It is a well know fact that many businesses fail within the first few years so how can you make sure that your business is not failing at the moment. Heres a Business Health Check for you.

Sit down quietly in your office, with your records to hand and work your way through this business health check. You dont need to do it all at once, but try and do it within a few days. You should review each question deeply in order to get a detailed view of your business.

Management:

1. Do you rely too much on one manager, including yourself?

2. What would happen if one or more managers left or were ill for some time?

3. Do you have enough managers with the right experience?

4. Do you have too many managers?

5. Are your managers trained or experienced to the optimum level?

Staff:

1. Do you have enough staff?

2. Do you have a high staff turnover?

3. Can you find staff with the right skills and experience?

4. Are your staff fully trained?

5. Are your staff in the right departments and geographic areas?

6. Do you have a strong sales and admin group?

Operations:

1. Your internal efficiency does your company run efficiently from marketing to after sales?

2. Can you manufacture or fulfill your sales quickly and meet your customers expectations?

3. Do you have bottle necks in any of your business processes?

4. Do you receive frequent complaints about any part of your business?

5. Can you provide your goods and services during sales cyclical increases?

6. Do you have high stock levels that you regularly have to sell off at below normal prices?

7. Do you have a strong marketing and advertising strategy in place?

Sales:

1. Are your sales strong and gradually increasing?

2. Are your sales reliant on external factors that you have no control on? Think ice cream seller.

3. Do you have strong cyclical sales and can you cope with them?

4. Do you have alternative products and services available for periods when your standard stock is not selling so well. Think diary sellers.

5. Do you have a strong product range that has a naturally increasing set of price points?

6. Do you have up sells available to capitalize on each customers total sales value?

7. Do sell products that are complimentary to your major products?

8. Are you selling what your customers are asking for?

9. Are the sales of one particular product diminishing?

10. Do you often get asked for something you dont have?

11. Are you sure that the prices you charge are set at the optimum level.

Financial:

1. Do you have a steady cash flow or are there periods of stagnant or negative cash flow?

2. Do you collect the majority of your invoices within 30 days?

3. Do you have a problem with obtaining loans?

4. Are your stock costs high?

5. For retail or manufacturing companies. Are your staffing costs a large proportion of your total costs?

6. For service companies. Are your charge out rates at least 200% of your staff rates.

7. For service companies. Are your consulting staff being charged out at least 75% of time?

8. Do you have a good gross profit?

Suppliers:

1. Can you suppliers force you to take large deliveries?

2. Are suppliers difficult to find?

3. Is supply readily available?

4. Do you have the opportunity of obtaining supplies from several companies?

5. Can you obtain deliveries when you need to?

Customers:

1. Do you rely on just a few customers?

2. Can some of your customers insist on lower prices?

3. Do you have a lot of late payers?

4. Is the cost of obtaining new customers high?

5. Do your customers often repeat order?

6. Do you have a high percentage of customers who only order once from you?

Market:

1. Is competition very strong?

2. Do you have a near monopoly?

3. Do you have a strong and recognized brand in your market place?

4. Are you aware of future changes in your market place and changing your offerings to meet these?

5. Are you leaving some market niches unexplored or untouched?

6. Are there markets that you could exploit?

7. Are your marketing costs a high proportion of your costs?

These questions are planned to give you a good understanding of the weaknesses of your business. If you have too many negatives then you know you have some remedial work to do.

Lee Lister

Lee Lister is Management Consultant and Program Manager with more than 25 year's management and consultancy experience and more than 20 year's program and project management experience in projects for Banking, Finance, Insurance, Leisure and Government bodies. She also have more than 10 years bid management experience ranging from bids for medium companies to large international and infrastructure bids.

British born, Lee received her BA(Hons) Financial Economics from the University of Essex. She went on to work in or for a considerable number of countries within Asia and Europe as well as Australia and the United States. While building a name for herself through helping company restructure, change management and project management consultancy, Lee became a well-known figure for her skills in analyzing, problem solving and trouble-shooting. She has consulted for many major industries, including banking, telecommunications, insurance, transportation, leisure and governments from many different countries. Some of the companies who have benefited from Lee?s expertise are Hewlett Packard, Siemans Nixdorf, Electrolux and the Philippines government.

Whilst working in the Far East she became a recognized expert on preparing and evaluating large World Bank Proposals (infrastructure projects within developing countries). These accomplishments called upon the skills of bid and project management, risk assessment, contract negotiation and supplier management and required dedicated work to very tight time scales. This expertise was acknowledged by an invitation to be the principle speaker at an International Business Development Conference in Washington, USA. She has also consulted at very senior level in several countries.

She owns and manages two companies, Biz Guru LLC in the USA and Biz Guru Services Ltd in the UK as well a considerable number of profitable web sites. She works almost entirely via the internet, visiting clients on site during major consultancies and training. Her Internet skills span from when major companies first started to consider obtaining their own web sites. During these years, she has kept up to date with the rapid changes on the internet, including the dot com boom and the resulting bust ? which her own web based companies survived.

She regularly consults, writes and lectures on business, bid management and marketing and has published numerous courses and books.