Free Business Benchmarking for Small Business is here!

The team of advisors and researchers associated with this project has over 60 years of collective experience training, measuring and understanding literally thousands of small part-time home-based and lifestyle businesses right through to fast growing entrepreneurial firms. For many years now we have repeatedly defined and refined the various meanings of success for small business owners. We have come to the conclusion that every small business would be best served using a customised measure of YOUR success, which focuses on what matters to YOU in YOUR specific industry.

WA Small Business Benchmarks (WASBB) aims to achieve this with a novel benchmarking tool that gives you an opportunity to confidentially compare your performance to other similar businesses every year, across a range of easy to understand measures. In the medium term we are intent on building multiple communities of best practice in literally hundreds of different industries. There are already over 700 different industry types in our database, with this list growing all the time, there will be one right for you. All we need to make it work for you is to have four or more similar businesses complete the tool and you are on your way to measuring your success the way you want to!

The information required to benchmark a small business is designed to be quick and simple for you to supply, with one 30 minute session using our online collection tool.  Once you have provided your business information you will be given an immediate ranking of your business, known as the SB2 (Small Business Success Benchmark). This is a ranking against other similar businesses at the most detailed level available, without disclosing any confidential information.

As more and more businesses use WASBB, the benchmark database will grow. To keep you up to date in tracking your own performance, you are given password protected access to the data for the entire year. You will also have access to simple instructions on how to use the SB2 output. This will help you to define and achieve your own measures of best practice and small business success.

The project has many sponsors and supporters in the WA small business community who assist us by promoting the tool to their networks, and by providing significant discounts and rewards to businesses that take part. So, if you get an email, letter or phone call asking you to register for WASBB, it probably came from someone that is as keen to see you succeed as we are! We invite you to take the first step in benchmarking your way to success by clicking to proceed.

At the base of this page you will see three short video segments that explain the Snapshots from 2008, the output from the SB2 tool and an explanation of the first steps of the data collection (creating an account and selecting your industry code).

This project is part funded by Curtin University of Technology. More information and research output including industry snapshots can be found by visiting www.business.curtin.edu.au/wasbb .