Invest more time measuring and less time worrying

How do you measure and test in your business?

I suspect that the majority of people reading this post, would not have formal measurement processes for many parts of their business. In fact in my experience, very few businesses measure anything at all, other than the level of the bank account.

The more I delve into this space, the more it seems essential to begin to formally measure various parts of the business. It turns out that many things, for example, parts of a marketing strategy, don't work the way we think they should. And strangely enough, when things are tested the results are often the exact opposite of both what we thought and our personal preferences.

As an example of this, a number of the world's top Internet marketers have done extensive measurement and testing on “ugly" websites that sell product versus “pretty" websites that sell product. And of course there are exceptions to the rule, but in the main, ugly websites, ugly sales letters and ugly video sales letters significantly outperform the prettier and more professionally produced websites, sales letters and video sales letters.

The challenging thing for most Business owners is that their ego gets in the way and they choose a website, for example, that they prefer themselves rather than testing and measuring to see which performs better.

This is just one example, but there are many areas of the small business that could and should be tested and measured to improve performance. A focus in these areas can often add thousands of dollars to the bottom line very quickly and with little to no expense. By just knowing your metrics and making a few simple tweaks and changes.

If it's not measured, it won't be managed.