Ep:10 Six Tips & Strategies to Improve Efficiency In Your Small Business

Running a business can be rewarding and stressful at times. One area of our business that keeps top of mind and keeps business owners up at night often is business efficiency. Business efficiency or the lack thereof can have a large impact on your business's success. Any business that operates at minimum efficiency wastes time, effort, and resources. As business owners we're always looking for innovative ways to improve and maximize business efficiency. There are lots of ways you can get more efficient in your day-to-day business activities—all it takes is a little planning and forethought. 

On todays' podcast, I'll taking a deep dive in business efficiency and sharing 6 tips to improve efficiency in Your Small Business. 

Transcript

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Hi, and welcome to the Brave Pivot Podcast. I'm your host, Cindy Marie Ferguson. I'm a former corporate girl turned entrepreneur, business educator, and mentor here to help you build a profitable and successful business. After the kids' corporate and chaos. On the podcast, we'll have honesty, meaningful conversations around becoming an entrepreneur, starting a business, building a brand, and my favorite. Systems and processes and so much more. If this sounds like your thing, stick around each Wednesday through guest interviews and solo episodes. I'll be providing insights, tools, business strategies, and actionable support to help you along the way on your entrepreneurial journey. Get ready for some candid conversations, inspirations and invaluable insights. I'm so delighted you're. Let's dive in and get started. Running a business can be rewarding and stressful at times. I think we can all relate. One area of our business that keeps top of mind and keeps business owners up at night often is business efficiency. Business efficiency, or the lack thereof can have a large impact on your business' success. Any business that operates at minimum efficiency, wastes time, effort, and resources. As business owners, we're always looking for innovative ways to improve and maximize business efficiency. There are a lot of ways you can get more efficient in your day-to-day business activities. All it takes is a little planning and forethought. On today's podcast, I'll be taking a deep dive in business efficiency and sharing six tips to improve efficiency in your small business. Let's start by taking a deep dive to understand what is business efficiency. Business efficiency is a measurement of how effectively your business performs. Business efficiency is a term that can mean a lot of different things to different people in different context, but the basic concept involves utilizing your business' resources in the most effective way in order to accomplish your business goals and ultimately increase profit. Here's a quote. Efficiency is doing better, what is already being done. And why is business efficiency important? As business owners, if you don't maintain or improve efficiency, you may be at risk of overspending, reducing quality, wasted time and effort, revenue loss, loss opportunity costs, and customers dissatisfaction. Did you know that inefficiencies cost many organizations as much as 20 to 30% of the revenue each year? Successfully running a small business requires a great deal of time and energy and other resources. If you wanna increase your chances for success, focus on being as efficient as possible. Next, I'll move on to areas to improve business efficiency, which can include, but they're not limited to, finance processes, operations, workflows, and so much more. Next, I wanna share with you six tips on how to improve efficiency in your business. Starting with number one, process automation businesses use different approaches and solutions to improve efficiency. Automation by far is the most common solution. A business may have several repetitive and frequent tasks that use valuable resource. By implementing in an automation solution, you can save time and money, thereby allowing you to reallocate those resources to other business critical areas. Moving on to tip number two, process efficiency. Process efficiency can be defined as the amount of effort to achieve a business objective or outcome. Process efficiency is essentially making your business or system processes more efficient. Improving process efficiency can result in increased productivity, increased profitability, reduced errors, and improved customer service just to name. Improving process efficiency can vary depending on the business's unique needs and challenges. However, a general framework includes mapping out your existing processes, identifying bottlenecks and areas of improvement, creating a new or revised process, and lastly, socializing your new or revised process. A good strategy is to set up a routine to review your existing processes about twice a year, to see where you can align, consolidate, or optimize your processes. Remember, process efficiency is an ongoing process. Small incremental improvements can have tremendous impact in your business. Moving on to tip number three, reduce the need for multitasking. It's scientifically proven that you are more productive when you focus for an extended period on completing one task instead of multiple distracting activities and tasks. A good strategy to consider is to consolidate small work items and tasks or maybe set up a routine to do batching. For those of you who aren't familiar with batching, batching is a time management technique that includes grouping similar tasks together and setting a set a time to complete them all, or until you've reached a predetermined