10 Simple Ways To Improve Your Small Business

If you want to have a successful and sustainable small business, then it is critical for you to have consistent improvements that enhance the business. Using tools like social media for marketing, monitoring the cash flow consistently, recognizing and honing in on your strength, and looking for help in certain areas of weakness will enable you to focus on improving areas of your business. 

Working from the top of your head might seem like a good idea, however, making sure you are working to the checklist to remind you of the simple, and basic steps that you need to take is going to lead to the biggest gain.  

Below are 10 of the simple ways you can improve your small business that you should be including on your checklist: 

Keeping Track Of Your Finances 

There are not many businesses that can estimate an accurate idea of the monthly, weekly, and daily numbers, as well as the financial trends that are happening within the organization. But, it is essential for you to take some time to keep track of the current cash flow. When running a small business, you may lack the much need financial skills to do this, and in this scenario, it’s always best to seek professional help and outsource to an accountant or accounting service. At least until you are unfamiliar with what you need to do to keep it in line yourself. 

Set Realistic Goals 

Similar to keeping track of your finances, setting objectives and goals is a critical part of your business success. Utilize the goals you set as a plan for the future to ensure you can continue to move forward with your business. For example, try to increase the traffic that you receive on your blog or business website. Having an increased traffic flow to these areas can translate into more sales or more customer loyalty. 

Use High-Impact Marketing 

It’s far too easy to waste money on marketing that is ineffective and pointless. Try to look for low-budget, high-impact marketing methods in order to improve your small business. Test a few tactics at a time, such as utilizing social media alongside using a printing service (click here for a great option), you can then see which work the best and offer a more effective performance. Once you have gone through the trial and error process you can utilize them as a permanent fixture in your marketing strategy. Social media can be an excellent low-cost and low-risk marketing method if done correctly. Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter are some of the good options to build up a social media presence and attract the needed attention to your business. 

Create Fantastic Business Presentations

Having a fantastic, powerful business presentation can really help to improve small businesses’ performance. Start by taking the time to learn the essentials of a business presentation that is memorable. These can include providing unexpected pieces of information in order to captivate and engage with your audience. However, you want to make sure you don’t overload your presentation with too much information. Everything needs to be relevant but not long-winded. 

Keep A Watchful Eye On Trends 

No business should operate with tunnel vision. Changes and events in the global landscape have a massive impact on your business, meaning you need to make sure you are up to date with the latest occurrences as well as the latest trends. Make sure you remain current on issues and trends that are happening in your industry and the local community.

Things that may appear irrelevant on the surface could impact what you decide to do, so, always ensure you are considering all the possibilities. Covid-19 is a huge example of this, no one could have predicted what could happen, but it has impacted every single business, across all industries in different ways. 

Brush Up On Your Selling Skills 

If you want to ensure you have a high-return in sales, then you need to focus on the business sales function. Whether you’re managing a sales team, or you’re a one-person operation, you need to make sure you are always focusing on sales improvement. To start, you need to begin by clarifying your business mission. When you determine the areas that you know that customers need and that you excel in, you will have a much better sense of vision and purpose. If your selling skills are less than perfect, it could be a good idea to brush up on your skills or hire a dedicated sales team to tackles any incoming sales. 

Establish Best Practices 

An important underpinning for every business is keeping everything transparent. That means communicating effectively, testing, breaking down silos, and improving your processes constantly in order to keep everything running as smoothly as possible. Another great example of this is the ensure you document all of your processes and avoid miscommunication at all costs. Make sure you write your best practices down as policies, train any staff with them, and review them on a regular basis. 

Motivate Your Staff

Motivated and talented staff members can lead to big improvements in your business. You should take the time to learn what motivates your employees and leads them to higher levels of performance. You also need to be aware that all employees are different and they will be motivated in varying ways. What works for one member of your team won’t necessarily work for another. In order to succeed in this department, you need to be willing to listen to their input and insight regardless of seniority or position. Some of the best ideas for motivation methods comes from those who are closest to the problems. 

Be Aware Of Your Limits

A successful business owner will have a very clear awareness of their limitations. Being aware of your entrepreneurial personality type, you can successfully manage your resources and identify any areas of weakness. For example, if you’re brilliant at sales and marketing but are less experienced with bookkeeping, focus your efforts on the sales and marketing bur hire someone else to handle the books. One of the best things you can do for a small business is play to its strengths. A great way to help your business be as strong as possible, leading to success is to utilize outsourcing to strengthen your weaknesses.

Most business will utilize some sort of outsourcing, for tasks as simple as data entry right thought to IT design and maintenance. One of the most common areas to outsource is social media management, this is because it is often a skill that is lacking within a small business, but also takes up a lot of valuable business working hours. 

