Anna Balyuk 
You’re a business owner or CEO. Maybe you’ve just recently started, or maybe your company has a long history. It doesn’t matter as in both variants, your goal is to develop your enterprise as quickly as possible.
Go on reading to find out 5 tips to make your company grow quicker.
1. Take Care of Proper Resource Management
If you have no clue what your employees are working on at the moment and how many tasks they are trying to tackle, don’t expect good results soon just because an overloaded worker is ineffective. And if you’re dealing with multi-project environments, where tasks are often interrelated and employee’s duties are interdependent in various projects, it’s the first thing you must dwell upon if you want to make your business move faster. How? Use an individual approach and be in touch with your team controlling their work. Besides, apply tools to track the workflow in your company. There are a lot of resource management software whose aim is prioritizing tasks and allocating resources. Check out how Epicflow can help you monitor the workflow in your company and allocate resources using the Pipeline and Bubble graph.
For less than a year, KPN, a Dutch landline and mobile telecommunications company, increased their on-time delivery from 18% to 80%, efficiency – by 21%, and halved completion time using Epicflow.
If your subordinates are addressing too many challenges at a time, they can face a psychological issue that ruins their performance. It’s called emotional burnout syndrome. That’s why together with proper resource allocation it’s so important to make your employees a close-knit team. Team building activities will be helpful. Create an atmosphere of collaboration and friendship to make the workers feel like they’re on the same page.
Many companies have relax rooms including places where employees can both have a rest and play, or even workout.
To prevent procrastination and emotional burnout, let your workers know they’re on the right track in their efforts. You should communicate your feedback to an employee in a proper way, which is also a good thing for you to learn.
And remember that employees should manage their energy, not their time, as the latter is a limited resource. If people feel comfortable at their workplace and know they’re valued, their performance level will be higher.
2. Keep Track of your Competitors
You must know both your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Regardless of their experience, whether it’s good or bad, you can learn something new and useful for your own business.
Competition between people and companies leads to new discoveries, without which there would be no progress. The constant rivalry between Mercedes and BMW, Nikon and Canon, Apple and Microsoft millions of times resulted in the new product release.
Harvard Business Review has conducted a survey about the impact of competitiveness on risk-management and decision-making characteristics. They’ve found out that rivalry increases promotion focus.
And it’s not only about your rivals as other company’s owners. It’s also about creating an atmosphere of competition for your employees at their workplace to make them move active, resourceful, and motivated. Though remember that constant competition causes tension and may lead to emotional burnout, so be careful with this policy.
3. Don’t Be Afraid of Dealing with Risks and Think Ahead
Business is impossible without risks. If you don’t take them you don’t move anywhere. So get used to them and stop being afraid. Proper risk management will prevent you from the fiasco.
Always think over different scenarios of your business life and keep several variants in mind to be able to change your strategy on time not to let it fail.
“If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not taking risks, and that means you’re not going anywhere. The key is to make mistakes faster than the competition, so you have more chances to learn and win.” – John W. Holt, Jr., Xochi manufacturing.
Though mistakes slow down any process so it’s better to avoid them. And if they happen, the most important thing, according to Wellingtone’s 9 golden rules of risk management, is mitigation: dwell upon concrete actions you can take to improve the situation.
Good news: risks don’t necessarily lead to mistakes. Multi-project management tools can assist. For example, What-if scenario function in Epicflow can make you a prognosticator testing your decisions before implementing them. You can also view your projects’ progress in a future perspective using a Future load graph.
Epicflow has helped VieCuri, a Dutch medical center, to optimize the number of IT resources and allocate them, as well as forecast backlogs.
Read more: How Epicflow Helps Drive Project Success
4. Improve Your Marketing Strategy and Make It Work in Collaboration with Sales
If you spend a lot of money on advertising but get no positive result just stop and think over it. Perhaps you’re doing something wrong.
When dealing with customers, appeal to their emotions, not just force them to buy your product. They want to understand how your product can help them with their problems. They don’t want to know why you’re the best, they want to know their benefits. Everyone is concerned about themselves, not about someone else. So try to communicate with your potential clients via your advertising campaign. Make them believe you’re striving to make their lives better. And do it.
Watch the video where Simon Sinek, a leadership expert and TED speaker, is talking about the ways to inspire action.
Make your marketing and sales departments work as a whole. Salespeople can’t sell the product they know nothing about. They can’t do it for the established price if they don’t know the reason for such pricing. So the marketing team should give them the necessary information. At the same time, marketers should consider the sales department’s experience regarding the market and previous sales, to deliver a proper campaign and establish a reasonable price. Sales are focused on individual clients’ needs, and marketing considers the target audience, which consists of millions of potential customers. There’s a conflict between them. Salespeople think in a short-time perspective, and marketing experts – in a long-term one. Make them communicate and exchange their experience and worldview to reach a common goal. Read how to end the war between sales and marketing.
Read more: When Sales and Marketing Aren’t Aligned Both Suffer
5. Be in Touch with Your Clients
Keep in mind that your current clients are the people interested in your company and who need your product. That’s why they’re the best way for you to know your pros and cons to get better and attract new customers. According to statistics, making your current customers buy from you once more is twice cheaper than attracting new clients. So you need feedback. Conduct case studies, interview them to find out what your product’s features make them more successful and what shortcomings should be eliminated. And of course, don’t forget about bonuses for your regular clients. They should know they’re appreciated.
Any business is vulnerable in the digital age where negative feedback can ruin its reputation. That’s why you should apply a customer-centric approach, which means that every department should be in touch with your clients directly or indirectly. Your business goals must be focused on clients’ needs and pains, and you should react immediately if they don’t like anything. The longer you ignore their queries, the more time they have to find a new product. You need happy clients, and it’s up to you to make them happy.
Emma-Ruth Arnaz-Pemberton, director of Consulting Services at Wellingtone Project Management, recommends paying attention to the following feedback issues:
- Use open questions in the feedback questionnaires to let people feel free to express their thoughts.
- Talk about your clients’ pains to let them know you care.
- Don’t consider extremes, focus on average feedback.
- Don’t take it to heart, just use every opinion to become better.
Here’s a summary of tips to make your business move faster using your environment:
- Take care of your team members
- Learn from your competitors and strive for better
- Plan each step but take risks
- Focus on your clients’ needs
- Let your customers know you care
What are your business success tips? Have you ever used any of the suggested ways to make your business move faster? Share your ideas and experience in the comments.
