Modern business is ruthless. The hard-hitting, fast-paced climate of continual change and evolution usually catches small businesses off guard. Entrepreneurs are sucked into the whirlpool of spending money they don’t have and trying to play catch up with the earnings to loss ratio. And guess what, modern business isn’t going to change anytime soon and it has no reason to. The way you succeed as small business owner is by using everything you have further and more efficiently than you competitors. Doing more with less is the goal that you should be striving for. But, that’s quite a broad statement and sight to aim for, how could your business begin making this cultural shift? For one thing, if you are going to be doing more with less, you need every ounce of what you have to count. This means limiting waste. The only way you can even find the end of the piece of string first, is to monitor and improve every single process in your business.
Endless human errors
Even though businesses are incredibly complex and rely on even more complex software to keep everything in order, at the end of the day the thing that pushes and pulls the levers is the human being. You, and your employees are potentially the biggest hazard to your business. Don’t take it personally, it’s just in our DNA. We’re not robots that do a task the exact same way a million times in a row. Human errors are to be expected but that doesn’t mean you cannot work on limiting them as much as possible. If you do not have a manager or managers, then you need to do the monitoring yourself. This means that you probably have less than 10 or 20 employees. Study how much work and the quality of work each employee does throughout the week, splicing this up into different days to cover all employees. Do this for a month and see which person is the weakest link and why. Start to improve them by either giving them more training, or re-evaluating what their role should be.
Those pesky machines
Any business that uses machines are beholden to their capabilities, their design, their functions and their ability to stay working for as long as possible before maintenance is needed. How we utilize machines in our processes is will determine how fast and efficient our business really is. For example, with a Six Sigma philosophy, a problem that is occurring in the business will be methodically identified. With the training program you can slowly rise up through the ranks onto different belts, which are basically certifications in the different levels of complexity and skill in the philosophy. With your newly earned skill and adoption of a different way of studying processes and where profit leakage is happening, you can make radical changes to your business. Not knowing why your profits this month have fallen, could be the difference between one machine compared to another. Six Sigma helps to identify whether one is more efficient and costs less to run than the other.
Human errors are unavoidable. However for a small business to thrive, the business owner must carefully study his workers and see where a failing is happening and set it right. More and more industries are starting to implement new ways of thinking, that monitor each little tiny process to find problems and figure out the best solutions to them.