Year after year the priorities and goals of CEO's and business owners everywhere remain consistent. The top of the list year after year is increasing the value of the business.
Whether you are preparing to sell your business, want to increase chances of a business loan approval or like all businesses, simply want to improve your financial results, here are three of the most important items that should have your focus.
1. Increase profitability
Bankers, vendors, employees, owners and shareholders all have a keen interest in the profitability of your organization. Not many will be interested in investing in a company with declining returns.
How can you do it?
Look for ways to decrease expenses, increase effectiveness internally.
- Find opportunities during the sales cycle to increase the value delivered to customers, seek out ways to develop recurring revenues by providing ongoing services that will make your customers more effective and increase their revenues or profitability.
- Involve your team, members of your organization are closest to the customer experience, tap into their knowledge and reward their innovative ideas.
- Sharpen the saw, take advantage of educational opportunities, speak with your network and the organizations who assist you with your operations, seek authentic feedback and input.
2. Improve your processes and service delivery
Start by documenting your procedures, ask hard questions, why do you do things the way you do them, is there a better way? If you are planning to sell your business, ensure your business is setup to run effectively without your involvement, the easiest way to do so is to document and tweak your processes and cross train. Eliminate redundant processes, implement software to avoid error prone processes.
Develop dashboards that deliver easy to understand consolidated insight into your operational data create visual on demand insight into your organizational results.
3. Keep employees engaged
Provide great systems for your employees, set them up to succeed by making it easy for them to delight your customers, replace antiquated systems and software. Provide great methods for feedback, long term incentive plans and reward and acknowledge your team for their role in customer service and retention. Today’s work force wants to use modern technology that gives the visibility into the operations of the organization and communications with customers.
Don’t have time for this? The good news is there are companies, like BAASS Business Solutions, out there who do nothing but this type of work. Engage an organization that specializes in working with companies to improve their systems, business process review and improvement, implementation and guarantees their results.
Now is a great time to set some specific goals and tackle one or more of these important improvements.
