In the current financial climate, it might seem that improving your business is a virtual impossibility given all of the problems you might have just to keep things afloat. You will have no end of responsibilities, not least supporting your team as their salaries seem to cover far less than they used to.
Improving your business in 5 key areas will not only help you keep on top of all these ongoing problems, but they can also create an environment where your business can thrive over the next 12 months, and hopefully beyond.
Step One: Hiring the right talent
One problem you may have consistently is that you have something of a skills gap between the abilities of your current team, and where you want to be. Of course, training can solve many of these problems; and will improve confidence and morale among your team at the same time. However, if the issue is also one of headcount as well as skills – you will need to hire talented people to help take the strain.
Finding the right people is not always easy, especially if you are limited to recruiting those willing to commute to your office each day. You might even find yourself in a situation where you’re paying over the odds for people who you wouldn’t normally employ.
One way around this is to outsource key areas of your business, or if you prefer to keep a tighter rein on what you’re doing, you could hire somebody with the right skills from elsewhere and allow them to work remotely. This possibility could also be open to your established team as well, which will also raise their morale further and cut down on the cost of their commute which would be welcome in the current financial climate.
Step Two: Migrate to the Cloud
If now have a distributed workforce or even one that enjoys the benefits of working remotely or in a hybrid pattern, then you will need to allow a lot of people to access the same files at more or less the same time, so they can work collaboratively on your various projects. One way to ensure this can happen as smoothly as possible is to migrate everything to the Cloud.
Benefits of Cloud migration
This will have several benefits; most conspicuously regarding costs. Instead of having to upgrade your hardware constantly, migration to the Cloud means you can use as much space as you need. You will only be charged for what you use, and it also allows you to expand almost infinitely when you need to for a project – or to run several projects concurrently.
Security considerations
This is no small undertaking, and this kind of arrangement comes with security implications. These fall into two parts. First of all, there is the security of the Cloud itself from outside attacks as well as any problems caused internally as the result of granting permissions to people who should not have access. If you are still a little hazy on the details of what you need to cover, and what would be covered by the services you use – checking out the microsoft shared responsibility model would be an ideal first step in understanding what your responsibilities are and mitigating any of the risk involved.
Step Three: Analysing data
Regardless of what your business does, it will generate an almost eye-watering amount of data. Looking at this can be absolutely key to improving your business, so you need to find the right software that can crunch all of this data into usable graphs and charts which can show you the way forward.
This might expose productivity issues and bottlenecks in your current operation that need to be improved, and it could highlight some areas where you are having outstanding success and you could have even more with very little extra effort. By having data in the forms of graphs and charts, you can show this to other stakeholders and communicate it to your other team members, to show not only what you are doing but also why you were doing it.
Step Four: Communicating effectively
This ties in with the need to communicate effectively with everybody who works for you. It doesn’t matter what type of working arrangement you have; everybody needs to be kept in the loop. Whether this is through project management software or simple face-to-face team meetings at the start and end of every day. By doing this, everyone knows what their objectives are, and any feedback from customers or suppliers can be communicated so that people know what their priorities are.
The important thing here is not to take up people’s time needlessly, and that you are not having meetings for the sake of having meetings – especially if you have not defined a purpose for that meeting when organizing it.
Step Five: Optimizing your website and social media
All businesses wishing to have success in the next 12 months must have some form of an online presence. This will typically be in the shape of a website, and social media output across major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, depending on which particular needs your business happens to be in.
You may have found from analyzing your data that your social media posts aren’t getting enough engagement to generate the right amount of traffic, or that you’re getting plenty of your visitors to your website but they are clicking off before booking an appointment or buying something online.
You will need to look into this area to find a solution, and while you could try and do this yourself– this is one area where getting the experts involved (or at least hire the right person remotely)is key.
- They will be able to deduce why those people are clicking away from your website–typically due to slow-loading pages or being directed to the wrong page.
- They could also find out if your content on social media is too promotional, and you need to show a bit more of what happens behind the scenes at your business–so your followers can relate to you more easily.
To sum it all up
There are plenty of areas in which your business can improve, and by getting five of the most important right, you will find that you are on the right path. Migrating to the Cloud should be a priority here, as it can save you money; offer a better level of security for your data, and open up other areas where you can improve.
It can allow you to hire talent from around the world, which can cover up your skills gap; and help you move forward in other areas like analyzing data. This will show where your company needs to improve – especially in the areas of online engagement on the website and social media.
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