Don’t fly blind in business. Focus on these five key areas.

Don’t fly blind in business. Focus on these five key areas.

Do you sometimes feel like your head is spinning with everything you need to be ‘on top of’ in your business?  There’s a phone call from a customer to deal with, a staff member off sick, a product to fix, the bank manager to appease and the list goes on!

As well as handling the day to day issues, do you dream of building your business and having some time off without the whole place falling apart?  The good news is you’re not alone.  Most people who go into business have a dream of doing something great for customers/society, as well as creating a great place to work and hopefully creating some reward for their hard work.

Once you get into the reality though, the dream can fade because you’re just so busy trying to keep all the balls in the air at once.  If you’re really serious about getting a handle on things, here’s a great start to creating a structure and path towards your dream.

Start by thinking of your business as having 5 Key Areas:

1. Product/service – the things you sell
2. Marketing and sales – promotion of your business
3. Operations and finance – delivery of your product/service and the finances
4. Human Resources – staff/volunteers
5. Customer Service – how well you look after customers

If you can set up processes to proactively manage these five areas, you will be well on the way to creating a profitable and ‘stress-free’ environment for your staff and yourself to work in.  You will increase the value of your business, because systems enable someone else to come in and run it.

Once you’ve got systems in place to manage things, you can also create measures to ensure good performance and improvements i.e. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).  

KPIs are a great way for you and your team to understand clearly what is expected, to ensure the right activities are focused on and the result is a profitable business.

For more detail on KPIs download our eBook ‘Using KPIs To Grow Profit and Cash’