THE ORGANIZATIONAL STEP THAT MAKES A DIFFERENCE
Have you ever heard business owners say that their business is not expanding to the degree that they would like? Or they may be having difficulty figuring out what they need to do to increase their profitability. You may have even heard from business owners that they have difficulty getting good staff.
What is interesting about these problems is that they seem to fade away once they begin to organize things better.
So, what is the organizational step that makes a difference? The answer is any, really.
There are some that are better to start with than others, depending on the current scene. Some examples are:
Your payroll is extremely high. What would you do first? You would draw up flow charts and see where all the bottlenecks and inefficiencies were. Just by drawing up flow charts, a business owner feels better. This is a start of organiztion going in. Then start graphing KPIs of each staff member.
You are having trouble covering monthly expenses. You better find out how much it is costing you to deliver each of your products and services—Overhead, Cost of Goods, Labor, and expenses, including marketing and sales. Are you building in a profit percentage?
Qualified Leads are down. Organize the prediction statistics, don’t just operate off the result stats. Example Result stat of Marketing is Number of Qualified Leads weekly. Prediction stats would be, # of Posts, # of Blogs, # of Webinars, # of Webinar attendees, # of Emails out, # of opens, # of clicks, # of Phone calls in, etc.
Delivery is down. Flow chart all the delivery lines and look for bottlenecks or lack of personnel etc. Get policies and checklists of daily and weekly actions drawn up with expected quantities listed.
Sales are declining. Upon inspection, the factory is messy, and there is dust everywhere. Administration offices with piles of papers not indexed and filed appropriately. Get the place cleaned up and painted, get some new nice filing cabinets and raise the level of professionalism.
The point is that there has to be a constant willingness to improve things organizationally. On the other hand, don’t try to change everything at once. Take different areas and improve the efficiency there. Then take another area and get that organized better.
Many business owners have a hard time delegating because new people don’t know where everything is. The owner does, but he or she hasn’t thought about labeling materials, drawers, shelves, etc. so that other people can find things easily.
The motto is: “A little bit of Organization can go a long way.”
I hope this was helpful.
Sincerely,
Graham Payne