The fact that your enterprise is still new, you are operating on a skeleton crew and the competition is tough are poor excuses for a lack of efficiency. An enterprise willing to expand needs to perform well from day one; the efficiency always overpowers raw manpower; and as for the competition, the more competitors you have, the more competent you appear when you outclass them. All of this can be achieved by improving your company’s organization. Here are five tips that can help you do so in 2018.
1. Avoid holding unnecessary meetings
Even though emails may seem like an impersonal tool of communication, you simply can’t hold a meeting for every minor announcement. In fact, it is precisely this practice that led to the phenomenon of some businesses spending as much as 31 hours in meetings each month. It goes without saying that as much as three-quarters of this time could be reduced by using circular emails or by holding standing meetings and brainstorming sessions.
2. Use lists
Keep in mind that even the best memory has its flaws, which is why you need to use to-do lists as much as you can. For instance, you can create a system where you arrange your objectives and priorities on a daily, weekly and a monthly basis. In this way, you get to track your progress at any given moment, as well as ensure that there’s nothing that you’ve failed to do because it simply slipped your mind. In time, this becomes a habit, which means that you will have to invest very little active effort in this trend.
3. Ensure a steadycash flowÂ
Without bonuses, there’s no incentive. Without technological innovation in your digital arsenal, it’s much harder to achieve a competitive edge. Without new employees, it’s impossible to increase your workload. To make a long story short, a business needs to burn cash in order to grow. However, this means that you have to find a way to provide your business with a steady cash flow, even in situations where your sales are not so great. Some do this by diversifying their portfolio. Others turn to selling their invoices to factoring companies. All in all, you need to have a plan even for these scenarios.
4. Improving your fleet management
For companies that use their own delivery system, proper fleet management is one of the most important features out there. Even if you have a single vehicle in your employ, you could definitely benefit from a feature such as vehicle tracking. In this way, you will be able to ensure your drivers are utilizing their routes, driving at the peak of their gas-efficiency, as well as ensure the swiftness of your delivery system in general. Overall, this stands to make your business more reliable and save you some money on gas at the same time.
5. Organize your inventory
Finally, inventory organization is probably a feature that may seem important, yet, due to your inability to quantify the efficiency boost tied to it, you might not be 100 percent sure just how important. Luckily, creating an inventory system is not that hard, you need to properly label areas based on the frequency of use of the items, limit the access to your inventory and regularly update your base. With these three tips alone, you can already achieve a lot and you don’t even have to resort to a premium inventory management tool (although this would certainly be a plus).
The issue of organization is usually determined by your understanding of your business and all that it represents. Namely, if you don’t understand your goals, objectives and corporate values, you will have a hard time improving your company’s efficiency and overall performance. Furthermore, you need to understand its needs, seeing as how this will allow you to understand its shortcomings long before they actually become a problem. With these five tips on your side, all of these issues will become much easier to handle.
