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Every entrepreneur knows about that feeling of having a healthy business, at least on paper, but seeing it struggling for its life somehow. There are sales coming in, and the team is busy, but there is no visible business growth at all. In fact, the main issue is not something spectacular and dramatic, but a combination of little inefficiencies working silently behind the scenes and becoming a barrier for your company.
Here is a look at the issues that may seem small individually but become huge collectively and prevent you from further success.
1. Decision-Making Authority of Limited People
In many cases, an essential part of the decision-making procedure in businesses is concentrated on just one or two people. Pricing approvals, inquiries to suppliers, project authorizations – all of them go up to the top without the real reason for it. However, as the business grows, such a centralized system starts working against you, making everything slow and inefficient. If the authority is distributed and the capable people know how to use it effectively, the situation will change for the better.
2. Lack of Integration Causing the Need for Workarounds
If the systems of your business are not integrated with each other, the lack of communication is usually replaced by a manual way of doing things. Data duplications, spreadsheet reconciliations, and other workarounds take your time without you realizing that it happens. In case of a business where the accounting and the operation run separately, working with experienced MYOB consultants may help to solve the issue.
3. Business Dependence on Key Persons
When the crucial process knowledge is concentrated in one individual, the company risks facing serious problems in case that person leaves. All the issues related to that will be solved by delays and workarounds and, hence, won’t be noticeable at all. The problem may be easily resolved by cross-training people and sharing the responsibility among them.
4. Inconsistency of the Onboarding
A new employee who got confused during the induction process may generate mistakes which will take much effort to recognize. The impact of such an inconsistency will be hard to see since it is very likely to appear away from the root of the problem. The structured induction process will help to avoid all these complications in the future.
5. Reactive Approach to Inventory and Resource Management
A company which manages the stock levels only when the problems occur spends all its efforts on solving the issue rather than preventing it. Both overstocking and understocking of the inventory will consume much money, but both of them are not dramatic enough to become the priority. Simple demand planning based on the historical data will help you to make your business preventive.
6. Ineffective Communication
While growing, your business becomes a chain of people passing the information to make decisions. Without any protocol of the communication process, it may slow down significantly. The project will stall due to the absence of context, the teams will perform redundant efforts, and customers will receive different messages. All this will impact the business negatively, but nobody will notice it on the reports since it is not directly connected to finances.
7. Data Collection Without Regular Usage
Modern business software collects much data for you automatically. However, what you need is not the availability of the data, but the ability to know which numbers are worth paying attention to and to check them regularly. A business that uses a small number of important indicators regularly is more likely to succeed than the company maintaining an extensive dashboard and never using it.
8. Customer Follow-Up Relying on the Memory
Customer retention is not only the acquisition of new clients but also the maintenance of the existing ones. Leaving the follow-up of the sale, service or any proposal to memory is the recipe of lost opportunities slowly. Consistent use of the CRM habits across the team will change this tendency.
9. Informal and Time Consuming Approvals Process
In many businesses, approvals for expenses, contracts, and scope changes happen via a quick discussion or a message in the chat. If the relevant person is not available, the process will be delayed. In case the decision needs to be rechecked later, there is no clear trace of how it was done. The formalization of the approval process will eliminate the delays and risks and allow you to track the inefficiencies within it.
10. Growth Strategy Going Ahead of the Capability
It is typical for many companies to chase revenue growth without considering whether the business processes are ready for it. Hiring additional employees and taking on the new clients without checking if the systems can support the workload will cause you service quality problems long before the expected benefits will come. Little problems left unattended accumulate and become the barriers for further development.
Conclusion
All of the issues described above are typical of many businesses and do not require huge expenses to be solved. They need only a consistent improvement based on the honest analysis of the business operation. The most successful businesses are rarely those which have made some drastic changes. Usually, they are those which have found where the inefficiencies were accumulated and have solved them step by step.
