The open standard for measuring a small businesses’ ability to survive.
The famously misattributed quote “What gets measured gets done” (despite its detractors) makes the fair point that without some way to measure a thing, it becomes extremely difficult to improve it (let alone to have a meaningful conversation about how it might be improved). The BVI is an open effort to create a standard way that to measure a SME’s Vitality— that is, its ability to survive, so that collectively we can do better at supporting small businesses that service important and hard to reach corners of our society.
Who’s this for?
This document outlines the BVI standard, and attempts to do so in an interesting, easy to consume kind of way. Its designed for both people who run small businesses (owners and leadership teams) and people who advise (accountants, bookkeepers, coaches, mentors, advisors) and support (investors, funders, brokers, government) small businesses. It hopes to create a common language and set of activities for all of these groups to talk around the broad concept of small business vitality.
Why a standard?
Its not as if the problem of understanding what makes a SME successful hasn’t been considered before— over time there have been many solutions developed. You’ve no doubt come across multiple “systems” and “frameworks” in your own journey. While this creates and communicates a rich set of ideas, which is always nice there are some major problems with the approach:
- Reinvention: There is a lot of wasted effort involved in everybody re-imagining the basics of how businesses of this class work and function. That effort could be far better spent on individualised / high value activities.
- Mistranslation: With everyone re-inventing the wheel there are a lot of ways to talk about the same thing, or worse, terminology can be reused across people’s systems in different ways. While you might think you’re talking about the same thing are you really?
- No Comparison: Its often hard to draw a line between the way groups measure their businesses, and so if you want to actually use these measures to meaningfully understand differences between businesses or to build strategies that apply to multiple businesses you need to re-measure and re-educate the team doing the measuring with your new method.
Thanks to this we end up with a landscape with a lot of noise, and a lack of cooperation and very little effective direction being offered to new businesses or businesses dealing with new problems. So its time to create a new standard!
Ok… point taken— but there is still a bunch of benefit to having some standardisation in a space that lacks any, so with some of the drawbacks in mind lets lay out what we’re trying to do. To be useful the BVI is deliberately:
- Limited: We’re not trying to boil the ocean. The BVI must only include those key things that in combination move a business towards a higher level of sophistication / resilience / maturity.
- General: The BVI must be structured to help the class of businesses of a certain size and sophistication rather than a given industry vertical or configuration.
- Understandable: The BVI must be quick to understand. If its too long winded or complex for a busy SME owner to pick up without a bunch of education then its out of the scope of the BVI.
- Actionable: The BVI must be able to be implemented in a standard SME.
- Compatible: The BVI must maintain broad compatibility, using the same language and ideas as existing systems out there.
- Free: The BVI must always be free to use, free to extend, free to contribute to. This will allow it to grow, to represent the best, and to continue to be useful to the wider business community.
Example
Ok ok, but what does it actually look like? Whats the output? Show me some pretty pictures…
[BVI Image]
Hopefully that is instantly understandable— but there is a bunch fo stuff that goes into it, and a bunch of ways it can be used that are worth exploring… so go on… read the rest of the site for the juicy details.
Version History
The BVI is a growing versioned standard that is contributed to by the wider business community.
Date | Version | Description |
20/10/2024 | 0.1 | Initial Version of the BVI |
Following Along
Interested in learning / applying the BVI but don’t have anything to contribute right now? You can still follow along as we continue to learn and develop the standard on our regular live streams, YouTube channel, or by following us on LinkedIn. Across all of these channels we’re constantly reviewing whats going on in the world of small business and posting the latest updates / changes / interpretations of things through the lens of the BVI.
- Live Streams
- YouTube
- BVI Newsletter (Quarterly Update Email)
Where can I find it?
The BVI is the brainchild of the team behind Entactic— an innovative tool designed to the be the space for Small Businesses teams to work on their businesses precisely because it felt non-sensical to re-invent this wheel in a proprietary black box again! We’re actively searching for participation from the wider business community so if you’re interested at all check out the “Contributing” page.