If you want more success in your business then understand your critical number

The key area for growth and longevity in your business in based upon the successful recruiting, training and ongoing development of your team.A Company is just that - a group of people and to have those people fully engaged with the purpose of the Company, they have to know your critical number.So what is the critical number?

That's the number that you as the owner or the team at the top has discovered is the key measurable in the ongoing success of the business. It can be many different things and usually it's geared towards the generation of profits. If you are in a production business it may be a metric based on cost and sale value differential, if you're in marketing perhaps it's in the number of leads generated.

To find your critical number you need to look into the workings of your business and how each area affects the balance sheet of the Company. In there you will discover a very basic conclusion - if we focus on this then this will happen.

When you have discovered that number, the next objective is to forecast what you want that number to be and how that will affect the business overall.

Always keep one eye on the big picture. This will come in the way of cash forecasting. Create a 12-month cash flow projection based on your critical number to give a simple easy to understand metric that the whole workforce can relate to.

When that's done, its time to educate the team on why that number is so special and how each member of the team influences it. People need to know that they have a bigger purpose rather than just going through the daily motions and teaching them the basic rules of business is a great way to create massive engagement.

If they know how they can affect the critical number and it's aligned with what they want from their working life you suddenly have a huge amount of ownership all across the business.

So if you don't know your number and haven't got maximum team buy in give it a go. If you want to learn more read Jack Stacks fantastic book The Great Game of Business..