There are many ways to improve business performance, but not all of them are effective for every company.
The following eight tips are a good place to start if you want to improve your business performance.
Whether you’re the owner of a company or business, marketing manager, or marketing coordinator, you want to be thinking of ways to increase your profitability.
Increasing your performance can come with some disadvantages as challenges arise, but there are many ways to help grow the company so profitability is possible.
Below are business performance strategies any small business owner can implement quickly to help improve their business.
Business Performance Tips
Tip 1. Accounting Software
Getting the right accounting software is crucial for your business. Get an accounting package that you can load budgets and forecasts. Not only will you be able to track your income and expenses accurately you can analyse performance against expectations, thus allowing you to make decisions faster.
Tip 2. Credit Check Potential Clients
Many small businesses still do not credit check their clients, it is too risky in working for a client that may not pay you. Most banks provide their business clients with a monthly subscription service, invest in one as soon as possible.
Tip 3. Improve Payment Terms
Make sure you get paid for your sales as soon as possible. If you have payment terms over 30 days you should seriously consider changing it to 30 days or less if possible. Ideally, you should get paid for your goods/services before you pay your creditors.
Tip 4. Chase Creditors
Chase all outstanding debts from your clients that have exceeded your payment terms. Every small business should have a procedure in place to deal with aged debts. Start off with a friendly reminder, warnings should escalate upwards to senior management. If this fails you should seek legal advice.
Tip 5. Feedback
Ideas and collaboration drive improvement and innovation. Every small business should try and interact with their customers. Find out what they like about your business, what you could do better. Use this information to improve your business. Offer customers an incentive to take your survey, this will increase participation.
Tip 6. Analyse Your Competition
Competitive analysis is should be a continual process, not just for your business plan. You need to analyse what your direct competitors are doing regularly and try and stay ahead of them. Scan your market, find out if there is a new entrant or is a competitor struggling.
Tip 7. Review Contracts
Keep track of all of your long-term contracts, revenue and expenditure and start planning for possible alternatives several months in advance. This will help put you in a position of strength in negotiations.
Tip 8. Manage Staffing Better
Is your business slowing down? Think of what your staff demands will be in the future, you may need to start negotiating a reduction of hours with your employees.
Also, develop succession plans for yourself and for all key staff. Your business should be able to survive without you or another key member.
By implementing these tips, you can create a more effective and efficient business that is better able to compete in today’s marketplace.
Improve Your Business Performance
The key to a successful business can be found in our Business Success Formula. If you structure your business using the Business Success Formula as your blueprint you will decrease your chance of failure significantly.
We assess your business and implement our business success formula in our business assessment service The Business 360. It provides you with all the information to 10x your business in a matter of weeks. You can check it out here.
