to the Benchmark Index (BI), the gold standard in benchmarking services and best of all its free!
If you are not familiar with benchmarking, this is a great opportunity for you to learn how it can help your business to become more efficient, resilient and productive. For those of you already familiar, it gives you an opportunity to access this valuable resource free of charge.
Benchmark Index
Benchmark Index provides real time business performance data to create a baseline of your current levels of attainment, powerful assessment of your business’s strengths and weaknesses in particular areas, and the means to track your progress over time. It is a proven and reliable resource that has been used by more than 500,000 businesses across the globe over the past 30 years.
Cumbria Business Growth Hub is offering access to four of the Index’s tools.
- Business Model This tool analyses your needs by understanding where you are now and your current business model, and identifies opportunities for growth, providing a firm foundation for you and an adviser to conduct an impactful strategic review of your business.
- Growth Assessment. Taking less than two minutes to complete, this ingenious application identifies the current performance and future growth ambition/potential of your business, signposting to valuable resources to help you develop.
- Finance Benchmarking. This tool provides insights that will help you take an in-depth review of the financial health of your business. Your financial performance is benchmarked against similar businesses across the 4 dimensions of profitability, stability, productivity and growth.
- BI Supply Chain. This diagnostic provides a foundation for you to complete a supply chain review of your business. It assesses business practices and performance across 10 dimensions, including leadership and management, resources, relationships, ad regulatory.
The depth and time investment varies for each tool, but all are modest when compared against the insights gained and the value of the exercise. An adviser can help you every step of the way, helping with any questions you may have and personalising the exercise for your business.
At the end of each assessment, you will receive a bespoke, easy-to-understand report that identifies ways to improve your business’s profits, productivity, resilience and competitiveness. The results, based on comparison with more than 150,000 businesses, are completely objective and offer up-to-date national and international comparisons. With the Benchmark Index, your data is completely secure and used solely for the purpose of anonymised assessment. The quality of data held is rigorously protected to ensure complete accuracy.
Why Benchmark?
Business assessments of this nature provide valuable insights into performance by comparing processes, practices and outcomes against industry standards and competitors. Analysing key performance indicators and metrics helps you understand how your business measures up to others in your sector and beyond. These insights not only gauge a business’s performance, but also provide valuable market intelligence which enables the adoption of best practices and increased innovation.
Benchmarking is not just for large, global businesses who routinely benchmark their performance. It is particularly valuable for SMEs as it allows them to gain insights into industry best practices and identify areas where they can improve their operations and competitiveness. It is also useful across sectors.
We encourage you to take advantage of this offer. Anyone interested please email info@cumbriagrowthhub.co.uk
We’ll be working over the next few months to develop and enhance the benchmarking tool further – this first version has been funded to support businesses in Allerdale and Copeland (up to 30th June) by the UK Shared Prosperity Fund.