As with any business, but especially start-ups, it is key to have a plan in place to help maximise your income. Whether it be through general productivity or marketing strategy, we’ve put together a few simple steps that could give your business a new focus to help maximise profits.
Productivity
Time is precious, and sometimes we can find ourselves wasting it on various long-winded processes and tasks. The key to saving time is to understand your processes and procedures and try to automate where possible. It’s beneficial to streamline laborious or manual processes, so you can spend time where it matters.
You know how your business works and what’s best. Look at work that needs to be done and create workflows for best practice and follow them. Try not to deviate and get into bad habits, as this will almost definitely waste time and hinder productivity.
Set clear objectives to ensure you constantly aim to grow and develop as a business, and note what you want to achieve. A great structure for this is to make them SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. Monitor your objectives regularly and be sure to keep them relevant to avoid them falling out of touch with the business.
Understand the customer journey and continue to look at it with fresh eyes. Don’t be afraid to be critical and make changes where necessary. Ultimately if your customer journey isn’t slick and smooth, you could be losing customers before you even have them.
Utilise Technology
We are quite a tech-driven practice and implement a lot of new technology and apps. Nowadays there is an app to solve almost every problem, so check out the app marketplace to see if they have anything that will help streamline your processes and essentially make your life and your customer experience better.
Be committed to trialling software and give it a good amount of time to see the benefits, but don’t feel obliged to roll it out if it’s not for you. It may take a few apps before you find the diamond in the rough, but if you feel it’s not working, chop it quickly to save unnecessary time. It’s important to remember not to oversubscribe to resources that you don’t use or can’t implement. It could stretch you too thin and you won’t end up dedicating the right amount of time to each software.
Budgets and Resources
Look at both the time and financial elements of your business and assess whether your time could be better invested somewhere else.
Make sure you have a budget and know where the overheads are, and remember to account for the cost of your own time.
Review your budget for new technology. What will you need to cut in order to afford it or where will the additional time come from?
If you have a team, don’t be afraid to delegate and utilise the skills that are available to you. It’s easy to forget that you don’t have to do everything. Use your delegations skills to hire assistance, whether it be temporary or permanent.
Business Overview
Encourage referrals and repeat custom, because after all, it’s free marketing. Try and offer referral discounts where possible.
When looking into marketing options, decide what strategy is realistic to your business based on your brand and budget. Identify your competitors and take note of what they are doing, as well as looking at your target market and budget.
Finally and most importantly, build a brand. Review your internal culture, product/service, social media, and website and ask yourself:
Why will people remember me?
How will people remember me?
Why will people want to work for me?
If you would like further advice or to see how we can help your business, why not book in for a complimentary consultation and speak to a member of Team SAS.
Alternatively feel free to contact us.
