In case your answer to at least 3 the above questions is no, then chances are, there's no order in your business.
You have to know: the most dangerous enemy your business faces is not the fierce competition or hard-to-get clients or lazy subordinates (which will not help you prosper either, but this is a different story)
Ever happened that you could not see through what is happening in your business? Maybe you tried to organize all operations in Excel tables, only to end up creating an Excel sheet in which you marked which other Excel sheet contains what...? Are you still assigning tasks in e-mails, or your colleagues are doing so? Sometimes you just don't understand why certain coworkers are doing what they are doing? Or maybe a member of your sales team forgot to call back a prospect, so you lost business or even worse - received some not-so-flattering comment at your Facebook page?
You work 10-12-16 hours per day to keep up with demand and your coworkers are also overloaded?
Approximately this is chaos in a business - and it will lead to the annihilation of your company.
To the annihilation of your company. Since chaos spirals into your operations slowly and insidiously, it is usually too late to change things when you notice it. Of course, the realization itself is a huge step ahead, so no worries - let's start eliminating chaos in your business.
Although not easy to answer, yet it is rather certain that you gave time for chaos to get into your business, hence, the causes are not to be searched merely in the current situation. Think over how many things happened since you started your business - in the beginning you had easy, simple to manage tasks and challenges, which became overwhelming as your business started to grow. All tasks and operations multiplied, and maybe you even caught yourself having avoiding you family for weeks because of your workload.
Maybe you already realized that things are not going the way you want and tried to implement systems to better manage your business - ERP, CRM, project management, chat bots, ticketing, and helpdesk and so on. However in the end you might have realized that these systems are not providing you with effective help for decreasing your workload or to support your company's growth. Therefore, your business became more organized, but still you have a zillion things to do every day and also your operations remained impenetrable. Let's face it: beyond a certain business size, such systems are not able to organize everything for you: what your colleagues are doing, client/prospect statuses, whether all relevant emails have been answered or not, and so on.
So, the direction is right, but still not the complete solution for getting your business organized - or even automated at certain points.
First of all, if you are not organizing your business activities into business processes it is really time to do so! This will be the foundation to become more organized and will provide you with the possibility to automate - at least parts of - your daily operations. In order to achieve that, it is fundamental to clearly define: who is doing what, why, when, and with what resources. Therefore it will become clear that some operations are cumbersome and ineffective - hence areas to be improved will unfold. You should be really objective and thorough when reorganizing these areas in your company, otherwise results will be slim. Analyze and divide all your activities into the smallest steps possible, and you will clearly see the weak points. After this all is done - maybe with the help of an organization developer partner - and your processes are clear and written, enter the next level of growth and automation: implement a workflow system! Workflow softwares are the tools to model, manage and automate your business processes, freeing time and resources for you and keeping all oeprations in order. By proper workflow implementation and usage, you can say goodbye to chaos, inefficiency and administrative overload - you organization will become more organized, automated and precise as a Swiss watch. No more worries about deadlines, operations, routines - the software will do all this for you.
In our next blog series, we will uncover ways to eliminate chaos in your business by giving you tips, methods and other means of getting your business processes organized and transparent on your way to streamline your operations. Follow us and get instant results by implementing proven technics of business process management!
