Do as I say...

I spend a large proportion of my time looking at businesses and finding inefficiencies in processes which I then work on resolving... human beings are problem solvers by nature, is we see an issue we want to create a solution. I suppose the difference is that I’m able to see the issue where as quite often, especially if you’re heavily involved day too day, a lot of business owners become blind to it.

Business efficiency is a bit of a woolly term- essentially it means ‘making things better’ and that could be through anything really but generally it’s defined as improving processes. In a small business though so many of the processes are inextricably linked that it’s hard to pull apart the strands to focus on points of failure. In a large business with established infrastructure an ERP system for example, takes care of a lot of task duplication or wastage and smooths the end to end journey.

Most small businesses don’t have that luxury and often the owner is the removing one hat as salesman to put on another as warehouse operative, another as finance and so on. We all do the best we can in what we think is the best way... and often that is developed organically, rather than consciously.

So, back to what I was saying, with the luxury oh being able to view the whole picture at once and be able to spot these bottlenecks/in efficiencies and I believe that if it is within your gift to help someone, you should.

Over the years this has manifested itself in marketing improvements, spreadsheet removal, process automation, just stopping doing something that’s utterly unnecessary (just because that’s how you’ve always done it!) and it’s fulfilling for me to see those changes implemented and successful.

This brings me back round to something that will no doubt amuse you. I use Quickbooks, have done for ages to track my mileage- little app on my phone does it, I tag journeys as personal or work and et voila at year end I have that part of my return sorted. I pay for this, it’s well worth it for me. Quickbooks (this is not an advert btw, other tools are available I just always think it’s disingenuous saying ‘an accounting app’ 🙄) does other things that I’ve never used, like invoicing. I was sat the other night preparing my month end invoices, that I create myself in a long winded way and it occurred to me that i could just do them in the system I pay for... I then meekly carried on doing it the way I always have.

I am going at spotting ways to create business efficiency but as it is for many of us it’s a lot easier to look from the outside at someone else’s business than to critically review our own... so in this case it really is a case of do as I say, not as I do and if you start to feel overwhelmed by your own processes consider getting in someone else to just look and point out where there are bottlenecks, issues or potential savings to be made... I promise that perspective is worth it.