How to improve the efficiency of your organisation

Would you like your business to soar? The biggest challenge for any business owner is to let go and allow their team to do the work. And this holds the business back from reaching its potential.

In my experience, most small business owners are control freaks. They find it almost impossible not to be all over everything because they are worried that others won’t do it to their own exacting standards. I get it, I’m the same!

But if you do want to:

• Grow your business;

• Have the option of selling it at some stage;

• Concentrate on doing the work you love;

• Be able to go on holiday and actually take a break; you’ll need to make some changes.

  
  

The three key factors to improve efficiency (and profitability) in your business

To have an effortless organisation, there are three key areas where you need to improve your efficiency:

• People - You need to have the right team of people to support you if you want to grow. This is about letting go of feeling you have to do everything. If you have the right people in the right roles they can make a huge impact on your business and your ability to grow. They need to share your values and vision.

• Process - You want to aim for consistent delivery, all the time, by everyone. Documenting your key processes is a priority as it allows you to train others to take on work that you shouldn't be spending your time on. And it takes the stress out of remembering how things are done each time. Processes reduce errors and increase quality. Your customers get a consistent, high quality service.

• Technology - Having the right tools to help you, increases the speed at which you can do things, increases efficiency and reduces duplication of effort. The aim is to automate as much as possible.

  
  

See the graphic for the main elements of each of these.

All three need to be working in harmony so if only two out of the three are working, you won’t get the same benefits:

The right team with well-documented manual processes

This is a great start, and your business will operate at a good level, but you won’t be able to crank the handle and scale without adding more people (and limiting your ability to be more profitable).

The right team with the right technology

You will have a well-motivated team along with online tools that support their work. But unless you have worked through what the ideal processes are before you implement the technology, you’re likely to have fragmented software or apps that don’t talk to each other and aren’t optimised.

Well-documented processes with the right technology

You’ll have well-documented processes and integrated them with online tools. These may work seamlessly together, but unless you have the right team who are bought into your company vision and strategy, having the best systems and processes will be a waste of time as compliance will be low.   

All three are interlinked and the magic happens at the intersection of all three – If you can get all three working optimally, your business will be cooking on gas.

The result is you will have a business that:

Is highly efficient and scalable

You can do more/service more customers with fewer people and you can start to grow your business.

Has improved customer service, customer satisfaction and customer retention

You’ll have optimised processes that you are continually improving so customers get consistent, high-quality service every time. As an added bonus, those customers will rave about how awesome you are and will refer new business to you.

Has a well-motivated workforce

Your team want to do the best for you and your customers and loves working for you.

Is more profitable

This goes hand in hand with improved efficiency. If you can do more with less, your profit margins will improve. And because your customers refer new clients to you, your new customer acquisition costs are lower – adding to the bottom line.

Is self-managing

It can stand on its own without the need for you to be micromanaging everything – Happy holidays for you!

Is sellable

Whether or not you want to sell it, if you do, you will have all the elements that make it attractive to a buyer and your business will be working like a dream. Nice to have the option, I think!

Recommended reading

These are two excellent books that I recommend to help you in your progress to business nirvana:

Clockwork – Design your business to run itself – Michael Michalowicz

SYSTEMology – Create time, reduce errors and scale your profits with proven business systems – David Jenyns

(Both these links take you to Amazon, where I will get a microscopic commission if you buy either book, but it won't cost you any more. And I only ever recommend books and tools that I have experience of)

If you’d like to learn more, or you’d like a copy of the graphic, let me know.