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Startup
By JOE MAILLET 1,765 views
BUSINESS

Stuck in your Startup? Try these tips to streamline your Business Activities

A business going through a growth phase is difficult to control. Things can quickly turn haywire, leaving the business owners quite overwhelmed. It may also have them working overtime, squeezing each resource to get the best out of a department to drive efficiency. Startups may often need a lot of reshuffling and re-shaping to streamline all the business activities making things difficult, to begin with. For starters, here are a few of the quick tips that every startup in the growth stage can simplify and redefine the business activities.

Start Outsourcing

No matter the size of the business, every business can benefit from outsourcing. There are many departments that a startup can choose to outsource. For instance, hiring business professional service providers for a range of services like accounting and booking, trademark registration in India, and GST filings. Ultimately, any outsourcing would help businesses to focus on performing their core activities while reducing the recurring costs as well. Also, if you are looking to redefine the way how your business works, then outsourcing is the best way to free up existing resources and spaces while having experts at their disposal. When the business grows big, the habit of outsourcing pays off as operational costs plummet gradually.

Implement and Communicate Change

It makes no difference if you cannot communicate the change within the organization. Maybe you are trying to better the current business processes or evolving with the team. There will be possible changes in the shape and structure of team – hiring, expanding our outsourcing. All these require careful management and planning. It is best to keep some time and resources dedicated to dealing with operational hazards. Running a pilot is highly recommended so that everyone within the organization will get a taste of it and feel trained enough for new roles and deliverables.

Remember that change is never easy for anyone associated with the business – employees, customers, or vendors. These entities may resist change, especially after functioning in the same manner for too long. There are two ways to it – you can either use the change curve to help affected people adapt to the change, or you can implement Kotter’s 8-step change model to cross the hurdle of change resistance.

Process Reviews

Reaching a final business goal, be it retaining the customers, driving more leads, or spreading the business will require a process. All your business activities should align with the processes you follow within the organization to streamline it. A systematic approach would involve following a step-by-step process and its timely reviews. The key is to achieve greater efficiency through process setup and see tangible results like customer satisfaction, enhanced productivity, etc. Also, when processes don’t work, it creates friction amongst the teams leading to frustration, delays in deliverables, and financial losses.

Try following this step-by-step process for timely reviewing

  1. Mapping the functional processes
  2. Process Analyzing
  3. Redesign the process if required
  4. Resource acquisition based on a new process
  5. Implementing and communicating this process change to the affected people
  6. Process reviewing by gauging the performances

Most processes will require your inputs for improvement as the market and demand for products and services changes along with the customer expectations. New goals, new technology, and changes in the business environment can make any process go outdated. Therefore, it is recommended to keep reviewing the process by tapping in the performance and see what can be done in the best way.

Empower Your Employees 

Invest your time in building the A-team for your startup where employees stay in trenches and on the front line who gets their job done. As an entrepreneur, you’d want to retain your employees, motivate them by providing great rewards, and inspire them with the success. Keeping them in your startup for long will eventually streamline the departmental processes and gradually the whole of your business. It is so because they can make key decisions quickly without moving back and forth since they know the processes within the organization.

You may well consider monitoring those areas where managers and supervisor conduct their daily jobs. It helps you stay familiar with the process and find out ways to benefit them with various process improvements. Trusting them with their conduct of carrying out business activities, delegating crucial tasks, and letting them take the charge will infuse a leadership culture. This way, you are pushing them to give their best without letting them succumb to the pressure.

Taking Data-Backed Decision

Try logging the mundane activities like logging in and out of the web, socials, Google Analytics, etc. You will soon realize the time crunch and feel it pounding harder than you’d ever imagine. Therefore, tracking the activities, productive or otherwise, is essential if you are looking for sustainable streamlining. You will need to see the numbers to understand what pays off well for you and how can your efforts change the results.

Stop spending more time on activities that don’t yield results and instead, start tracking the business activities. With this, you will soon understand the underlying causes that plummet business performance or process that yields better results. Implement Google Analytics or SalesForce automation to map performance with the activities that help to take timely streamlining decisions without negatively affecting the business.

Final Words

There is no one single way to streamline the way how a startup functions. It is always a cohesive effort where you take charge from all ends to ensure providing a proper structure to the way how your startup functions. These above-mentioned tips do hold for startups in general but choosing the right one to implement or combining two or more strategies is also possible. Have you recently streamlined your startup in any other way than the ones mentioned above? Write it below in the comment section for everyone to explore more options.

Joe Maillet
Author
JOE MAILLET

Joe Maillet is an avid reader and a writer by heart. He is an author, freelance writer and a contributor writer, who write articles and blogs for various leading online media publications and for CEO and entrepreneurs from across the world. He keeps himself updated with the latest marketing trends and always recognized in the industry for providing solutions to B2B and B2C businesses.