How good is your business? – the FiMO healthcheck

Identify the strengths and weaknesses in your business using the 'FiMO' framework.

Before we can talk about ‘what to do next’ we need to know how good you are now.

Using the ‘FiMO’ framework, defined below, you can identify strengths and weaknesses in your business. This framework has now been applied to thousands of businesses with staggering results. It really tells you where you need to concentrate your efforts. And if you lie to it, you are simply cheating yourself.

FiMO
The framework we use to assess a company’s performance to date is known as FiMO.

FiMO stands for:

• Finance (Fi)
• Marketing (M)
• Operations and Production (O)

The FiMO framework gives a ‘holistic’ view of the business.

Key point
A more accurate understanding of the business’s performance to date is to recognise that financial performance only reflects the marketing and operations performance in the business.
Financial performance is a consequence of marketing and operations performance.

In other words…
Your financial performance is a consequence of how good you are at selling and how good you are at doing the doing.

How does knowing this help?
To sort your financial performance you probably need to sort your marketing or operations performance.

What we mean by marketing and operations in this context
Marketing is all about getting potential customers and selling to them. And there are as many measures of marketing as there are measures of finance.

Operations is all about producing the service or product. It is all about ‘doing’. And there are as many measures of operations as there are of finance.

Thought bubble
Most business people are too much in love with their businesses. More specifically they are too much in love with their product or service.

Most people that run their own business are preoccupied with the making and the selling. In other words, operations and marketing. In fact, most business owners are preoccupied with the O and the M, but don’t know how to do marketing properly and effectively, so they put their effort into the operations while they have sleepless nights about how they could get more, better customers (marketing).

Without the ability to find customers and sell to them (the marketing), and the actual production or delivery of the service or product (the operations), then there would be very little to measure in terms of finance!

So, how good is your business?
How would we measure your business? What measures would we use to evaluate how good your business is?

At the risk of repetition
The first thing people always mention is the financial scores: turnover, profit, return on investment, but the most important measure in a recession is CASH – it may be illegal to trade without profit but it is impossible to trade without CASH.

Robert Craven shows MDs and owners how to grow their sales and profits and focuses on how to do this in recessionary times. His latest book is the runaway success “Beating the Credit Crunch – how to survive and thrive in the current recession” www.directorscentre.com

He is a keynote speaker and the author of business best-seller ‘Kick-Start Your Business’ ‘(foreword by Sir Richard Branson) and runs The Directors’ Centre, helping growing businesses to grow.
For further information, contact Robert Craven on 01225 851044 rc@directorscentre.com .