44 Examples of Business Performance

John Spacey, June 28, 2023

Business performance is how well a business achieves its objectives. This can't be measured with a single metric but rather requires a set of balanced metrics to capture. For example, if you measured a business on quarterly profitability alone, that business might damage its reputation, customer relationships and brand value in order to achieve this objective. The following are common ways to measure business performance.

Revenue and revenue growth	Gross margins
Net profit	Return on investment
Return on assets	Return on equity
Overhead costs	Revenue per employee
Accounts receivable turnover	Debt
Interest coverage ratio	Current ratio
Free cash flow	Operating expenses
Capacity utilization	Inventory turnover
Market share	Churn rate
Customer satisfaction	Net promoter score
Customer loyalty	Customer acquisition cost
Customer lifetime value	Customer engagement
Customer complaints	Product returns
Employee satisfaction	Brand recognition
Brand awareness	Employee turnover rate
Employee tenure	Safety incidents
Cybersecurity incidents	Product ratings by customers
Service ratings by customers	Reputation scores such as brand perception surveys
Service reliability rate	Defect rate
Product and service performance metrics [industry specific]	Cost of Quality
Cost of Risk	Standards compliance
Regulatory compliance	Environmental and social impact

All of the metrics above indicate much about the state of a business. How this is interpreted is industry specific. For example, there is a large difference in revenue per employee based on the labor and capital intensity of an industry. As such, performance is benchmarked against peers in the same industry.

How you measure the performance of teams in a business may be very different from how you measure the business as a whole. For example, you may view win rate as important to sales or conversion rate as important to marketing but these aren't typically relevant to the entire business.

Next: Business Goals

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