As a small business owner, you have to show more appreciation to getting the most out of the little you have.
It can happen that because sales get heightened importance in a small business, other aspects that go into making a successful business get ignored. Most of these other areas of business management are inward looking so it’s easy to miss them.
One such aspect is efficiency. It’s well and good that your business is on a streak of good result, effectiveness, but is it coming at a fair cost? You never know this until it is too late.
There are a few easy to implement tips that will do your small business a world of good:
Have you written down what you want to achieve?
I’ll repeat it. People who set clearly defined goals perform better than those who set vague objectives. The reason you want your goals to be well defined is so that you can make deliberate steps towards it. Also, you can use milestones to measure how far you’ve come or how close you are to winning. If you want to reduce cost or increase production, you must have the numbers of what you are talking about. There are two ways to arrive at such figures in your business.
Can you draw a process diagram?
One of the things you fear in your life as a business woman is being called a “micromanager.” Obviously, you decide to focus on the end product only. But do you know exactly how the output comes about? The importance of this is so you can identify wastage in the processes or things (or people!) that slow everything down. In the end you will be able to not only streamline business functions but you will also easily align the work of different specialists who come on board as your small business grows.
Do your employees know what to do?
Some employees in your small business are lite-entrepreneurs because they perform different roles. This can lead to confusion on what is important or what is priority. This failure to manage workloads leads to inefficiency. At times, you may want operations to be more cost-effective but you neither communicate this as the new default of work nor do you train your employees on the new way you want them to work. This, despite the fact that training is a cheap retention tool.
One tip, out there, in making employees work better is reducing subordination. It results in people doing the bare minimum – we may or may not touch more on it in the future 😉
How much do you make?
Many women entrepreneur in Kenya like blaming their low sales or decreasing revenue on the ‘bad economy’. C’mon, the economy has always and will always be bad. You just want to be on the right side of history. The end. You don’t believe it? Look at these ‘Coffin Homes’ in Hong Kong!
As an entrepreneur, you must invest your time in training on both revenue and inventory management. You need to forecast demand in a much more analytical way. You also want to handle those piles of money, called stock, much more efficiently.
What techniques do you currently use to forecast demand? Share with us in the comments section below!
