How efficient is your small or mid-sized business? These 6 steps can help your business run more smoothly.
How Efficient Is Your Business?
As a business owner, you have first-hand knowledge that running your company requires a lot of time, energy, and resources. Waste is not a luxury smaller business can afford. Due to smaller resources and budgets, it is important to make sure your energy and time are well-spent. If you want to increase your chances of continued success and achieve your business goals, making your business more efficient is key.
Efficiency makes your business run more smoothly, with less wasted time and effort. In fact, business efficiency can help your company:
Reduce operating costs
Increase profitability
Improve employee productivity and morale
Increase customer satisfaction levels
Improve competitiveness
Here are 6 steps you can implement to increase the efficiency of your small business.
How to Increase Efficiency In Your Small Business
Review Your Business Processes
What is working and what is not? Conducting a business process review is a good way to evaluate your current business process and identify ways to make them more efficient. Start by identifying and mapping out all your current processes and get detailed information from the people involved in any roadblocks or challenges they may be facing. It’s also good practice to create a visual representation of your business processes, and how they interact with people, departments, and software. This makes it easier to identify potential gaps. You should also conduct meetings with staff to brainstorm solutions. Then focus on an improvement plan by mapping out realistic and measurable objectives and key actions that will help you meet your overall business goals. Finally, find out if or how technology can fit into your action plan to create more efficient processes.
Need an expert? If you’d like help with reviewing and optimizing your business processes, book a free consultation with our team to get started.
Bring Your Processes and Software Together
If you’re a business owner, you might find yourself using different applications to manage your company. Accounting software to prepare invoices, CRM software to manage your contacts and pipeline, perhaps another system that tracks production and inventory, and of course, email to communicate with your customers and vendors. Switching back and forth between fragmented systems like this takes up a lot of time and may require duplicate data entry. It is not an efficient way to work and you might be wasting a lot of unnecessary time and energy. A simple solution to this is investing in a comprehensive business management solution that allows you to do all of this from one platform.
Automate Repetitive Tasks
Many small businesses get bogged down with repetitive admin tasks or manual processes that waste a lot of time. This is where automation can help. By automating repetitive processes, you allow your employees to free up time so they can focus on critical, revenue-generating tasks instead. The good news is a lot of your processes can be easily automated – whether it’s generating and sending receipts to vendors, setting up automated payment reminders, or creating reports from scratch. Again, a comprehensive business management solution can easily help you automate your processes.
Keep Communication Lines Open
Poor communication is another source of inefficiency in the workplace. You can keep your employees in the loop by scheduling weekly team meetings and creating safe spaces for employees to share ideas, concerns, and give constructive feedback. Your employees may be able to spot processes that are inefficient or come up with ways to boost productivity. By encouraging them to be part of the efficiency process, it results in a more efficient team.
Utilize Marketing Automation
Marketing is another area where your business can set up some automation in place to save time and boost company productivity. Marketing automation essentially allows you to reach out to customers with automated messages across email, social media, text, and blog. Marketing automation ensures your business has a continuous online presence and helps with lead generation and nurturing. By automating some of your campaigns, your team can focus on analyzing, tweaking, and improving results to generate more traffic, leads, or sales for your business, while saving time and money.
Limit Interruptions & Meetings
Are you seeing a lot of internal meetings? While a weekly team meeting or a daily 10-minute huddle is essential for open communication, having a calendar chock-block full of meetings is not efficient. To increase efficiency in your business, consider scheduling multiple meetings on just one or two days, instead of scattering throughout the week. Make it a habit to block out time on your calendars for periods of uninterrupted work (with breaks for lunch and hydration) so you can focus better and work more efficiently. You’ll be able to accomplish more throughout the week.
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