3 Key Areas For Improving Your Business Processes

No matter your service or product, or whether you’re a start-up or an industry veteran, the same keys always unlock business success.

It could be a work-from-home side venture or an industry leading company, but the recipe is always the same: speed up, get smarter, trim those costs, minimise waste – and do it all whilst keeping quality and service levels at five-star levels.

Sound like an impossible juggling act? It’s all a matter of knowing the business process blueprint, which we believe can be summarised in 5 key areas:

1. Costs

Making money in business is the goal, which means selling a product or a service at a price that people don’t mind paying. And the easiest way to make more great products at the right price is to keep your production and operating costs down.

If you sell multiple products, an analysis will show you that some sell better than others. If the ones that aren’t selling as well are piling up, you’re just losing money – because they’re taking up space and could spoil, get damaged, or never sell at all.

2. Customers

If one side of your business is all about your product or service, then the other side is the human beings who buy them.

Looking after your customers drives sales success, whether it’s smart analytical processes, great sales and marketing, or friendly and proactive customer service pre, during and post-purchase.

Excellent customer service means deeply understanding your customers needs and their purchase experience – and the best way to do this is to ask how you did, and encourage constructive complaints. With these insights, the exact areas of attention will be easy to identity.

3. Risk

Unfortunately, risk is synonymous with business – but the best way to drastically reduce it is to look into a crystal ball to know exactly what challenges are around the corner.

If you don’t have a crystal ball handy, the next-best way to accurately predict the future is to ensure that your operations – and the results they produce – are reliably predictable.

One of the easiest ways to bring operations to a costly and often devastating standstill is if a link in the chain suddenly breaks.

Take a company that relies on batteries for devices, equipment and vehicles – is battery testing one of your religious daily or weekly tasks? Something as simple as inexpensive battery testers, combined with other tools and processes that seek to look into the future, can save you an awful lot of money.

So while it’s all good and well to focus on producing excellent products and services, there’s more than one ingredient in a delicious stew.

Succeeding in business is about constantly chipping away on all the crucial aspects that feed directly and indirectly into bigger profits, including better sales, better staff, happier customers, better books – and an always-honest and thorough analysis of what’s not working and how it can be improved, and what is working … and how that can be improved too!