How to focus your efforts and energy is one of the biggest hurdles we face as people and in business. Furthermore, gaining an edge in business can definitely be a challenge. There are so many competing things for your time, energy, money, and attention that you may get too distracted to pay complete attention to any one thing.
Whether you’re running a sole-proprietorship, an LLC, or some other entity, getting organized and focused is crucial for gaining an edge in the market and on your competitors. Imagine having more time to devote to what you care about in your business. How about having more energy throughout the workday? And how about increasing your sales without overspending on leads and client acquisition?
If any of those ideas seem like a fantasy, they’re not. In order to achieve growth in your business takes time and dedicated focus that comes from better organization. When a person is distracted, it’s evident to friends, family, and casual passersby. But, unfortunately, your business is the same. A distracted company can quickly lose customers without even knowing why sales are slumping.
Consider a Workflow Audit
Think about an understaffed restaurant. The kitchen can’t keep up with the orders, people are turned away, tables are a mess, and the staff is all running around like chickens without its head. For a one-time occasion, this chaos can be forgivable. But if this is an everyday occurrence, eventually, people will recognize this as a defining characteristic of the restaurant. If that is the case, the food better be impressive to attract recurring customers. Otherwise, the restaurant is in for some difficulties down the road.
So taking a look at your workflow and organization can reveal if there are holes in your business. There are some simple steps to getting your business more organized and streamlined so that your customers have fewer hurdles with their transactions and your logistics are simpler to achieve. In order to grow your business and have a robust representative brand concept, there are five foundational things you can do that will simplify your process and make your business engine purr.
Create An Organization Chart
In every organization, there are roles that people take, from direction and execution of the business to finding new customers and providing goods and services. For small businesses with a few administrators, creating a clear organization chart that defines the roles, details responsibilities, and explains cross-over scenarios will make each job more accessible and more productive.
It becomes easier to handle tasks and conflicts that may arise when the definition of who handles those becomes clearer. Productivity increases as a by-product of having clearly defined expectations and parameters of what your team needs to focus on. The power of an organization chart is that it will clearly define each role within your business, how those roles interact with each other, and give employees and customers alike the understanding of who can assist them with challenges and questions as they arise.
For the mom-and-pop sole-proprietorship, this organization chart is simple for the decision-making side of the administration, the final decider is you, but for executing actions, it can be overwhelming. In this instance, hiring outside help, from bookkeepers to marketing, is crucial to allow you to dedicate your time and energy toward the best functions of your operation.
Efficient communication is also a critical factor in staying organized, especially when working with remote teams or outsourced professionals. Implementing phone solutions for small business can make communication easier among different roles and ensure that calls are handled efficiently, regardless of whether they come from customers, suppliers, or team members. A well-structured phone system can help maintain professionalism, reduce missed calls, and improve overall workflow, making it easier to manage operations without unnecessary disruptions.
Outsourcing for small businesses can include:
- Bookkeeping and Accounting
- Lead generation and Marketing
- Human Resources, Payroll, and Legal
- Customer Service
- Logistics and Order Fulfillment
Outsourcing is an excellent strategy for startups to scale. For example if you are a food and beverage company outsourcing to a contract packager would allow you to distribute your product to customers without owning and managing your own packaging facility. Obviously, you may have fewer roles to delegate and define if you’re running an online business or blog. But even if you’re running a website about a hobby such as college sports or movies based on comic books, you’ll still have departments you may want to define or outsource clearly.
Declutter Your Space
Once you organize your operations, the next is to turn your attention to managing your physical space. A clean physical room is symptomatic of your org chart’s message that every operation detail is purposeful and thought out. The idea of “everything in its place and a place for everything” should be the mantra of your office and storage needs. Anyone that’s ever worked in an office knows how frustrating and distracting it can be to look for paper for the copier or try to find a needed file to assist an account. The more organized your office is, the easier people will have in completing the small tasks that could otherwise detract from productivity.
Improve Your Workspace For Better Productivity
Hand-in-hand with your physical workspace being decluttered is to think about the best way to improve your workspace for better productivity. Creating a workspace that supports the vision of growing your business is tantamount to its success. Little things such as adding plants to the office can increase overall happiness in the space, and happiness is a predictor of productivity.
Go Paperless
So much time in business is dedicated to shuffling, organizing, and processing paperwork. This alone is a significant time suck that can drive productivity into a deep spiral in other areas. Consider going paperless with almost, if not all, of your documents. Creating a centralized document on your cloud service and having a service such as DocuSign to handle contracts will make finding, organizing, and sharing files easier and help maintain the declutter of your workspace.
Emphasize Customer Service
As you declutter your space, go paperless, and redefine critical roles within the organization, it can be easy to lose sight of one of the essential aspects of your business: customer service. Too often, as organizations become more streamlined, they lose the front-facing personality of their customer service operations. And these changes are noticeable by the clientele. Most customers want to be greeted and handled by familiar and friendly personalities. It’s a cornerstone of why some companies have such ardent followers.
For example, imagine two breweries. One brewery offers a loyalty program for regulars, has low staff turnover, and makes the customer experience an event, one like from the 80’s hit show, Cheers. In addition, it’s a welcoming place. In fact, some of the patrons and team members become friends outside of the workplace, either in the “real world” or on social media. In other words, customer service has created a sense of community.
The other brewery is a wide-open space with over 32 beers on tap for tasting. There is no food or other amenities, but the beer is award-winning. Think about those two examples and answer, which is more appealing to you as a consumer? The warm, friendly brewery, or the solely product-focused one?
Another benefit of emphasizing customer service is to mitigate any possible issues and to help foster better brand loyalty, a linchpin to repeat sales. Organizing your small business has many upsides, from making your operations smoother and more efficient to becoming more customer-friendly. Done right, you’ll be able to expand your brand and grow more brand loyalty in time.
