Investing In Productivity: 4 Things That Are Slowing You Down

As a founder and business leader, it’s up to you to squeeze every last drop of productivity out of every day and every team member. To create an environment where your team feels motivated, satisfied, and ready to meet the challenges of each new day, this is critical to the long-term success of your business.

One of the curses of entrepreneurship is that you’re never quite able to look back on what you’ve accomplished and say that you’re completely satisfied. But by building a culture of introspection and support, your business can reach new heights of operational excellence, thereby making employees feel comfortable and maximize their output; the kind that leads to the legions of loyal customers and years of sustainable growth.

However, this kind of culture doesn’t just come overnight. You need to make an investment in your business productivity. And that needn’t necessarily be a monetary investment. It can simply be an investment of your time and attention on the things that could be slowing you down in business. Let’s take a look at some potential barriers that could bottleneck your team’s productivity and overall output.

Your operations

Your operations play a large role in defining your business and how well it runs. As the old song says, it ain’t what you do, but it’s the way that you do it. As a proactive entrepreneur, you should be constantly looking for new ways to make your operations more efficient and your employees more productive. This may mean relying more heavily on marketing automation, investing in new software, tools, and equipment, or simply being more receptive to training your employees in new ways and borrowing operational ideas from your competitors. 

Lots of entrepreneurs are very protective of doing things their way, even it is may not be the most efficient. But if you’re prepared to be fluid in your definition of what your way is and how the business functions, you’ll find that it’s easier to make your operations more efficient. 

Your comms infrastructure

In the 2020s, every business is a tech business to some extent or another. And the more reliant you become on digital communications, the more you need to ensure that you have the right digital infrastructure to keep your operation running efficiently. 

Structured cabling specialists such as richmondcomm.com ensure that your cables are organized in a way that not only prevents them from becoming a safety hazard but also confirms that they maximize the speed of your internal and external digital communications. Speedy communications, especially wi-fi, is critical to running a business efficiently. What would happen if your phone and wi-fi connection went down? How would you run your business? Simply put, you can’t.

You’re doing too much in-house

As a small team, you’ve all had to double up in your responsibilities and learn new skills as your business has grown. But as you strive for further growth, could you be biting off more than you can chew? That zeal to do everything your own way can actually prove detrimental to your operations and actually prove less cost-effective than outsourcing to an expert. Consider how much time you’ve spent on learning more skills that you could have essentially outsourced for a few hundred dollars? How much more time would you have had to focus on growing and scaling the business?

For us at FemFounder, we know we aren’t experts on setting up email sequences, so we outsource that task among many other duties. This enables us to focus on our strengths.

Third-party service providers won’t compromise your ability to do things your way. They simply take some of the pressure off your team’s shoulders so they can get back to doing what they’re best at. 

Your team are multitasking

Finally, neuroscience has proven time and again that there really is no such thing as multitasking. There’s just doing several things badly! If you want to squeeze the most out of every day, make sure your business has a zero-tolerance policy on multi-tasking.