How Small Operational Tweaks Can Boost Your Business

Most businesses focus on making big moves, such as having a recruitment drive for the launch of new products. But often real growth comes from making changes behind the scenes. These include small operational tweaks that make things run better and faster, and can impact the business and make it more profitable.

If you are running a startup or small business, making improvements to your operations doesn’t mean that you need to change everything. You just need to look closer at what you are doing and what’s working well and what’s not. Identifying where your business is slowing down is the key.

Let’s have a look at where to start.

Look at What Slows You Down

Every business has bottlenecks; it’s just about finding them. It might be that you struggle with fulfillment, or it could be from onboarding New employees. It could even be that one person handles too many tasks and isn’t able to keep up.

You need to start looking at your core workflows and finding anything that is causing delays or confusion on a regular basis.

Once you are able to identify what is working for your business, you can look for solutions. This might include automating part of your processes or delegating better. Am I even including you in changing your timelines so that they are more realistic?

A great example of this is if you are a physical goods business, you need to check your production line. Investing in better tools or changing the layout of your manufacturing process could shave hours off of your weekly output. Something as basic as upgrading to a more reliable woodworking machinery can reduce errors, improve safety for your employees, and also increase the speed of production.

Standardize What You Repeat

If you were doing something more than twice a week in your business, then it probably needs to have a system in place. This might be a simple checklist that you hand out to employees, a template that gets used, or even a short training video that you can show to your employees.

When you standardize repetitive tasks, it gives your team a clearer Direction and it helps to free up any mental energy that they may be using. It also makes it easier to scale when you do start to grow, you won’t need to keep explaining things from scratch each time.

Measure a Few Operational Things That Matter

Not every metric is useful. There’s no need for you to get distracted by numbers that might look impressive, but they don’t actually tell you anything useful.

You need to have a look at a few key indicators that are tied to outcomes. This might be looking at things like conversion rate or time to deliver, you then need to track them consistently and use the data to make any changes that you.

Final Thoughts About Operational Changes

It’s not always big operational changes that make a difference when it comes to running a small business; you need to have a look at how small tweaks can help to boost your business and gear it towards growth.

Have you made any small changes in your business recently that I’ve helped move you towards growth? Let us know some of the things that have worked in the comments.