Are You Maximizing Your Business’ Mileage?

In today’s competitive market, business owners are forced to deal with rising costs while trying to maintain the best prices for their customers. How you operate your small businesses is essential not only to running a highly profitable company, but to maintaining a competitive edge in the industry.

It is crucial that business owners like myself find ways to streamline operations while continuing to meet the increasing demands of our clients, but how? This is the million dollar question many small businesses face. On one hand there is pressure from our clients to provide the best price possible, while at the same time, the costs of day-to-day operations continue to rise.

Strike a Balance

One way of managing the pressure that comes with being a business owner is working smarter and learning how to run your business more efficiently. In our everyday operations, we must look for new and innovative ways to deliver the same product or service. For example, in the Canadian Information Technology (IT) community, my business Ulistic coaches small business IT firms on effective ways to market, sell and run a successful IT firm. We saw a significant improvement in the business when we turned to automation and streamlining service delivery in order to maximize operational efficiencies.

Business automation software could be an answer for many small businesses. With Ulistic, we use ConnectWise to help us all be on the same frequency. Many of my clients also rely on this tool to maximize their operational effectiveness and provide an increased level of service to their clients. It is software automation tools like ConnectWise that lay the foundation for many businesses, my own included, to maximize the overall everyday operations of our businesses.

Avoid Spreading Resources Too Thin

I work with many small businesses across the country, and another alarming trend I have noticed is overlapping or duplicating of efforts and responsibilities. Even with checking, double checking and, even in some instances, triple checking to ensure duplication doesn’t occur, overlapping is harmful to the bottom line of your business. It also has a negative impact on morale and the smooth operations of your business.

My own personal experience came out of one of my own companies. Our CFO simply did not trust our systems to ensure accuracy with our billing process. This distrust of technology and our process meant that we needed additional staff to carry this burden. Not only did it increase our expenses related to bookkeeping and accounting, staff also questioned the amount of people required when they were asked to run lean and mean. This gets me thinking about the importance of systems and processes.

Create Consistency

When I work with my technology clients, one of the immediate areas we focus on is systems and processes. Systems and processes are crucial to streamlining your business to operational success. When a small business simplifies employees’ systems, processes and workflows, we immediately see an impact in customer service, projects are streamlined and even profitability goes up. Without systems and process, how can end goals be reached and financial targets hit? Many businesses will see an immediate turn upwards just by implementing basic systems and processes and then making sure everyone follows them.

A great example of having effective systems and processes in place would be your local hamburger franchise or your favourite café that is on every street corner. These franchises or corporate stores have set systems and processes in place that ensure the customer gets the same experience every visit. Processes prevent your staff from doing what they want; it keeps the experience consistent every time.

These are just a couple of very basic tips to aid in the improvement of your business operations. It is hard to provide you with the secret sauce to success through a blog post like this. However, I can share with confidence that if you put some very simple processes, procedures and systems in place and make sure your staff follows them, you will have a good start in the right direction. While it might be a little harder to implement with your team, it is doable and well worth the effort.

When you have the right systems in place, your staff is fully aware and entirely bought in on your vision as the owner of the business; and when the right systems are in place, only then can you monitor and measure your overall effectiveness through a business automation tool. Use your automation software to continuously adjust the dials and improve the process.

Keep in mind, your mileage will vary and your entire company must buy in with all operational changes to make sure everyone is moving towards the same end goal. You need to have a basic operations strategy and plan in place. Without one, how can you ever hope to meet the needs of your clients?

This post is brought to you by American Express Canada. Check out their new Amex for Business Canada Facebook page for the latest news, information and resources for Canadian small business owners.