Running a business isn’t easy. Whether you have five employees or one hundred, your business needs constant work to grow.
You need to always be on top of the changes that happen in the market, stay up-to-date with the latest technology, and consistently have innovative approaches to improve your business.
There are two ways a business can go, and that’s up or down. If you stick to your old-fashioned methods and hope for the best, your business will perish in the competition.
From team building facilitation to employee appreciation activities, there are many ways to strengthen your business’s team. With a good company culture, you can overcome the competition. If you and your team keep pushing the business to its full potential, it’ll only continue getting better.
Here are 5 ideas to improve your business:
1. Use technology whenever possible.
Almost everything can get done using technology nowadays but that doesn’t mean everything should be done with technology.
For example, meetings can get done via Skype but once a week, a face-to-face meeting might be in order. However, there is no denying that online apps and software increases a business’s efficiency.
Using apps will facilitate and speed up a lot of business operations. For example, there is a virtual mailbox solution for better postal mail handling, and you’ll receive all your mail online instead of at your business. Each of the best virtual mailbox services on the market have been a vital tool for keeping business processes efficient.
There are multiple CRM solutions to manage and keep tabs on customers, online time trackers to track working hours, sales apps that offer sale funneling, forecasts and analytics.
You’ll also be able to use accounting software for invoices and payments, HR solutions, tasks and project management solutions like Trello or Asana, and many other software solutions.
Going back on our previous point, learn more about the difference between a physical mailbox and digital mailbox, and how your business can benefit. There will be many tools related to your product or service that you can look into.
2. Automate whatever can be automated.
There are many tasks that can be done that don’t require an inordinate amount manpower, time, or effort. A great way to cut down on wasted time and have your employees focus on other tasks that need their attention and be more productive is to automate the basic tasks that don’t need a human mind or manual work.
There is software for automatically generating invoices, sending out pay subs or receipts, managing inventory, sending out emails, tracking work done on computers and more.
Automated systems may seem pricey, especially for a startup, but the investment would be worth it in the long run. Employees will focus on their actual jobs. For example, the accounting department will follow up on payments and debits instead of wasting days creating invoices and sending them out.
3. Hold short, but effective meetings.
One of the main distractions that ruin a business’s workflow is casual meetings interrupting the workday.
Whether it’s a staff, department, or managers meeting, consuming too much time in meetings will affect your employees’ productivity.
The fix to long, useless meetings is cutting them down to 10-15 minute meetings. Efficient planning for a meeting is all it takes to have a productive meeting.
Be sure to have listed all the topics and points you need to address and stick to the set timeframe.
If a topic wasn’t discussed, push it to the next meeting; don’t prolong the meeting! It takes an employee at least 2 minutes to regain focus on the task they were working on, so imagine how many wasted minutes there are in a day per employee?
4. Encourage communication & collaboration.
Encourage your employees and departments to work together as one and collaborate on projects. They need to be able to talk to each other face-to-face to resolve conflicts or problems instead of sending messages to each other or leaving notes.
A problem that may seem complicated or tangled can quickly be resolved in a few minutes if they communicate properly instead of prolonging the problem over multiple emails.
This method of clear communication should be established with you as well. Give your employees the chance to speak their mind and state their opinions about the business.
They’re the workers in every department that can get you the insight you need that you can’t get from your office.
Encourage them to voice their feedback, ideas, and thoughts; one of these opinions might make all the difference with your business. This will push your employees to actually care about your business and be more productive at what they do.
The same applies to customers; give your customers the chance to communicate to you their concerns and feedback, even if it’s negative. If you establish this open gateway, your employees will work harder and your customers will appreciate your efforts.
5. Sharpen your sales & marketing tools.
If your current sales and marketing ways aren’t working for you or aren’t bringing in the same revenue they used to, then you probably need to change them.
There are multiple ways to enhance your marketing; you can use marketing software like Hubspot or Hootsuite, which are focused on boosting your social media marketing.
You can work on your social media yourself by updating your content, posting new content regularly, and making sure your info is always up-to-date. Other methods include learning from your competitors.
See what works for them and try implementing it into your strategy or you can stand out and come up with unconventional marketing ways.
As for sales, you can add special deals or packages into your sales strategy to get more sales, optimize your website, boost ads on social media, or work on your blog.
Ensure you’re efficiently exploring all your sales and marketing channels then do some more.
These were just a few ideas to get your business out of a funk or help refresh your productivity and give you the boost you need. There is no such thing as a business that has peaked; there is always room for your business to grow and be better.
