Running a B2C is challenging, especially if it’s your start-up and you’ve built it from nothing. Our businesses are our passions – the projects we pour all our time and energy into for years to make successful. Sometimes it can be difficult to know where to make improvements though. If everything seems to be ticking along nicely, you might be at a bit of a loss as to where you can progress. Below, we’ve got some business assets we think are important and can often fall to the. If they’re already present and correct in your company, you can give yourself a pat on the back. If something chimes with you as a new initiative for your company, then it might be worth having a think about how to implement it.
Communication
Whilst it’s easy to fool yourself into believing your company has a strong foundation of communication in the workplace, sometimes not every colleague feels the same. Although regular check-ins can feel frustrating, they are an invaluable way of making everyone in the company feel as if their voice is being heard and their opinions and thoughts matter. Sometimes just the act of being heard is enough to reassure people that they have a worthy place in the business. You can improve communication in a number of simple but effective ways:
- Have regular one-to-ones with your team members and managers you supervise. Once a month should be plenty. This gives them the opportunity to air problems they are having, or challenges they’re facing and is a great way, not only for them to offload, but also to raise your awareness of what’s going on in the team. Keeping your finger on the pulse is a huge part of successful management and communication is at the heart of every great company.
- Team meetings. They don’t (and shouldn’t) last forever, but a weekly hour or so to give everyone in the team the chance to say what they’re up to is an excellent way for everyone to hear about the wider picture and therefore feel more invested in the company as a whole. A trap that companies regularly fall into is that junior members of the team, or people who have joined recently, only find out what their colleagues do on a day-to-day basis through osmosis. Change this so everyone has the chance to explain what they’re up to – it might seem frivolous but will really help in the long run. If other teams you’re responsible for aren’t doing this, encourage them to start.
- Have an open line of communication and encourage the regular passage of feedback. Although a yearly or bi-yearly company questionnaire can be beneficial to look at the strengths and weaknesses and gauge employee opinion as a whole, it can sometime be counter-productive to ask people to save giving their thoughts for this opportunity. Instead, maybe every month or two months, you can send out a short survey relating to a specific issue. Use a free service such as Survey Monkey to generate this. It could be as basic as ‘Do you think the food in the cafeteria is reasonably priced?’ followed by a few more questions on this topic. It should take no more than two minutes to complete and you’ll get completion rates and statistics so you will soon learn if this is something members of staff are participating in. This gets employees used to having their voices heard and offering feedback and suggestions. Make sure you have good practice in place though to start implementing changes when you’ve got your feedback. You can also send reports out to your colleagues with a brief summary of your findings, so they know what the general feeling across the company is on any given matter.
Consultancy
This is a service which often gets overlooked and budgets are regularly attributed to other prioritise. Bu the benefits of strong business consulting can’t be underestimated. Your business consultant will work with you on various aspects of strategy, planning and problem-solving within your business. They immediately have an outside perspective so, sometimes when it’s hard to see the wood for the trees, this external eye will be able to point you in the right direction. It’s not about highlighting what you’re doing wrong and mistakes, but simply gaining a neutral perspective from someone who hasn’t been involved in the structure of the company from the beginning and can therefore have a fresh take on what it looks like from the outside.
Although you might have concerns about the financial implications of hiring a business consultant, if your management team are having to split their time between daily tasks and implementing a large project, getting someone in on a temporary basis is going to be more cost-effective in the long run than hiring a new member of staff. A business consultant might initially seem like a larger up-front investment, but the money they will save you by not putting another employee permanently on the payroll is an incredible advantage.
As management, you will likely often get caught up in the minutiae of everyday like and managing the tasks and challenges that arise on an everyday basis. A business consultant will be able to look at the whole picture and assess the growth and development of the company in its entirety. They are also likely to be a specialist in your field, so will have an awareness of what other companies are doing, or have done, in order to make themselves leaders in the marketplace. Whatever size company you are, hiring someone for a short period of time who can give you constructive feedback on how to grow and move your company forward in an ever-more competitive field will be nothing but a benefit.
There are numerous ways you can improve your business, from B2C digital marketing, to rebranding, but often it’s best to begin improvements from the inside out. If you look after how your company functions and attract strong employees with a good company ethos, the business will follow.
