CooperRatings has been designed as a way for a business to check out its performance. Self-service. Behind CooperRatings is a lifetime of experience with small businesses: enterprises that know the importance of every dollar. CooperRatings is already being used by individual businesses for two things: to explore their current performance - and to revisit that analysis periodically to track their improvement. It has also been found useful by business consultants as a quick and cost efficient check before embarking on a full and often costly Business Plan. The CooperRatings site will grow as you watch. Already it provides benchmarks in the relatively intangible area of operations management. Shortly it will offer a quick but effective financial module that adds a harder edge to the operational analysis. In time, it will release a planning module that provides an interactive way of building an action plan for the things that have been shown to be in need of attention. And all the time, continuing research is adding to the depth and subtlety of the benchmarks built into the system. So not only can you ask "how am I doing?" but also "compared to what?" ...