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Are you finding it tough to streamline your daily work processes, and that most of your business resources remain overworked or underutilized? Is your business struggling to hit optimal productivity, which is further causing a dip in overall sales figures? Worse, are your business operations hampered by limited or inconsistent cash flow?
If you are one of those entrepreneurs who are facing the aforementioned challenges, then it’s likely that you are not using the best tools for managing the key areas of your business.
Now, different businesses operate differently and key areas differ from business to business. However, there are certain critical areas that are common to businesses irrespective of their size and type. I have identified and listed the key areas that demand careful management to help small businesses achieve their goals. 35
5 Key Areas of a Business
Though businesses have to oversee many crucial aspects, I’ve zeroed in on five zones that are of the utmost importance to both entrepreneurs and managers.
1. Resource Management
Resource management is essential to keep a business running because it ensures resources are available in the right places at the right time and reduces costs and wasted effort. Resources can include not only tangible things like products, equipment, and money, but also valuable assets like skills and time. To make sure this happens, businesses must create schedules and set budgets for people, projects, and supplies.
Thankfully, there are tools available to streamline many of these processes. There’s a lot of software that allows you to foster collaboration as you assign tasks to the appropriate team members. You can also track progress and capacity. Best of all, many of these tools also generate reports that help you find patterns and address areas needing improvement.
Managing people in a direct to customer business is particularly challenging. Fortunately Mystery Shopper Services has 40+ year’s experience helping our clients do just that. Monitoring and measuring your customer’s experience is crucial to your success. We can help!
2. Operations
Operations are an essential part of any business because departments coordinating with one another to meet goals is what business is all about. You may not recognize all that goes into operations on a daily basis, but as soon as anything is out of sync, your team notices and productivity can falter.
Many businesses have started utilizing software to keep their operations on track. Proofhub is an example of a software that offers a centralized work space for teams to keep track of task lists, workflows, discussions, calendars, and documents. When looking for this kind of tech, it’s important to make sure the software you choose integrates with other tools you use, and it’s an added perk when there’s little to no learning curve.
Managing your inventory and business standards can certainly eat up a lot of your valuable time, but is necessary to the growth of your business. We have the tools to make that task much easier through our Internal Audit app that allows you to conduct inventory and standards audits from your cell phone or laptop. No more pad and pencil calculations. Give us a call!
3. Marketing
No matter how great your company is, it isn’t going to succeed without some marketing efforts. What that means for you will probably differ based on your business. It might prove more beneficial to focus on social media efforts or content marketing. But the bottom line is that you need to be promoting and marketing your products or services.
If you have an internal marketing team, they have plenty of resources to choose from. Customer relation management tools ensure customer interactions are consistently smooth. Our Social Media Management tool allows you to stay on top of all your social media platforms from one location. No more jumping around to several accounts in order to stay on top of customer engagement. Managing your social media is critical to your search engine optimization. Our system streamlines that process and increases you customer engagement as well. We’re here to help.
4. Sales
Sales obviously play an important role in business because they generate revenue, but sales teams are also your front line when it comes to establishing customer loyalty and trust. An efficient sales team can help grow your business through improved profits and reputation.
Arming your sales team with the proper tools is crucial. Ask them about their pain points. If keeping documents organized is a hassle, find a contract management software that lets them streamline agreements and manage digital contracts. If drafting personalized emails eats away at their time, consider using templates. Anything that’s repetitive and bogs down their process should be automated when possible.
5. Financial
Accounting, recordkeeping, administrative work, and monitoring cash flow are all tasks that get repetitive quickly. While that can be monotonous for humans, computer software can make quick work of number crunching.
There are plenty of tools to help streamline financial processes. Accounting software should help with report generation, automated recordkeeping, expense calculation, and invoicing. Expense tracking tools let employees from across teams share any expenses with the finance department. Those are just a couple of examples. When looking at finance-related tools, make sure anything you add integrates smoothly with the tools your team is currently using.
Final Takeaways
Managing a business is no easy task, especially when you have limited resources at your disposal. By using the right tools to manage different areas of your business, you can achieve improved results while saving your employees from tedious manual work.
The tools mentioned in this blog will help you eliminate resource wastage and cut down on error-prone manual work while facilitating collaboration across various departments.
In this dynamic age, you cannot afford to rely on old-fashioned ways. So, I would suggest you immerse yourself in reading business publications that are crucial to your business, and choose the best tools and business partnerships.
Nothing is more important than managing the customer’s experience. Satisfied customers are your best form of advertising. We would be happy to show you how to turn customers into Raving Fans and to streamline all the other processes that get in the way.
BY JOHN HALL AND CARL PHILLIPS
