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The Leading Business Advisor to New Zealand Growth Companies. Grumley+Company assists New Zealand businesses with every phase of the business lifecycle – from launch and growth to maintaining and thriving.
Our key business advisor Toss Grumley guides over 200 New Zealand companies with the right advice, plans, strategy and structure. His insights are based on growing his own businesses and a coaching framework developed from his MBA at Warwick Business School in the UK.
Toss’s management career began early, when he became general manager of a leading wholesale supply company at the age of twenty-five.
As a Director & Shareholder Toss has helped grow multiple eight figure businesses and has successfully exited three businesses to date.
Proactive and innovative, Toss brings clarity, confidence and a structured approach. Passionate about helping business owners, he shares his experiences and insights widely as a regular contributor to national business media.
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Business benchmarking can be a great way to track your progress, but only if you’re doing it right.
Too often, we meet business owners who are overwhelmed with too much information, tracking dozens of metrics and comparing themselves against industry averages, without taking away anything actionable that supports their strategy.
In our experience, when it comes to business benchmarking, the goal shouldn’t be to collect more data, it’s to find the reference points that best reflect how the business is performing, and where your attention should go next.
Benchmark Against What Actually Matters to Your Business
We work across a wide range of sectors, and one thing that becomes obvious very quickly is that there’s no universal definition of “good”. Your business model, size, maturity, customer mix and growth strategy will all have an influence on what a healthy result looks like.
That’s why we prefer to look at benchmarking from a few different angles. How are you performing against similar businesses? How does that compare with your own results over the last year or two? And, importantly, are the numbers moving you closer to the goals you’ve set?
Which KPIs Should Business Owners Actually Be Watching?
For most businesses, a small group of business KPIs will tell you far more than a wall of numbers that nobody has the time to interpret. If growth is the priority, you’ll watch different performance metrics than a business focused on reducing risk or preparing for an eventual exit.
For all businesses, revenue is important, but sustainable revenue that shows growth is much more indicative of a healthy business. You can look to your margin to see whether your revenue is translating into profitability, or to your cash flow to see whether sales are only covering your bills, or giving you enough cushion to invest and grow.
Depending on your business, other valuable KPIs might include customer retention, customer concentration, revenue per employee or progress against key strategic goals.
The right KPIs for a small business all come back to the question, what are you trying to achieve right now?
Look at Trends, Not Just Numbers
A rough month doesn’t mean you’re off the rails, but a great month doesn’t mean you’ve cracked it either.
Business benchmarking is far more useful when you track the same measures consistently and start looking for patterns. Compare current performance against previous periods, your budget or forecast, and relevant external benchmarks where they add context.
More importantly, ask why the number moved. If margin dropped, was it pricing, supplier costs or a change in sales mix? If revenue increased but cash tightened, what happened between invoicing and payment? What’s behind the numbers tells you much more than the numbers themselves.
Turn Benchmarking Into Better Business Decisions
Once you know if your performance is ahead or behind expectations, the next step is working out what’s driving it and how to move the dial. The new priority might be tightening costs, changing pricing, reducing your reliance on one or two major customers, or redirecting resources towards the parts of the business giving you the strongest return.
At Grumley+Company, our process builds these conversations into regular strategic and quarterly planning, because performance data is more powerful if you can act on it quickly, and with accountability.
Want a better view of how your business is performing and what your biggest opportunities are? Book a consultation with our team today.
For more on turning information into action, read Tools That Accelerate Business Growth.
How NZ Businesses Should Think About Benchmarking (And Which KPIs Actually Matter)
Business benchmarking can be a great way to track your progress, but only if you’re doing it right.
Too often, we meet business owners who are overwhelmed with too much information, tracking dozens of metrics and comparing themselves against industry averages, without taking away anything actionable that supports their strategy.
In our experience, when it comes to business benchmarking, the goal shouldn’t be to collect more data, it’s to find the reference points that best reflect how the business is performing, and where your attention should go next.
Benchmark Against What Actually Matters to Your Business
We work across a wide range of sectors, and one thing that becomes obvious very quickly is that there’s no universal definition of “good”. Your business model, size, maturity, customer mix and growth strategy will all have an influence on what a healthy result looks like.
That’s why we prefer to look at benchmarking from a few different angles. How are you performing against similar businesses? How does that compare with your own results over the last year or two? And, importantly, are the numbers moving you closer to the goals you’ve set?
Which KPIs Should Business Owners Actually Be Watching?
For most businesses, a small group of business KPIs will tell you far more than a wall of numbers that nobody has the time to interpret. If growth is the priority, you’ll watch different performance metrics than a business focused on reducing risk or preparing for an eventual exit.
For all businesses, revenue is important, but sustainable revenue that shows growth is much more indicative of a healthy business. You can look to your margin to see whether your revenue is translating into profitability, or to your cash flow to see whether sales are only covering your bills, or giving you enough cushion to invest and grow.
Depending on your business, other valuable KPIs might include customer retention, customer concentration, revenue per employee or progress against key strategic goals.
The right KPIs for a small business all come back to the question, what are you trying to achieve right now?
Look at Trends, Not Just Numbers
A rough month doesn’t mean you’re off the rails, but a great month doesn’t mean you’ve cracked it either.
Business benchmarking is far more useful when you track the same measures consistently and start looking for patterns. Compare current performance against previous periods, your budget or forecast, and relevant external benchmarks where they add context.
More importantly, ask why the number moved. If margin dropped, was it pricing, supplier costs or a change in sales mix? If revenue increased but cash tightened, what happened between invoicing and payment? What’s behind the numbers tells you much more than the numbers themselves.
Turn Benchmarking Into Better Business Decisions
Once you know if your performance is ahead or behind expectations, the next step is working out what’s driving it and how to move the dial. The new priority might be tightening costs, changing pricing, reducing your reliance on one or two major customers, or redirecting resources towards the parts of the business giving you the strongest return.
At Grumley+Company, our process builds these conversations into regular strategic and quarterly planning, because performance data is more powerful if you can act on it quickly, and with accountability.
Want a better view of how your business is performing and what your biggest opportunities are? Book a consultation with our team today.
For more on turning information into action, read Tools That Accelerate Business Growth.