The Business License function performs an important service within a municipality. How do we know if it’s performing it well? In Part 1 we talked about the goals for Business Licensing with a municipality. Let’s take those goals and break them down into the key metrics we should be tracking to see how well it’s performing.
Business Management
- Business Diversity: A healthy community has a wide array of businesses to employee and service it’s region. Establishing a baseline of business types, both overall and by geographic region can help identify trends that may impact the overall health of your community.
- Business Health: Measuring year-over-year business revenue by type versus the overall economy can help identify particularly weak areas that need support.
Business Accountability
- Contact Currency: Are you able to get in touch with a business?
- Contact Freshness: How recently has someone been in touch with the business?
Business Friendliness
- Time-to-License: Average time of a new application to license issuance, broken down by type and measured over time.
- Customer Satisfaction: How satisfied are businesses with the service being received?
Cost Sharing
- Revenue: Both how are you doing for the week/month and how are you looking year-over-year?
- Delinquency/Collections: When are businesses paying?
- Accuracy: What is your audit rate (percent audited annually) and what percent of audits find discrepancies?
Economic Development
- Entrepreneurship: How many new businesses are starting each year by type and geographic area?
- Community Strengths & Opportunities: The flip side of existing business health, the same metrics can be used to identify under served business areas for recruitment or strong niches within the community that can be targeted for growth.
In Part 3, we’ll take a look at what reports you need to support these metrics.
What key metrics do you follow to make your department more effective? We’d love to hear your thoughts below!
Do you need help improving your Business License Department? Reach out to us for a free process check-up and get a report with suggestions on improving your business process.