Businesses ought to have a thorough checkup on a regular basis. Rather than waiting for a major crisis to develop or something drastic to go wrong—leading to emergency treatment—businesses can benefit greatly from preventative medicine.

A business health check measures corporate performance and is designed to ensure that the firm’s procedures, systems, management and ethics continue to produce a healthy bottom line. It enables the owner and leadership team to pinpoint weaknesses and address inefficiencies in any aspect of operations and performance, as well as identify early symptoms of malaise and build a lasting structure of growth. It also sets a precedent for future monitoring of business improvements and ensures valuable resources are focused on the most critical activities.

Eight areas are essential to the life and health of a business:

• vision and planning;
• commitment to quality;
• leadership;
• decision-making;
• finance;
• marketing;
• communication; and
• information technology.

Different Approaches

Some organizations may choose to call in an experienced consultant to help them with the process. Other organizations may employ a more lean approach whereby they engage internal teams from various departments to identify process improvements and reduce waste.

Some organizations may undertake a self-diagnostic approach and analyze each operational area of the company, while others utilize a rigorous diagnostic tool, and the results are thoroughly analyzed.

Regardless of which method a business employs, any resulting change initiatives will need commitment from the top down. Almost certainly, resistance will be encountered in some form, especially when changing the culture surrounding people, performance, productivity and processes.

Several financial metrics are available on the market to provide benchmark information. These applications review a company’s performance and compare it against similar organizations within the region.

Contractors should pick a method that allows the company to identify lagging performance issues and make course adjustments.

Then, valuable resources can be focused on the most critical activities. The analysis and resulting actions should take an integrated solutions approach by determining what the business needs, and what support is required and when.

The analysis can be divided into three sections—areas for improvement, key themes and benchmark profiles—that can then be developed into an improvement plan regarding profitability, turnover and value.

Remember that change is a continuous process. Firms must continue to work on implementing changes, measuring results and making course adjustments. Only then will organizations begin to see the turn in their business and their goals being achieved.