The Right Way To Grow Your Business
Success in business comes down to two things: The strength of your plan or strategy and your ability to execute it; everything else is window dressing. In the words of business consultant and author, Mark Sanborn, “it’s better to be consistently good than occasionally great.” Mark’s mantra can be applied across all lines of business, but has a special meaning for business processes.
Good business processes can lead to great rewards. Followed correctly, they can:
- Improve the quality of your products and services
- Provide more consistent delivery
- Increase customer satisfaction.
- Equip you to cope with the unknown and adapt quickly to change.
- Help you identify strengths, weaknesses, and skills gaps.
- Highlight new opportunities and help you capitalize on them quickly.
- Save you money – and help you make it.
Why then do so many small businesses and midsize enterprises (SMEs) undervalue business processes? According to a report from Circle Research, which questioned 800 global SMEs, only 19% want to achieve business improvement. In addition, less than half want to streamline their business processes, reduce their cost base, or create supply chain efficiencies. On the contrary, 47% of businesses are focused on achieving growth.
My advice for business owners is to focus on what you’re doing now and get that right before branching out. Here are eight more steps to help you run a better, more efficient company.
- Identify which processes you can improve – Find the processes in your company that use up a lot of resources without generating a lot of value.
- Break it down – Examine each step of the process in detail and ask the relevant people how they carry their part of the process out.
- Analyze it – investigate the problems within the process. For example, are there bottlenecks? Where does the cost go up and the quality go down? Are there certain stages which frustrate customers and/or employees?
- Redesign the process – Once you’ve identified the problem(s), get rid of them. Ask for suggestions from people involved in the processes. Cultivate the best ideas, and then start thinking about how they translate in real life.
- Plan your resources – The next step is to map out the resources you will use to make the necessary changes. Consider IT support, more supervisors, technology investment and anything else you might need.
- Put it in writing – When your plan’s in place, document the new processes clearly so that everybody can see and understand them.
- Implement and communicate change – Improving your process might mean equate to changing your systems, teams, or other processes. Make sure you provide the appropriate training and support. Be prepared for initial resistance, and a slow start.
- Review the process – Monitor the progress you make and ask your employees about their experiences with the new process.
Change takes time. Sometime it happens quickly; other times change can be painfully slow. Either way, the changes you make in your business should be viewed as an investment of time, resources and manpower; something that should not be decided by a flip of a coin or the winds of fate.
Read the report from Circle Research to find out why ambition matters and how businesses, just like the one you run, are using it to grow their companies.
Source: http://blogs.sap.com/innovation/innovation/right-way-grow-business-01629217
