Part 2 - Field Guide

9 Key Self-Evaluation Questions

The key to a successful and worthwhile self-evaluation process is, to be honest. Anything less makes the process worthless. The value of admitting where we are weak or less effective is the first step to overcoming and improving. Understanding your strengths and exploiting them is extremely powerful.

Every business owner and manager has “employee favorites”. When evaluating your employees, make sure you put the “friendship” on hold. Being anything but 100% honest with them is not helping them. The best way to help them is, to be honest with them. This applies to your suppliers as well

Most successful businesses and individuals “self-evaluate” themselves, at a minimum, annually.  A quarterly self-evaluation will help you keep on track and react faster to necessary changes and opportunities.  

We urge you to take some quiet time to complete this self-evaluation process. For some, this process can take several hours, and for others, it may take just an hour or two. If you have key employees that play a major role in your operation, we encourage you to consider including them in the process. 

1) Evaluate 2022:  What went well (your successes)? Where did you fall short and why? 

2) Evaluate Your Goals for 2023:  Setting goals is quite possibly the single most important thing you can do. Share these goals with your employees. When you share goals, you have a 65% better chance of reaching them.  

3) Evaluate Your Team/Employees:  Nearly every business with employees has a pecking order from their absolute best employee(s) downward. A question to ask yourself is, “If the perfect candidate walked through your door today, would you hire them and add them to your team, or hire them to replace someone?"

4) Evaluate Your Business Category: Is your business category holding its own? Is it getting stronger or weaker? Identifying your business category will help you identify opportunities and potential roadblocks.  

5) Evaluate Your Competition:  Identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors will teach you a lot about where your potential growth areas exist and the territory that you may need to protect.  

6) Evaluate Your Community:  Small and Medium-Town-America is changing and depending upon which part of the country you are in, it can drastically dictate how viable your market is. Again, understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your community/market can help you forecast opportunities for your specific business.

7) Evaluate How You Spend Your Time:  Time vs. Money. There is an old saying that states, “You can’t have more of one without giving up some of the other”. Evaluating how you and your employees spend their time can go a long way in creating more profits and becoming a more efficiently run business.  

8) Evaluate Your Marketing/Advertising:  The world of marketing and advertising is changing as rapidly as everything else.  You’ll want to evaluate your business category and the competition’s marketing and advertising as well. The one thing that hasn’t changed in advertising is that “perception is reality”. Well-planned and executed advertising that creates Top of Mind Awareness is essential to getting your current customers and future customers to think of you first and to feel best about you when the time comes for them to need or want your product or service.  

9) Evaluate Your Vendors:  You should always be judging and evaluating your vendors. With all the disruptions in the past two and a half years, still there are opportunities abound. Are your current vendors taking care of you and do they have your best interest at heart? RFPs (Requests for Proposal) from your current vendors and new vendors are one way to make sure you are receiving the best deals possible. It also serves as a notice to your current vendors that they should not take your business for granted.