One of the greatest problems when trying to make an efficiency boost lies in the fact that it might take a while for your business to grow. This is particularly true in B2B interactions, seeing as how your audience will need to patiently examine every single change that you’ve made, prior to making a final verdict on how to act. This means that even though you’ve made some improvements to your infrastructure, business model or efficiency in general, the results may come in several months.
To some, this is discouraging but before you start accusing anyone of being impatient, remember that there’s nothing wrong with some immediate results, every once in a while. Here are several ways to give your business a simple and immediate efficiency boost.
1. Motivate your staff
Motivating your staff is a simple and efficient method, that can be done even without any additional resource investment. Ideally, you would use bonuses and gifts to encourage your team, as well as present them with chances for growth and advancement. On the other hand, if the budget is tight, you could look for non-material ways to improve their morale. An additional break, a chance to customize their workstation, as well as a public mention of the outstanding work that some individuals are performing are all efficient tricks that you can use to your advantage.
Aside from this, you also need to gather feedback and see if there’s a common (even recurring) source of discontent amongst your staff. A single emotional vampire could drain an entire team, thus making them less productive. Nonetheless, the problem doesn’t have to come from a person. An inefficient appliance, low quality of supplies or a particularly demanding (and unnecessary) business practice could all be a cause of low morale. Needless to say, discovering these problems is a first step in solving them.
2. Get in charge of your digital marketing
Even if you’re not the one who’s directly in charge of your digital marketing but are outsourcing this function to someone else, it’s definitely worth your while to learn a thing or two about this field. For instance, by learning about different types of digital marketing, you can perhaps spot an opportunity that was so far unused or underutilized by your company. While some may argue that this defeats the very point of outsourcing (not having to worry about this area of business), things are never that black and white. After all, there’s a difference between self-managing your SEO and knowing a thing or two on the topic in order to be able to track metrics with greater efficiency.
3. Smarter meeting management
On average, a person working in an office attends about 62 half-hour long meetings every month. This means that they spend about 31 hours (almost four work days) in meetings, not all of which are necessary. Just by cutting this time somewhat, you could make a massive difference in productivity. For starters, you would add more work hours to your month, which gives you a direct boost in productivity. Aside from this, you would also avoid downtime caused by the commute to and from the meeting (no matter how short, when multiplied by 62, the numbers start adding up). Standing meetings are a great alternative.
4. Focus on your cash flow
An inexperienced entrepreneur looks at the paper and sees that the company is profitable, which makes them feel content about their current financial situation. Several months later, they find themselves in front of a problem, seeing as how they can’t afford a new piece of equipment or lack the money to hand out all the bonuses. This is mostly due to the fact that account receivables and cash flow are not one and the same thing. That being said, in order to keep your company running, you need to learn how to fix this massive issue. Here, you have various options from selling assets and invoices, to getting loans.
5. Give your team some equity in the company
In the first section, we talked about the ways to motivate your staff, well, there’s no simpler way to tie them to your brand than to give them some equity in your company. This way, when they perform better, the value of their stock rises, which should be more than enough to ensure both their loyalty and high performance. The downside lies in the fact that as the company grows, the value of this stock will also grow, which means that this “bonus” might become a huge figure in several years (or decades). On the other hand, if this is what it takes to ensure the loyalty of invaluable team members, then this is a price worth paying.
Conclusion
While there’s a false presumption that methods which give immediate boost usually aren’t that great in the long-run, with the above-listed five methods, this is definitely not the case. It all depends on your point of view. Sure, on paper, selling a valuable asset for cash flow might seem as if it could backfire in the future, but once you realize that without the cash flow there is no future, things will become a lot clearer. Same goes for the majority of other methods on this list.
