Now, more than ever, whatever the industry your company specializes in it is imperative to take the time to examine your business model, identify areas that require improvement and implement those changes as soon as feasibly possible.
1. Outsource Customer Service
It makes considerable business sense to outsource your customer service to a professional, established and experienced company. With the internet being so utterly prolific and influential to all businesses regardless of industry, customer service is more paramount and powerful than ever, so you need to make sure you are getting it right.
Outsourcing your customer service has a multitude of significant benefits. Call centers have their own individual infrastructures and generally charge considerably less than if you were to create your own in-house customer service team. For larger businesses in particular, outsourcing your customer service operations allow you to spend more time in other areas of your business that need attention and investment, safe in the knowledge that trained professionals are handling all of your customer enquiries.
Additionally your revenue is likely to increase, you are able to release a significant portion of you and your employee’s workload and outsourcing your customer service means your customers will be helped with multi-language support.
2. Invest in Superior Technology
Whether your current business model needs considerable work, or perhaps just a few smaller tweaks to the structure, the latest technology can significantly and relatively easily be of substantial assistance.
There are copious benefits to upgrading your technology, both for the short-term growth and the long-term growth capabilities. Such benefits include, but are categorically in no way limited to:
- Efficiency – The initial outlay will quickly become wholly justifiable when you and your business partners see for yourselves the increase in employee efficiency resulting from providing them with new computers and other electronic equipment.
- Compatibility – It would be of considerable detriment to your business, specifically your finances, if you were pipped to the post by a competitor who advanced purely because they decided to invest in the latest technology and you held back. As technology is constantly improving and evolving, staying up to date with such developments will ensure your systems will always accept new operating systems and software releases.
- Productivity – Undeniably, the faster and smoother your technology, specifically computers and associated electronic equipment is, the faster an employee is able to work.
3. Conduct a Full Energy Audit
Not only will conducting a thorough energy audit of your entire business will save you considerable money in the long-term from reducing your business water supply, it will also mean your entire business model is considerably more eco-friendly,
The resulting benefits of a more environmentally friendly business are plentiful and include, but are by no means limited to:
- The likelihood of financial rebates, tax breaks and even monthly tax credits
- Lower utility bills
- Respect from business peers and industry experts who are interested in making business greener
- Customer loyalty due to the environmentally friendly nature of your company, products and services
4. Theory of Constraints
If you are unfamiliar with the term, the theory of constraints (TOC) is essentially a business-based, problem solving methodology which enables you to determine the biggest obstacle within your business model that is currently preventing you from achieving a particular project’s objectives and goals.
Invented by Eliyahu M. Goldratt in 1984, the theory of constraints focuses on what is preventing particular business processes from being successfully carried out and essentially suggests five steps to facilitate this process:
- Identify the main constraint – Simply identify the main constraint preventing you from completing a particular project
- Exploit the main constraint – Stop wasting money and time on this constraint
- Subordinate everything – Expand the consequences of the main limitation and investigate whether or not it has been limiting any other elements of the project’s progression.
- Improve the main constraint – Apply a specific problem-solving method to attack the root cause
- Repeat the cycle – Identify the second largest obstruction and repeat steps one to four.
The theory of constraints will effectively and succinctly improve each project’s success rate and length of completion time and will subsequently save you a considerable amount of money thus improving your monthly cash flow.
5.‘Box Theory’
The Darvas box theory effectively breaks down individual functions of your business into more manageable and smaller system groups, or ‘boxes’. This enables the business to concentrate on the most important few that most effectively drive your business forward and seek to improve such systems even further as to elevate them to a higher overall level of performance.
The six essential areas that the box theory focus on are:
- Measurement
- People
- Process
- Components
- Quality
- Speed
There is a wide number of additional tried and tested ways to improve your overall business model and subsequently increase your sales and overall cash flow.
Hiring an accountant who specializes in cash flow, seeking out marketing strategies that are simultaneously low in cost yet high in impact, staying abreast of the current innovative trends within your specific industry and ensuring you maintain transparency right through your business model are all effective improvement strategies. Meticulously and continuously documenting your processes is also extremely prudent change to make, mainly as this prevents any miscommunication which can cost you significant amounts of time and money.