Running a business is tiring work. You have to keep an eye on the minutest aspects to ensure that you’re doing your best to pad your bottom line while creating a welcoming work environment for your employees and an excellent company for clients to work alongside. With new advances in technology, it has become easier to figure out the niche ways you can fine-tune your operations that have a noticeable impact on your profits. However, some minor things will always fall through the cracks.
Invisible costs can add up over the months. These costs are in terms of money, lost opportunity, and reputation. While you can recover the money, it is much harder to recover lost opportunities and reputation. You need to work twice as hard and thrice as smart to recover the latter two, and it can often be impossible in highly competitive markets. It is significantly easier to prevent the damage in the first place! Here is what you might be missing out on when you assess how your company runs.
Service Fees
All businesses need some sort of support to run. Whether this relates to utilities or technology, most places rely on services to run operations smoothly. The service fees that accompany are often overlooked as part and parcel of your costs, but they can significantly impact your profits if you are not giving them the importance they deserve. Your first step is to identify any expenses that you might not be accounting for.
Evaluate all your service fees, from credit card fees to utility and servicing costs. You can speak to your service company and talk to them about a reduction of service fees for bulk work or renegotiate a deal that is favorable to both you and their company. Service fees for payment portals can be managed by changing how you use them. Small changes like this can save you hundreds of dollars every year that you can invest in infrastructure or expansion.
Weather
The weather plays a significant role in how you operate. Sunny skies generally correlate with lowered employee productivity, while bad weather can increase productivity. Bad weather can impact your operations when it blocks employees from reaching your place of business or the client’s location, delay deliveries, and wreck your planned logistics schedule. This can also strain relationships with clients you’ve worked hard to establish.
Accounting for inclement weather events can increase your operational efficiency as you now have time to prepare for the fallout from these events. You will also be better prepared for seasonal demands and be able to predict market demands with more accuracy. ClimaCell launched a new site for weather predictions and assessments that you can use to factor in the effect of the weather on your business.
Non-Performing Clients
When you lock in on clients, most businesses never evaluate the relationship they have entered. Not all clients are the same, and not every new client is good for your business. Every customer locks in your limited resources for their needs. It is crucial to bring clients on board who grow with you. Otherwise, you stand to get stuck with partnerships that are holding you back instead of pushing you forward.
Assess your clients and see whether it is more profitable to keep them or gracefully bow out of the relationship. By freeing up your resources, you are opening your business up to the potential to get a new client whose needs are likely to increase with time. This might seem risky, but it is a necessary risk you need to take for the sake of your company.
Standard Operating Procedures
Standard operating procedures should be an integral part of every business. They streamline the work you do and help you achieve consistency when meeting your clients’ needs. Every business should have standards and get processes that help employees do their job faster and more efficiently. Without SOPs, you stand to lose a lot of valuable time as your employees figure out what to do for the same work for different customers.
Not having SOPs will make assessing employee performance more difficult, as there won’t be common ground to compare different people’s work. It also negatively affects employee engagement and work culture, which costs businesses $450-550 billion a year. Having standard operating procedures also helps to reduce onboarding and training time for new employees, so more assets can hit the ground running and contribute productively to your organization.
