Business efficiency is a fundamental part of running any company. It means making the most out of what you have, clearly all the more important if you’re a small business owner.
Learning how to best manage your assets and streamline your processes is vitally important, so here’s a guide to help you do just that and deliver maximum business efficiency.
Get the Right Office
Your office is one of the key assets of your business, and where you and your employees probably spend the most of your time – so you need your office space to work for you. If it’s not working at the moment you might rush to try and find new premises, but get this wrong and you’ll produce huge cost and hassle. So make sure you’re doing the right thing and do your research – getting it wrong will just lead to another costly move in the future.
Make sure any rent agreement you sign will work with your business as it grows. Calculate exactly how much space you’re going to need now, as well as a realistic estimate of what you’ll need in the future. Also, look for flexibility in the lease, including the right to sublet the office you’re taking if it’s a fixed term let – just in case you grow more than projected and need to take bigger premises.
Get the Right Kit
How can you expect your business to be efficient if you’re not using the right kit? Make sure you’re giving yourself and your employees the best possible start by ensuring that whatever industry you’re in you have the right equipment.
Nowadays technology makes the business world go round, and this is one area where small firms can achieve significant improvements in efficiency and productivity. Consider transferring core business functions such as bookkeeping and word processing to a cloud or web-based systems to dramatically reduce the amount of time and money you spend buying, upgrading and maintaining in-house software and hardware.
If you’re business is more manual in nature, make your employees lives as easy as possible by getting the best handling equipment from Handling Equipment Online. Not only will your employees thank you, but you’ll see a dramatic improvement in efficiency.
Clean Up Your Contacts
From the moment customer data enters a database, it starts to become out of date. Within a couple of years, a database could be holding a significant amount of data that is likely to be out of date and therefore useless in real terms.
Consider the costs of mailing catalogues and marketing campaigns to out of date addresses, or redirecting packages to the correct address – and the impact on the marketing budget! It’s worth taking the time to review your contacts and querying them, then you can clear out any ‘dead’ contacts to improve efficiency.
