If you were too busy with things to not give the desired attention to planning the right steps for your business in 2016, fear not. You're not alone, and yes welcome to the Party! With too many things ongoing, I could completely believe if you said you don't have time to breathe. The boss wants the reports, the customer wants the installation while the sales teams have been asking for help on some technical stuff. You can only do as much as you do. With so much going around us, it is also sometimes hard to keep up with what really matters. Here is how to achieve planned success in this new year and give excuses no place to bother you when you're at your best.
You think your business is efficient?
Do you know everything about your business? Every minute detail? Have you paid attention to your expenses, your business efficiency and places where you need help ?How about how much lost time your employees are suffering from or the amount of time it takes for you to generate invoices or deliver those packages, whatever it is you do. Analyzing your business means analyzing every aspect of it. This does not mean keeping track of every minute of your employee times but it means to know where the bleeds are and what is working. The second step is to stop the bleed and do more of what works its simple business 101. Being able to know the precise efficiency of your business is key to understanding what aspects of your business need improvement in the New Year, or next month or even tomorrow. Here are three steps to help you succeed like never before.
Step 1: Seeing the Reality as it Is
As a business owner, manager or CEO, it becomes key not only to know non-sales numbers and focusing on them but also to focus on creating and managing an efficient business. As an example, based on industry statistics did you know that over 28 percent of meetings in corporate America are a waste of time? Consider another one. An average worker wastes over 2.5 hours every week because of poor internal communication. That's time and money that could have been spent on making a sale, speaking with a customer or addressing a genuine business problem. If you have never given though of working out how efficient your business is, it's time to do that right now. Nothing else can be more important than creating a well-oiled machine that can deliver results. A highly efficient and productive business forms the bedrock of profitability, value creation and stakeholder value.
Step 2: Keeping up the Good Work
After you have done a thorough analysis of what works and what not, you're ready to grab the bull by the horns. You have already accomplished the tough part. Creating the right mechanisms that support your business is running a business. As a leader, department head, or an individual contributor you may work with many people on an everyday basis and work on your or their needs. Being able to give a clear priority to things that you should be doing should directly connect with the challenges you found in the first step. Focusing on what works and continuing to do what is working is an excellent step to maintain the momentum that you have. This goes without saying that you should always reward and motivate your teams to keep up the excellent work and spread it across the organization.
Step 3: Be a Problem Solver not a Complainer
For pitfalls, and inefficiencies that are causing your bleed, it sometimes may be more difficult to cure them than previously thought. After all it's not easy to solve a problem. Consider that one of the problems you are facing is high customer attrition or non-renewal or low repeat orders. This could be a problem because of some business process issue, product issue or even a people issue. Perhaps customer service needs to be provided additional training to be able to upsell a renewal or maybe the sales team needs an additional freebie to offer to customer to make them order again,. No matter what the issue is, over 99 percent of the time it will have a solution. You do need to acknowledge that the solution will have a cost. This could be financial cost, time, commitment or something else that you will need to make possible. This is where most decisions experience a make or a break and where the fulcrum of success and failure lies.
Everything You Need to Succeed is in Taking Action
Success by any means is not an easy place. You need to adhere to a high standards of practices to be able to provide clear guidance and direction to your teams and to your people. If you have not gone to the point of deeply analyzing your business I urge you to do so and figure out where your business is right now and where you need to be. More than anything, if you enjoy doing what you do then keep on doing it. If you don't, then that's a problem that needs to be fixed!