The following post comes to us from internet entrepreneur, Kevin Conner who is the founder of Broadbandsearch.net. In this blog, Kevin shares a wealth of experience related to starting and running an efficient business.
How to Help Your Business Run More Efficiently
Efficiency is the difference between a company that doesn’t make it past year five and a business that succeeds for decades to come. Good efficiency practices show dedication to having good management, reduce wasteful spending, and discipline the culture of your business towards regular and sustainable productivity.
Yet how does one create an efficient business? It’s all about the environment you create and the policies you implement (and don’t implement). Above all else, consider it a mindset, a filter through which you should run all your decisions, even if you wind up deciding on the less efficient option in the end.
Here are some main principles you should keep in mind.
Delegate and Trust
While your instincts may at first tell you that heavy oversight is the key to better efficiency, we want to warn you that it will have a limited effect at best or even be counterproductive. While oversight is important, employees generally won’t like having someone perched on their shoulder all of the time and getting approval from you or a manager for minor, non-essential decisions will only bottleneck projects.
If you feel that you need to keep a close eye, then you don’t have an efficiency problem as much as a personnel problem, and it would be wise to find and hire people you can trust to work professionally and efficiently when you’re not around, at least in key positions. After this, trusting employees will ease your mind, generally let employees come up with the most efficient solutions on their own, and let people reach their greatest potential.
Make Sure Services and Utilities Are Effective and Working
If you’re using online services and technological tools to help you run your business or help employees perform tasks, make sure they’re either the best or the best option for the cost. Competition will breed a lot of new developments, and you might not be using the most efficient service or option anymore.
For example, consider the internet connection set up for your office. If its too slow to either upload necessary content to a webpage or, even worse, slow to download items your business needs, it creates a huge problem for your employees, and fixing the issue will be the best thing you can do for your business.
Automate Whatever Would Be Reasonable
Automation has become the new driving force in efficiency, and while the initial costs can be high to start with, getting a program (or even a machine in some cases) can save you a lot of money through wages otherwise spent on menial tasks. As a general rule, try to automate whatever your employees do that doesn’t utilize them in the tasks they are best at and were hired for doing. Paperwork, office chores, and laborious production steps can all often be automated or mostly automated, and you should investigate solutions to those problems.
Consolidate Tasks
By grouping tasks and improving the logistics of your business, you can increase efficiency by a great deal. Try looking at what tasks are commonly done and checking if you can simply have a dedicated block of time to taking care of them instead of them randomly being spaced throughout the day. Increasing flow around the office is a great way to improve efficiency.
Additionally, a group of specialists can likely do a better and faster job than a similar-sized team of generalists all handling their own tasks. See what tasks you can consolidate to one team member (when doing so wouldn’t put your business at risk) and let improvement happen over time. You’ll soon see productivity numbers go up as people adjust well to their updated agendas.
Focus on Improving the Most Time-Consuming Tasks First
This is a short tip, but one you should keep in mind. You may or may not believe in the 80/20 principle, but you’ll likely find that most of the stress and inefficiency in your business is coming from a few places and only a few places. As hard as it might be at times, we recommend you cut right to the core of those problems instead of distracting yourself with minor inefficiencies elsewhere (they’ll still be around once everything else is taken care of).
Review Tasks Regularly
Sometimes doing things as they always have been done is simply not the best choice for some tasks. New solutions appear and employees, when given some time and freedom to solve problems their way, can be extraordinarily innovative. Therefore, we recommend that at regular intervals (three months would be a good starting point for most companies) you look at your business and list out every major (and some minor but time-consuming) tasks your employees do, making changes where they would help.
This might not be something you want to do alone. Your job isn’t necessarily to know the ins and outs of everyone’s job so well that you can do it better than them. Instead, if you’re not entirely certain where to make changes (if that would be wise at all), talk to the employee about their tasks, and what might be done to improve efficiency, and which ones are truly necessary. Working with your best people on course correction will likely be the best path to success.
Conclusion
Your business will naturally have its own unique needs, and we are certain that there are methods that will work for you on top of those above that will vary based on your industry and team makeup. Yet with the above tips and strategies, you’ll find that your business will run more effectively and efficiently, driving growth forward and making everyone involved happier in the process.
About the author: Kevin Conner is the founder and CEO of Broadbandsearch.net, the U.S.’s leading home services (broadband and TV) search engine. Kevin’s strengths lie in creating a strategic vision and leading a team to successfully execute that vision.
