How to Optimize Your Small Business Processes
Small business processes consist of the steps necessary to achieve company goals. These goals can be as simple as maximizing onboarding time or as overarching as achieving certain revenue benchmarks. As you optimize your business processes, you’ll find doing so becomes a keystone process that itself continually monitors, evaluates, and adjusts business operations.
Improving Your Small Business Processes
It’s important to view business process improvement in one of two categories:
- Increasing momentum of processes that drive revenue
- Identifying and reducing friction wherever it slows company growth
Processes that increase momentum include sales, product development, and creating effective marketing campaigns. Friction reduction is most important when procedures unnecessarily drain resources, time, and labor. This can involve automating manual processes or removing obstacles to customer purchases, support, and satisfaction.
Types of Small Business Processes
Depending on your company, the following could be essential processes to upgrade and refine:
- Communications (internal and external)
- Error reduction
- Expenditure controls
- Customer outreach
- Interdepartmental collaboration
Optimization Methods
There are several frameworks or philosophies on small business process optimization. Some of the most successful include Six Sigma, which uses the five-part “DMAIC” framework to define, measure, analyze, improve, and control processes. Kanban, or lean, similarly achieves continual optimization of production and scheduling procedures while tightening quality controls. Total quality management emphasizes shared responsibility for enhancing quality assurance, improving customer relationships, and integrating systems for continual procedural flow.
Get the Help Needed To Optimize All Business Processes
AMB’s business coaching service is itself a proven, guaranteed process for identifying the most critical processes of your business by evaluating their impact on stakeholders, then maximizing efficiency and achieving the metrics that matter most.
Depending on the scale of your business, you could have up to hundreds of processes. Many times, the most important processes must change to accommodate growth. If you’d like a guiding hand in refining your business operations, contact us, and schedule a free initial coaching session with AMB Performance today.
