Are you struggling to get ahead in your market?

I hear you are ‘working even harder than before and still not making progress’ in your market. ​Perhaps it’s just that you don’t think that you are making progress. Especially when you know how your business is performing today compared to how it was in the past. ​However, what you don’t know is how much better your business could be performing.

What does the best performing company look like? Can this help you get ahead in your market?

Yes it can. Imagine that you had the blueprint to the world's best company. You could tell how your business compared with the best. It may be that your business has improved, but as your market has shifted, you have fallen behind. How would you know?

You know by looking at performance benchmarks for your industry. If you have performance benchmarks these are very useful for identifying where you may have a gap in performance and if so, how large it is. However, performance benchmarks will not help with what you need to do to close the gap.

You could compare your processes with those used by your market leader. This would likely prove difficult as you are competitors. However, a better approach is to compare your processes with the very best. 

Best practice benchmarking
Best practice benchmarking is where you compare your processes with those from the very best performing organisations from any industry. For example, for a long-haul airline, you would benchmark your services with the very best organisations whose core business is ticketing, logistics, restaurants, hotel accommodation, and any other similar service you offer your customers.

Gaining insights from the best processes from other industries highlights the gaps in your own business and what improvements need to be made. In this way your improved processes perform at a higher level than others in your market. Aiming for best practice enables you to get in front of your market and become the industry leader.

Every business today needs to compare itself against an ideal of excellence. so that they can see what is possible.  You need to be able to measure how you perform against the world’s best. Knowing where you sit means that you can make intelligent decisions. It may be that you are happy where you are. Or maybe you need to lift performance to a whole new level for a brighter future. When you aim for world’s best you will gain market share in your industry.