Almost everywhere I go, I run into people from all walks of life discussing Health in one form or another. Physical Health, Mental Health, the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare, weight loss programs for better health, physical trainers for better health, etc. are constantly conveying the needs. In keeping with that theme, I want to remind you that we all need to analyze the Health of our businesses—relatively often.

Some will do this, maybe once a year, some quarterly, some every other month, some monthly, some weekly, some not at all. Whatever your choice, you need to do this consistently and be brutally honest with yourself in your assessment. Utilize all resources you have available to you—surveys, customer comments, your numbers, everything you track and then give yourself a score on a 1-5 or 1-10 scale, A-F, or whatever will have the biggest impact on you.

When you do the evaluation, you need to look at and document your score in all aspects of your business. Sales, are they high enough? Profits, am I keeping enough? Operations: how many bottlenecks do I have that are impeding productivity? Systems: are they documented and clear so anyone coming in as a replacement has a guide to succeed? I could go on and on, but you get the idea. The point is that you need to do this “health assessment” of your business and as I stated earlier, you need to be brutally honest with yourself.

Once you complete this assessment, then what do you do? You need to evaluate it. You need to prioritize your opportunities, and attack the highest priorities based on the impact on your bottom line. You need to establish goals and objectives to move the 1s to 2s, the 2s to 3s, etc. Then you need to develop and document the strategies to accomplish this. Remember a plan that is not documented is not a plan. And you need to look at this plan often, updating your status and yes, evaluating your progress. You do not have to hit homeruns, but you need to move forward. As Darren Hardy put forth in his book, The Compound Effect, one tenth of one percent improvement every day… Again, the point is to move forward, grow, but to do this you need a starting point—your assessment, to benchmark your improvement.

Listed below are some of the areas (in no particular order) you may want to assess:

Subjectively keeping score. Being brutally honest. Enhancing your vision as you evaluate. All of these will help you grow, improve, move forward to deliver you dreams.

How Healthy is your Business?