Just because your business is fairly small, it doesn’t mean that it’s easy to run it with great efficiency. Micro-managing your employees is never a good idea if you want to maintain small business efficiency. In theory, managing 10 employees would be the same as managing 100 or 1000, when in reality this is not necessarily the case. According to the theory known as Price’s law, the amount of people doing the work grows linearly, while incompetence grows exponentially. Therefore, in order to give your business a fighting chance, you need to focus on it while it’s still fairly small.
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Keep your credit score high
The first thing you need to understand is that you never really know when you’re going to need a loan. Sure, massive investments, renovation projects and office moving can be predicted, yet, you never know when you’ll have an opportunity to expand your operations and lack funds to do so. The main obstacle to getting a loan whenever you need it lies in poor credit rating. Therefore, it’s for the best if you could work on your credit score before you actually need a loan. Watching your credit card balances, paying bills on time and scheduling your payments are just some of the ways to get there. This maintains small business efficiency amidst the financial strains at times.
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Work towards SMART goals
Another thing you need to keep in mind is the fact that the efficiency of your operations depends on your ability to have adequate goals. To do so, they have to be SMART. This acronym stands for specific (simple, yet, significant), measurable (meaningful and quantifiable), achievable (not unrealistic or impossible), relevant (working towards your long-term plans) and time-bound (time-limited). In this way, you can set some objective metrics based on which you can make an estimate of whether you’re actually fulfilling these objectives or not.
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Open multiple channels of communication
Different audiences use different means of communication. For instance, a teen buyer might feel that it’s completely adequate to contact you via an Instagram DM, whereas a company is more likely to do so via an email or even through your official business landline. Sure, depending on whether it’s B2B or B2C you might be contacted through different channels of communications, yet, all of these people are potential clients and you won’t grow efficiently unless you find a way to accommodate all of them.
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Invest in high-impact marketing
When you’re running your marketing with limited resources, you need to make sure you use only those techniques that give you the best ROI. For instance, retargeting your regular customers is one of the things you could do in order to get the most profit with the least investment. Content marketing, email marketing and social media marketing follow closely behind. When it comes to influencers, for small and medium-sized businesses, it’s usually for the best to reach out to micro influencers, rather than just looking at the top of the industry.
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Motivation makes a difference in small business efficiency
A happy employee works 12 percent better. However, you can’t rely on them to keep their morale up on their own. To get there, you need to create an efficient HR team, evaluate the situation in-field and give them an incentive to try their best. Raises, bonuses and promotions are always great. However, as you already know, all of these are quite finite and, if you push it too far too quickly, you’ll soon run out of money to distribute and positions to promote to. Instead, you might try to give out non-monetary incentives or even publicly praise your employees in front of the rest of the staff. Now that’s small business efficiency.
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Find an exhaust vent
Finally, all of these business-saving methods won’t do you much good if you burn out as an individual and an entrepreneur. Without an exhaust vent, enough time spent with loved ones and some time to spend alone, you soon might suffer from a lack of morale and motivation. To an employee with these same symptoms, you might recommend a short leave (to recharge their batteries) but what happens when the only irreplaceable person in the office burns out? Needless to say, this is not something you want to find out, which is why you should find an exhaust vent as soon as possible.
Conclusion
When asked a question, which one of the above-listed is the most important, there’s no straight answer to give. For true business efficiency, you need them all. You can’t run an efficient business without motivated personnel, same as you can’t do it without adequate marketing, financial safety or intrinsic motivation. In other words, it’s time to stop looking at the symptoms and focus on the bigger picture instead if you want small business efficiency.
