3 Ways to Improve How Your Business Operates

When you’re running your own business, it takes a multi-talented person to do well at it. You must be organized, a good planner, know how to delegate and develop a team that gets the job done. Not everyone is suited to be an entrepreneur, but if that’s you or something you want to develop into, then the good news is that it’s a role you can learn to play well.

Here are three ways to improve how a business performs over the medium to long-term. 

Develop Better Communication

Companies run through people. Without great performance from the staff, the business is likely to perform as poorly as the staff. Motivating staff to deliver their best work is part of the responsibility of the managers and motivating the managers is the responsibility of the entrepreneur. You may think that the managers should motivate themselves, but ultimately people come to work for more than just a paycheck and need some “attaboys” to feel good about what they’re doing. 

A leader leads. By this we mean, the person at the top points to the direction that the business should move and it’s up to the managers to push their staff to deliver on this objective. Therefore, communication matters from the top on down. A leader who fails to lead creates a rudderless ship, essentially, which doesn’t deliver meaningful business results.

Embrace Project Management

As your business grows, the number of client and business projects running consecutively will expand exponentially. It becomes increasingly difficult to manage the individual projects well and juggle the needs of multiple projects running concurrently. 

You’ll want to try different project management software and begin using GANTT charts to become better organized. Based on the information fed into the software, it’ll produce one of these charts to help you visualize the different parts of each project, who’s responsible for each task and make it clearer how things are progressing. There are paid tools like Microsoft Project and open-source project management tools like Odoo and MyCollab that will help with this.

To develop some advanced skills in project management, you might wish to consider a masters in project and program management program at Brandeis University. The online MSMPP degree helps you to work with best practices across multiple industries, learn new business tools and develop leadership communication skills too.

Outsource Smaller Tasks to Specialists

While your business may already have some full-time or part-time staff, you should also consider outsourcing minor tasks to outside contractors or use the services of a virtual assistant (VA). VA’s are available inexpensively when using workers from the Philippines who have good enough English to do a reasonable job with administrative tasks where some grasp of the language is required to complete the task. The company doesn’t have to pay many of the usual costs associated with a full-time employee this way and takes the load off staff who have better things to do with their time than knock out small, yet time-consuming tasks.

Once your company is up and running and beginning to show signs of progress, it’s time to pause to survey the scene. What things are being done poorly or could benefit from a change in processes to achieve more? Many newer businesses don’t have good operating procedures written down for staff to follow yet and would do well to draw them up.