Looking for ways to make your company more productive, make your team more creative, and make your operations more efficient? If so, then check out these 25 strategies, which range from thoughts on leadership to advice on how to motivate employees to ways of reducing IT costs. Each of these ideas has been tested by other small businesses and yielded a significant pay-off. Here’s hoping they work just as well at your business.
1. To Focus on Truly Urgent Matters, First, Clear Your Schedule
Harvard Business School professor John Kotter, author of A Sense of Urgency and Leading Change, talks about the importance of bringing a sense of urgency to your organization. The trick is, there are two types of urgency: a good type which is characterized by scrutiny and focus, and a bad type driven by panic and breathless activity. How can you tell which is which? One dead giveaway, according to Kotter, is your schedule. If you are overbooked with meetings, you are probably engaged in the wrong kind of urgency. Clear your calendar, so that you can better focus on the truly urgent matters in your business. Read more
Kevin Plank, founder of the athletic apparel company Under Armour, says that the key to motivating employees is to communicate with them face to face. When his company was smaller, he would gather the team together once a week to go over key strategic and operational decisions. Invariably, they brought up issues and offered suggestions he had not considered. Not that Under Armour is quite large, an all-hands meeting is not feasible. Instead, Plank invites a half-dozen “potential stars” to MVP lunches held several times a month. Read more
3. Tweak the Language on Your Website
Do you find that people come to your site and then leave without buying anything? There are ways to reduce shopping-cart abandonment and keep prospective customers on your site longer. Stamps.com founder that using the phrase “sign up” was actually a negative; customers saw it as a high-pressure sales tactic. Once the site replaced that phrase with “Get Postage,” sales increased. Read more
4. Measure Demand for New Products on the Cheap
Lean product development can help a company develop new products with a minumum of waste and expense. One trick: TPGTEX Label Solutions, a Houston based software company, creates mocked-up webpages that list the features of a potential new product along with its price. The response to those webpages enables the company to test a product’s marketability. Read more
5. Improve the Accuracy of Your Sales Forecasts
During difficult times it may seem hard to set realistic sales projections. Jeffrey Hollander of Seventh Generation discusses looking at your products item by item and finding out what is going on with your customers’ business so you can best meet their needs, In particular, identify the cash-flow issues faced by your distribution partners. That will not only give you a clearer sense of the health of your business—it may also present you with a new business opportunity. Read more
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