On 2 occasions now I have been asked to present at veterinary workshops what I think the most important KPI’s are for a veterinary business.
After giving it some thought, I considered what we had designed in the ‘Business Health Check’ dashboard in Profitdiagnostix – a dashboard that I use with all new clients when assessing the health of their business. And yes, this dashboard is to me a great snapshot that would detect the most commonly occurring problems.
So log in it you have a Profitdiagnostix license and look at your Business Health Check. These are the important things:
- Your number of active clients – a service business is essentially an asset of loyal customers. If you don’t have enough customers you are dead in the water, regardless of how good you are or how great your service may be. The trend in customer number is also important – is it decreasing, static or decreasing.
- The number of customers per staff member/business unit – it’s great to have a lot of customers, but if you have too many staff members, then you are over resourced. In many industries, there is an optimal number of staff members per customer. If you have too many staff, then profits get too low. If you have too few, then quality of service drops. The business health check keeps tabs on this metric by assessing the wages you spend in your accounting system and matching it with the number of customers you have in your practice management system
- Annual spend per customer and average invoice value – are you charging enough and promoting enough high value services? Missed billing and poor service promotion result in low annual client spend and average invoice value.
- Customer facing events – for medical professionals these would be consultations, repeat consultations and vaccination appointments. No point having loads of customers if they visit you infrequently.
- Wages as a percent of revenue – are you overstaffed or are your staff not producing enough revenue? It is very common for small businesses to find themselves in cash flow difficulties because they are paying too much in wages.
Have fun, and have a look at these in the business health check