Negosentro.com | 5 Effective Ways to Streamline Your Small Business for Maximum Growth | Small businesses often hit a wall when it comes to growth. Most business owners don’t expect significant growth in the early days and therefore haven’t planned for it. Thus, when it happens you may have some confusion because you’re not ready to handle the influx of business.
The solution? Focus on the service you provide instead of the pet peeves like appointments and administration. From handing some of your work over to an appointment setter to evenly distributing work amongst employees, there are a number of steps you can take to streamline your small business; all in the name of maximum growth.
Let’s show you where to invest.
- Appointment Setting
Many businesses with full schedules rely on appointment setting services to track and manage their company’s appointments. In addition to setting appointments, they provide information on staff performance and identify problem areas.
Appointment setting services offer phone and field sales training. This can only be beneficial for your growing business as it frees up more time for you to focus on core areas of your business.
Utilising the services of an appointment setter will prevent your employees from being flooded with overflowing calls to the office. Plus, sales calls can be outsourced which will provide your employees with the time to attend to more urgent matters at hand.
- Workflow Management
An important part of growing a business is managing workflow among your employees by handing out responsibilities. Not evenly delegating responsibility will bottleneck the completion of all-important tasks within your business. That makes workflow management—often in the form of an app or software—a wise investment.
Another method is to employ enough people to handle all the tasks. Increasing the number of people on your payroll will decrease your own workload. This gives you the freedom to focus on expanding your business and areas of your business that deserve attention.
- Organising Your Business
Clutter is a major problem in most offices, so focus on getting it right now before it becomes too messy to sort out. An organised office is a productive office. Any growing business needs to set examples for future employees joining the team. Although you own the business, you too need to set an example.
A messy workplace creates a challenging environment. Spending too much time finding a specific document or file can cause your business to lose a contract or miss an important deadline. Old habits die hard, so get into good ones before it’s too late:
- Get rid of clutter
- Clean and tidy daily
- Label everything
- Create rules for the business; for example, a clean-desk policy
- Ideas & Responsibility
For a business to grow every employee of said business—including the boss—needs to set aside the time to brainstorm ideas aimed at improving workflow in the company. This can improve processes and productivity.
Conduct group meetings to discuss problem areas and give each person the chance to voice their opinions about the tasks they’re directly involved with. This provides the opportunity for them to identify issues and gives other employees a chance to help solve them.
As a boss and an employee, it’s important to know what you’re capable of—and what you’re not capable of. Taking on too many tasks doesn’t make you a hero if you cannot handle it all at once; it can even harm the business. Rather, when a task gets handed to you and you feel, or know, that you aren’t capable delegate to ensure a better outcome.
- Complete Your Tasks
When you start a task, it’s important to complete it before moving on to the next one. Half-finished, piled up tasks are more difficult to deal with than handling tasks one at a time.
Each employee in your business has to work efficiently and responsibility has to be taken. Having an employee appointed with authority to discipline others helps to improve workflow and meet deadlines.
Important: have a sense of humanity when it comes to tasks being handed out. Expecting an employee to complete a task which you know is impossible hinders the growth of your business.
When tasks build up to more than what your employees can handle, turn to automated workflow strategies or companies. Workflow management systems are very helpful and can boost productivity.
Conclusion
When John is bored at the office and scrolls through his Facebook, but Pete is under immense pressure with sales calls and a heap of documents on his desk—you’ve got a serious workflow problem. Workflow in a business needs to be smooth and all employees need to work together as a team for your business to grow successfully.
No business runs smoothly when you take on all tasks by yourself or hand them out unevenly. As such, the following cannot be stressed enough: hand out tasks evenly to employees.
There are many different ways to streamline your business for maximum growth. Do you have any tips and tricks of your own? Share them with us in the comments section below to help other readers streamline their business for maximum growth.
