Best Practices
Part of being an effective leader of your small business is to be able to make sense of the numbers and to avoid profitability pitfalls! Understanding best practices is important because your business must be able to understand how to properly identify, implement and maintain best practices in order for your business to remain competitive and grow in an ever-changing business environment.
Keeping track of industry best practices and your own business best practices will help your business to avoid profitability pitfalls that could occur by pursuing less-than-favorable business processes.
To unlock growth for your company, adopt these best practices in business process improvement:
- Delivering Quality – No matter what else changes in the business world, there will always be value in doing exceptional work in your core business
- Identify Growth Opportunities – A small business owner has always got to be looking for opportunities for growth and increased profitability. Look for the areas of the business in which process improvement could have the most impact. Try to think in terms of the outcomes you want to achieve rather than the challenges you’re trying to address, Miller advises.
- Stay True to Your Core Focus – Once you’ve completed the impact assessment, consider how well the area you’ve targeted aligns with what you want the company to be. An opportunity is worth pursuing only if it makes sense in the context of your company’s identity, culture, and path to growth.
- Outcomes and Impact – you need to consider whether your organization is capable of implementing the process changes that you envision. Similarly, your approach to process improvement has to be fluid enough to allow for continual adjustment and refinement as required to keep you on track to achieve your objectives.
- From Improvement to Innovation – it’s essential to involve employees in planning and implementation. Their participation affords you the advantage of access to first-hand experiences and insights that you may not have as the business owner. You’ll want to solicit vendor and customer feedback on what you can do to make it easier to do business with your company. In that respect, you can think of business process improvement as essentially customer experience improvement. This, again, will keep you focused on outcomes that support your performance goals.
- Establishing Organizational Rhythm – Those companies who have established a natural rhythm through concise meetings or huddles, and who include employees from all levels of the business, are more likely to succeed. These daily huddles include communicating key performance metrics and other data, as well as a discussion on what’s not working. This rhythm allows employees and management to react more quickly to issues and implement corrective measures.
- Employee Empowerment – High-performing companies have created systems that allow them to gather and implement ideas that are generated across all levels of the organization. The entrepreneurs behind these businesses support their employee-improvement programs by integrating improvements into training and support systems, as well as rewarding and compensating their employees when they generate and implement improvements.