When it comes to owning your own business, your overarching goal is always to make money. Without that, your business won’t survive. But in the process of looking to make money, there are also a few other small objectives that you may be working towards too. For some, it will be to gain more customers, to others it will be to increase conversion. However, there is one key goal that a lot of businesses will agree they’re always working towards regardless of what they do or what industry they’re in, and that’s to make your business run smoothly.
There are so many different areas of your business that you have to keep on top of. From the financials all the way to customer service, it can seem like a lot. And a lot of the time, each different area will run in its own way, making everything hard to keep track of and giving a sort of disjointed feel to the way that you run your business. This can often mean that your business is inefficient. So, if you’re interested in ensuring that your productivity levels are up, and that your business runs like a well-oiled machine, here’s how to start streamlining your business operations.
Analyze Your Current Setup
To get you off on the right foot, the first thing you have to do is analyze what’s going on with your business at the moment. This is often the hardest part. Trying to look at your company objectively isn’t always easy, but it will help you to improve things going forward. So, be brutally honest. If you’re able to see things as realistically as possible, you’ll have a better chance of making key improvements that will make a difference to how things run.
Hire A Consultant
If you’re struggling with the first step, or you’ve been pretty good at highlighting the issues, and the work seems more than you can commit to, you may want to think about hiring a consultant. Business consultants can be brilliant during these times. By hiring someone from outside of the business to come in and make positive changes going forward, you should find that you’re able to make a bigger impact and even free up a bit of your time to focus on other things.
Start With The Financials
Whether you’re going to take on most of the tasks yourself or work with a professional, you’ll probably find that starting out with your finance department is always the best bet. When you want to streamline your operations, it’s helpful to have the financials behind you. By making your finance department run smoothly with a good accountant and the the right documentation, you should find that you not only get one department off on the right track, but you’re more aware financially, to take on the rest of the tasks.
Smooth Out The Sales Process
With your finances in order, you should then think about the sales. As both departments are crucial for your business success, you need to make sure that you tightened up the way you do sales. Not only should this mean that you work with set procedures for how your sales funnel will work, but you may also want to think about working with regular targets and training sessions to support that too.
Cover Off Customer Service
Then, there’s your customer service to think about. When you’re busy, it’s easy to just deal with things, rather than think about the approach you’re taking to get things done. Good customer service is essential to your businesses success. So, put a procedure in place that prioritizes your customers needs, allows you to be helpful, and ensures that your staff is trained well too.
Look At Your Product Or Service
Although you may feel like all of your departments need work, sometimes your actual product or service itself needs more attention than anything else. Improving the quality of your product or service can really contribute to your operations overall. By putting a strong research and development procedure in place, constantly making plans, testing and working with new ideas, you’ll find that everything to do with your product or service will feel a lot more streamlined.
Head To HR
Another department that you should aim to streamline is HR. HR comes with a lot of responsibilities and requirements. So, you’re going to want to make sure that you have the right policies and procedures in place. This will not only help to streamline your operations, but also ensure that you’re compliant too. With an employee handbook, the right job description, NDAs and more, your HR department will start to run like clockwork.
Cover Off H&S
As a part of your HR revisions or as its own separate entity, you also need to ensure that you have some kind of system in place for health and safety. Regardless of what your business does, you will need to be H&S compliant. For this, you may want to work with health and safety consultants than can ensure everything is right. Whether you outsource everything or utilize a helpful software, nailing H&S will mean there’s one less thing on your list.
Firm Up Security
Although you may not think this matters, you should also think about protecting your business premises. When your business isn’t physically secure, you can become at risk for burglary or theft. This would mean that your operations hit a roadblock. So, in the interest of streamlining things, you should aim to keep everything protected and take the right security measures as a part of your revisions.
Finish With Your Brand Image
Finally, you should also think about fine tuning your brand image as apart of this process. Although the revisions that you’re making and the policies that you put in place should mean that you’re able to tighten up your business, you should also think about reflecting this in your brand. You may find that working with a marketing professional is the last step in streamlining your business operations.
darlingceo says
Fantastic post. So often business owners focus too much working IN their business and not ON their business.
the hOOter says
Interesting piece that you’ve put together with notes that are helpful for business owners and startups. Operations is really the support to make things move and pave the way towards execution and eventually closing the deal! YAY!
Jon P says
Very interesting and informative stuff. I will suggest this to my friends as well . Thanks for sharing.