Last week we talked about ways you can work with your vendors to help save money for your business. I have successfully used this approach with my vendors successfully for years. If you would like to review them, you can review that post by CLICKING HERE. This week I am sharing another area that you can look at to save money for your business.
When many Small Business Owners start out, by necessity they have to wear many hats. They don’t have a large, specialized staff where everyone has well defined duties that are well suited to their abilities and temperament. Often as the owner, you have to be a jack-of-all-trades, doing most everything whether it is your strength or not. Over time, you may even get fairly proficient in performing those tasks. If nothing else, you certainly build a habit of doing them.
Eventually as you grow, you are able to add more staff to help you with the business. That is good for you – provided you have considered this. As the owner, are you performing the duties that will bring the most value to your business? Have you delegated properly so that you are doing the things that will bring the most value to your company? Read on for how to see if this applies to you.
You wouldn’t expect the owner of a high end restaurant to be in the back room sweeping out the cooler during the busiest time in the restaurant. You would expect to find them out interacting with the customers, ensuring that they are happy and receiving great service. You have to approach your business in the same way. Are you doing things that are keeping you away from interacting with your customers? We all only get 24 hours in a day, so you have to consciously choose where to spend your time.
It is easy to justify why we do things in a certain way. Sometimes it is just habit. We have always done it that way. The habit may have come from necessity, as new business owners with limited staff discover. Sometimes it comes from a change. You lose a staff that was performing a certain function and as the owner, you or one of your other staff pick up that duty while you are looking for a replacement. But often when the replacement arrives, we continue that duty while we are waiting for the new staff to get “Up To Speed”. We often keep the duty reassigned because you didn’t take time to make a transition plan or the employee isn’t learning as quickly as you had expected. You may be reluctant to train the staff because “everyone is busy and you don’t have time”. Pretty soon the duty has become permanently reassigned as time pushes out the original “intention” to turn the duty over later. You probably can see that it could be fairly easy to have people performing duties that they shouldn’t be doing.
Solving this is will take most people some time. You have to be open to the fact that you may be doing some things wrong. The procedure itself may be fine (remember to verify this), but the person performing it may need to be adjusted. It could be both. Keep in mind that because you are making a change, does not indicate that you did something wrong. A procedure that was appropriate when created may be outdated. Here is a quick example. If you have a large computer file that needs to get to one of your customers (or vendors), it used to be more efficient to send that on a CD than to transmit it over the internet. Now it is much quicker to transmit it than to send it. There was nothing wrong with the original procedure, technology changes allowed for a procedural change. Nothing was wrong with the original procedure, it just is no longer the best way to do it.
Once you are open to reviewing your procedures, you can gain efficiencies and get the right people doing the right thing in your business. In an upcoming blog, I will give you suggestions on how to approach this type of project.