Your baseline establishes your starting point for any endeavor. Fail to know your baseline before you begin anything new, robs you of the opportunity to measure your progress and gauge whether you are doing better or worse than expected. Put another way, no baseline means you don’t know what you are trying to do.
Improve your profits and cash flow by knowing the baseline for anything you want to improve so you can set a goal to do better and know what the gap to close is between where you are in the beginning and where you intend to end up.
Overview
You can’t control what you can’t manage, and you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Anything you want to improve starts by first establishing your baseline measurement. The baseline is the starting point for comparisons.
Once you know your baseline, you can set your goal targets. After you establish your targets against their baseline, you know the gap size you are trying to close. With this information in place, you can now measure progress against your baseline to determine if what you are doing is producing better or worse than where you had planned to be.