progress. The premise behind batching is that it minimizes the amount of distractions through setting it aside an intentional amount of time and making an intentional effort to not to break focus. Moving on to tip number four, delegate responsibilities. Now, in order to run your business more effectively, you must delegate. Delegating as a business owner does not need to be hard. In fact, it could. And welcome relief. Start by creating maybe a spreadsheet and a list of all your key daily responsibilities. Next, group your list by functions like marketing, content management, sales, finance, human resources, et cetera. You get the idea. Next, evaluate and identify which tasks and responsibilities are the one that only you can do and require your expertise. Only group those together and put those in their own list. After that, determine which task and responsibilities you can begin. Now, trusting someone in delegating will improve your productivity and efficiency, and it frees you up so that you can focus on the key tasks and responsibilities that only you can do, so that you can work on accomplishing your goals and objectives in your business. Moving on to tip number five, spot trends early. Spotting trends early is critical to business owners. One strategy to spot trends early in your business is to use trend a. Trend analysis is a technique used to examine and predict movements of an item based on current and historical data. Through conducting trend analysis, business owners are able to see patterns in the data that will reveal which areas of your business is running inefficiently and where you need to focus and take necessary corrective action. Trend analysis can improve your business by helping you identify specific areas in your business that are optimized and performing well, as well as areas that are underperforming. Now, having a regular cadence established to review the data on a monthly basis will help you to be proactive and address any issues promptly before they turn into larger ones. Moving on to our final tip. Monitor KPIs, monitoring those key performance indicators. It's important in to check your KPIs to measure if the effectiveness of efficiency improvements in your business, and determine if you need to make any adjustments or tweaks. As I shared before on a previous podcast, a good strategy is to set up a cadence to review your KPIs on a monthly basis, especially at the beginning. If you're in case you're, um, you're new at your business, you can identify any areas that need corrective action. I made another episode, as I mentioned, that takes a deeper dive into KPIs for your business. If you wanna take a listen, it's episode seven. Now, one thing I wanna stress is efficiency doesn't improve in a vacuum. Improvements to efficiency rarely happen in a vacuum. And here's a quote that you may have heard before. Knowledge is not power. The sharing of knowledge is power. Share your knowledge and experiences. When it comes to efficiency improvements, there's so much to be gained from sharing. For example, if Motorola hadn't shared its internal processes for improving quality and cutting cost, six Sigma would've never exist. And the same goes for Toyota as it relates to Total Quality Management. So the next time you're in a business meeting or perhaps you find yourself at a networking event, don't be shy about chatting about business efficiency. You might be surprised at the value of ideas someone shares with you. Now, let's recap what I shared with you today. First, we took a deep dive into business efficiency. Then I tonified some areas that you can improve on business efficiency. Let's recap what I shared with you today. First, we took a deep dive into business ef. Then I identified some areas that you can improve business efficiency, and then I provided six tips and strategies to improve efficiency in your business. And I'll leave you with this final thought. Simple changes can make a significant difference, such as automating processes, consolidate and delegating task, and implementing a new software capabilities that help you optimize your operational efficiencies. Efficiencies. Improvements are not a one size fits all. Improvements must be tailored to a business specific goals, values, challenges, and unique needs. Ongoing tracking and analysis is imperative to maximizing long-term efficiency. The key to a successful business is to be efficient. Efficiency helps you improve processes, reduce costs, and improve productivity so you can save time and money, which increases your profit margins and your chances of. I hope that you found these tips and strategies helpful, and I invite you to try and incorporate one or combination of the tips and strategies in your business. If you end up using any of them and they've helped you, I'd love to hear from you. You can drop me a DM or send me an email@hellocindymarie.co. Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed our conversation. If something I shared today resonated with you, please tag me@cindymarie.co on Instagram. If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave an honest five star review. When you do, it helps us to grow the podcast and helps others to find us as well. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast so you know when the new episodes are being. You can subscribe right from the app that you're using to listen to this podcast, or you can sign up for email alerts@cindymarie.co. Lastly, if there's something you'd like to hear about in a future episode or if you just wanna stop by and say hello, please feel free to DM me@cindymarie.co on Instagram. Thanks again for listening to The Brave Pivot Podcast and I'll see you next time.