How’s Business? How mentors can help turn insights into actions.

A free benchmarking report is being offered to Kiwi SMEs this month, thanks to Kiwi-designed benchmarking tool Ranqx and ASB. This benchmarking report will enable businesses to compare their performance against competitors in their industry.

Business Mentors New Zealand is a not-for-profit organisation that supports the success and growth of small to medium-sized enterprises (SME). When you’re facing new challenges in your business, looking to grow or just starting out, mentors help to guide you along and give you a fresh perspective based on their knowledge and experience.

The powerful benchmarking and industry comparison data provided by Ranqx offer business owners important insights into their performance against the competition and within the wider industry. Where mentors can be a huge help is around knowing what to do with this data and where to focus your efforts.

You might find out that your company revenue is higher but your operating profit might be less than the rest of your industry, and this would show you where you need to make changes to your business in order to be more successful. Benchmarking information takes the guesswork away and gives you solid insights to use when making business decisions.

Lisa Ford, General Manager of Business Mentors NZ says;

“Businesses can be very competitive and can be quite isolated from one another. For example, a local cafe might be wondering how the cafe down the road is doing, but they can’t just walk down and ask. Using business benchmarking data allows them to understand the competition and add value to what they are doing to try and improve. It lets them see the areas where they are behind, so they can focus on these parts of their business.”

Mentors can help steer the ship by offering advice based on benchmarking data, as sometimes business owners don’t necessarily have the expertise to turn these insights into actions. Mentors have experience and skills that they can pass on to businesses to make the most of the information available and adapt to succeed.

The Business Mentors programme has a delivery network of 14 mentor managers around the country that recruits mentors from all areas of business. They understand their personalities, skills and experiences and are able to match these to the types of clients they would like to help, as well as the clients that would benefit from their support.

One important way that mentors are helpful is by providing input from outside of your industry. As Lisa mentions, “you don’t know what you don’t know,” and this outside perspective can be valuable for you to learn from the experiences and expertise of others with a fresh set of eyes.

Knowledge gaps such as social media might not be obvious if you’re used to a certain way of doing things, and this is where mentors can help guide you and offer advice on best practice. For mentors, they have a responsibility to be up to date in terms of their own practice, so there’s huge value for them to be actively involved in the programme as well.

Learn more about Ranqx business benchmarking and sign up for a free report.

Learn more about Business Mentors.