The other day, I wrote about ways to track your productivity and the work that you are doing in your home business by creating categories and subject areas. While this may be helpful for some, there are other ways to periodically check to see if we are moving forward and following our overall plan to build our business. If you have a determined goal and a plan that you are using to grow your business, you can also create “benchmarks” or areas where you can stop, reflect, re-evaluate and check off once you have achieved them.
A “benchmark” is really a key or pivotal point along the way to a long term goal. Instead of checking off every single task that you do daily, weekly or monthly, you can determine what the major areas or achievements are and make those your benchmarks. For example, you may use income or profit amounts as benchmarks. Once you reach $10,000 in revenue, or $50,000 annually. Or, perhaps, you find a monthly or weekly goal more manageable and create benchmarks at $500, $1000, and $1500 or whatever works for you in your business. You might also want to consider number of customers or clients, networking benchmarks or events. If you attend conferences and trade shows, you might create a benchmark of 5 a year, 10 a year, etc.
What I like about benchmarks is that they can bridge the gap between short term goals and activities and long term ones. They also help me to map out and celebrate the achievements along the way to my ultimate goal. It gives me a real plan that I can follow along instead of trying to stay motivated to get from zero to the ultimate goal. You may also find that benchmarks are a good way of tracking your business efforts and staying motivated on building your home business.