3 fundamental areas to improve your business

The first Arm of our business is to support our customers with our managerial expertise. We are calling it the 3 fundamental Areas to improve your business as it covers 3 areas where each is important to boost the business performance. To improve your business, we suggest checking three main areas, as stated below, these areas are:

1) Internal factors

2) Business support

3) Marketing channels.

The internal factors include people, process, and structure; as we believe, everything related to your company efficiency is included here; then, when you check each of the internal factor mentioned above, you need to provide tool and means to complete the task, here comes the business support, where it includes all types of software and hardware to support your people to complete their tasks. Finally, you need to close the cycle with showing what you have done, and here are the Marketing channels.

As simple as it’s described above, this is how we have divided the business into three areas, each to be assessed separately and analyzed, if done correctly, you will be able to boost the performance of your service / product delivery.

Internal factors affecting your business

To manage your business effectively, you need to consider some internal and external factors. Internal factors , is our first in our 3 Areas to improve your business , are the ones affecting your business, but you can still take control of these obstacles, as you have created them unintentionally. Hiring incompetent manager, implementing a wrong process, and creating a lousy structure are some examples of internal factors. Usually, internal factors are the ones affecting your day-to-day activity, delaying your production, reducing the efficiency of your team, creating conflict between departments and many more. Contrary to the external factors where you can’t control, you can totally take corrective action to minimize or even eliminate what is affecting the efficiency of your business. We shall focus here on these internal factors, mention some and focus how to reduce the risk of other factors.

1- People

Number one on the list is people, the quality of your employees has a direct impact on your business, keeping in mind who runs your business is eventually someone with a mix of feelings and emotions. Hiring the most experienced is not always the best to your business, there are many factors involved other than knowledge.

So, what we need to consider before hiring someone?

What the employee should be/ do

Let’s put it this way, to complete a task you need to have the below from the human perspective not machinery or process perspective, you need to have:

1) Personal skill, experience, and ability to learn (experience)

2) Ability to deal with his superior (personal)

3) Ability to lead his team (personal)

4) Ability to be a team player with different department (personal)

By this, you complete a task, by using your experience and ability to learn, then able to communicate with your manager, convey the message to your team, and dealing with different department and support them. As we can see, experience count to 25% only, all other points controlled by your emotions, feeling, the love of power and the eager to shine.

Excluding chief level, personality plays big role to reduce the conflict; the more the conflict the more the toxic environment, the more the stress and the less is the efficiency.

From the human and personal perspective, the company should hire people with the same culture, including similar culture of the company itself. The culture of the company defined by their owners, stakeholders and board team members.

When the company culture is to be Strick, focus on attendance and working hours, would be a big mistake to hire someone who is convinced that the job is just getting the work done regardless how and where and when, whereas the company culture have these important.

Aligning the culture between employees and employers create harmony at work and ensure less conflict.

The relation here is not one way, as a company, you also must create the right environment to your employees. The top ranked companies are the ones who treat their employees well. You can’t create toxic environment and wonder why people are not getting along. Start with what you , as a company, and check if what you are providing to your employees from desks, tools, facilities , etc. Creating the right environment for people is your first responsibility. After creating what is needed for your employees to get the job done, you can assess people. ‘Attitude’ is a small word to hear and big to fear; you can teach people anything, but not manners.

2-The structure of the company

Our second on the list of our 3 Areas to improve your business, Choosing the right structure of your company is essential, two companies working in the same field with different structure show different efficiencies. Some companies witness production boost from just moving a team from a department to another, nothing changed , same employee number, same company, and same customers just a change in the structure made a difference.

the best way to allocate team into department is check the functions of the team. For best harmony, you need to create department to complete a certain task, from A to Z.

3-Internal process

We shall discuss in detail about process, just to keep it simple for now, the only constant in life is change. implementing a process has to be reviewed periodically.

Benefit of the Process within your organization.

Process is the pillar of any system regardless the type of your business: Engineering , finance, hospitality, accounting , graphic design and many others, you need to set the right process.

When you create a process, you will do it right up to 70 or 80 percent , later on, when you implement it, you start to tune it here and there. You will manage to fix and correct some obvious pitfalls, some of the well known process is like tightening a screw of the wheel before you drive your car or checking the safety parachute condition before jumping from the plane, obviously, then you will clear these processes with the first implementation and reflect it on your system, document it , then became THE UNTOUCHABLE NORMS .

Here starts new phase , where the process became hard to change and considered violation if you don’t follow . However , having a solid process with some pitfalls will still hurt less than having no or lose process in place. Reaching 90 percent of the right process is exceptional and this is where every small to medium companies should be, process should be respected above 90 % for medium companies (from 10 to 50 employees) and above 95 % for small companies (up to 10 employees).

If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.

There is always a right start , and in business, where we should start is to read the numbers, obviously. But numbers aren’t necessarily financial figures like profit and loss, numbers are also time consumed in a task, number of employees vs quality, the effect of changing the process on productivity, we do need a dashboard where you can see clearly the effect of your decisions over time. To do this, you need the right tool for your business. Tools are all similar, but sometime using the same tool in 2 different companies could be successful for one and failure for another depends on many elements like type of the company, size and location. We shall keep it short here and focus how to move forward with our topic.

How to enhance process and procedure using customized tool?

Process is a series of actions and decisions describe the way that work is completed. Process states the rules and regulations:

1) Between departments in the same company
2) Between the same department
3) Between external departments

Process is the bread and butter for any company, having a good process in place will directly affect the cost and expenditure of the company for a period of time. This is why it is crucial to create an appropriate process from beginning. What is important is also to review the process periodically to check if anything should be tuned based on the current work.
But honestly, that is the hard way and not effective at all, most of the companies fell in it; with time, companies move away from the process and tune to different action to adapt the obligations happening on the ground.

Unfortunately, with time, the process is kept on shelves.

However, the benefit if you create a tool and customize it as per your process, you will be able to have a better understanding on the below:

1) Weakness on the process. When you simulate the process into a tool, you can identify and measure the weakness in any part by checking the time consumed to complete a task within a department. By identifying the weakness, you can start taking corrective action by changing the process and reflect it directly on the tool, as it is customized. Let’s assume for instance you are using a customized tool to take wall painting orders, different departments will upload their data into the tool, to discover, the department responsible for surveying the location is the one who is causing the delay; as corrective action, you may ask the department to start surveying the location just after taking the call instead of waiting for the go ahead from the supply department. You will never be able to identify the weakness, take corrective action, check the outcome of your decisions without measurable data. And this data found only in something numeric and countable.

2) Strength part of the process: when you have measurable data, you will know your strength , and something you are not even aware of your strength. You may use this strength to extend your business and maybe outsource your manpower to another company. At least, you will have a measurable data.

To manage your business effectively, you need to consider some internal and external factors. Internal factors are the ones affecting your business, but you can still take control of these obstacles, as you have created them unintentionally. Hiring incompetent manager, implementing a wrong process, and creating a lousy structure are some examples of internal factors. Usually, internal factors are the ones affecting your day-to-day activity, delaying your production, reducing the efficiency of your team, creating conflict between departments and many more. Contrary to the external factors where you can’t control, you can totally take corrective action to minimize or even eliminate what is affecting the efficiency of your business. We shall focus here on these internal factors, mention some and focus how to reduce the risk of other factors.

4-Tools

You always need a tool, not only to support your employees , but also to measure their performance, collect data, relate efficiency with sales, production or delivery.