Hi all, this is more for the small business owners. How do you monitor and pay attention to how well a business is doing month over month? Apart from the obvious answer, that is, revenues and expenses etc, are there any other metrics that are good to use to give an insight into performance?
Each industry likely has its own operational metrics that are a standard for performance analysis. I would do some research via public company reports as these will often have reports dedicated to these metrics as well as comparisons and definition of methodology for measuring the metrics.
This really sounds like an AI answer! Haha. If you’re in the trade, what companies would you suggest I look at? I don’t think I’d find a similar example that I could use to compare.
Definitely not AI, but my response was somewhat generic as I don’t have familiarity in this industry. I did some market research back in the early oughts on CDRs (casual dining restaurants) for a hedge firm I was interning at. I read quarterly and annual reports for a few of the large public companies that own multiple chains. That’s where I remember there being operational metrics.
My industry is Real Estate, specifically multifamily. Some of the key metrics in this space are occupancy (physical and economic), resident retention (measured by rate of renewals), y/y rent growth, renovation premiums (think the ROI of renovating a unit measured by the increase in rent after the renovation), and many more. I have this knowledge from having worked at privately held companies in the industry, but the filings of the public companies in the industry generally align with this.
My point is that when you don’t have firsthand knowledge public filings are a great starting point.