Remember To Take A Break

Running a small business takes a lot of time and hard work. And, especially when starting up, small business owners are known for wearing several hats that can lead to them working too much and too hard. One of the best things you can do for a small business is to also look after yourself. Reignite your passion for a few vacations. A tired business owner can often lead to a tiring business. You should never underestimate the potential value of spending some time away from the workload, refueling, and preparing yourself for more work as your business grows. 

These 10 simple ways to improve your business should lead you to success. Is there anything that you do to make sure your small business is successful? Or is there anything from the list above that you already use to help? Please share some tips in the comments below.

How to Make Your Business Run More Efficiently

As a business owner, how much time do you spend on menial or administrative tasks every week that don’t yield any revenue? Are you looking for ways to make your business easier to manage? Do you need to streamline operations and improve your finances? 

If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you’re probably wasting upwards of 22 hours a week at work on tasks that take time away from the more important issues according to a study reported on Inc.com.

Learn how to put a stop to it now to maximize your output and start generating a profit!

A lot of aspiring and established entrepreneurs do dream of running a company that is simple to manage so that they can focus on everything from other investments to their personal life. Yet to do this, you need to make the right decisions for your company so it can run smoothly without having you work around the clock. Here are the steps that we recommend. 

Hire the Right Team Members from the Outset to Ensure High Retention and Low Employee Churn

First, you need to make sure that you are getting the right team on board with the right skills for your business. You should be doing this from day one and being careful with your hiring decisions. There are a number of key challenges here, however, the main point is to make sure that you know what skills are needed to fill each position, and then be sure you are asking the right questions during every phase of the interview process.

Ideally, you should be looking for people who are going to be valuable assets—both for the job and the company culture--in your business for the long term. That way you can avoid the problem of employee churn and not spend money on recruiting, hiring, and training new team members, only for them to leave a few months or a year later. If you find that the person you hired is not performing effectively in their position, it could be worth exploring additional onsite, in-house training rather simply cutting them loose. Some reports (such as SHRM) show that every time a company replaces a full-time, salaried employee, it can cost between six and nine months of that salary. This is due to the advertising, screening, interviewing, hiring, and training protocols.

Use Outsourcing Solutions and Providers for Projects Where Your Team Falls Short

Do be aware that if you are keen to keep your team small, then there are outsourcing solutions available. With the right outsourcing solution and help, you will be able to make sure that you can cut the costs of your business and still get the quality services and skills that you need for specific projects. You should be exploring outsourcing for any area of your business that is either expensive or complicated to manage effectively. For instance, if you need to hire a graphic designer or copyeditor for one project only, you can find qualified help on websites such as Upwork.com or Freelance.com. This is a much more cost-effective option than hiring a full-time or part-time specialist. 

Another example of outsourcing work would be an IT management service such as www.egistech.com. An organization like this can work to make sure that your IT systems run effectively behind the scenes and that your business doesn’t encounter unexpected downtime, fewer disruptions, or other information technology problems. You don’t want to end up in disaster recovery.

Explore the Right Technology and Tools for Your Brand from the Beginning

Next, do think about the tech tools available on the market. There are numerous options available that might provide you with the relief you need when managing your company from scheduling meetings to social media automation to project/task management software. Some of the technology tools that we use at FemFounder.co are HootSuite.com to streamline and automate our social media posts, Canva.com to develop our website and social graphics, ConstantContact.com to distribute email newsletters and announcements to our customers, and Squarespace.com as our main web hosting portal. All of these tools save hundreds of man-hours every month by automating various tasks.

Essentially, this will mean that you won’t need to spend as much time or effort on tedious administrative tasks or putting out fires. Indeed, everything can run far more smoothly, with or without your personal input.

How to Delegate Effectively to the Right Team Members as Your Business Grows

Finally, you should make sure that you are able to effectively delegate in your business model to the right people in your organization. This isn’t as easy as most business owners assume, though. It can be difficult to relinquish control over key areas of your company. When I launched my first business, I always felt the need to be in control of every aspect of the business. But that led to more problems over the long run.

You need to make sure that the right people are in place to handle menial administrative tasks for you. That’s why it’s so important to hire the right team from the beginning as we have already discussed. Once you have the right team members in the right positions, the trick is to train and then trust them to make the right call with key decisions. Where possible, you need to make sure that you avoid micromanaging any of your team members—this can lead to your most valuable players to leave your company. You can learn more about team delegation on www.mindtools.com.

We hope this helps you understand some of the best ways to make your business a lot easier to manage.