By Henry Brown
The most important time in your business is the first year. You begin to figure out the processes that work and the ones that don’t, and also figure out how productive you are in the long run. As we start to find our feet we begin to think about the best way to make our business run faster. Not only this, but going faster can be to the detriment of quality. This means we have to provide a sense of focus, as well as speed. What are the best things we can have in place to ensure that our business is fast but focused?
Workflow tools
Indispensable in the modern business, tools like Microsoft Dynamics 365 provide numerous workflow processes as well as automation to ensure that processes become integrated. Ensuring that you have the right workflow tool for your own individual processes can be a hard thing to find, especially as there are so many out there. What you need to do is look at the numerous components of your business and see what could be distilled into the bare essentials. Working fast is not necessarily about speed, but it’s about whittling down the detritus so your business can operate at its most efficient. Workflow tools are crucial in this respect.
Collaboration software
Because a company is spread across numerous areas, collaboration has become the buzzword for the modern business. Ensuring that you have collaboration software means that your business can grow, and your employees can start to find different ways of working that ensure new ideas are generated organically. These days, we can be incredibly isolated, especially those people that work remotely. This is why collaboration software becomes invaluable because we are able to have instant communication with other members of our team, as well as ensuring that ideas don’t fall by the wayside. There are so many different ways to communicate and collaborate at the same time that it’s never been easier, regardless of where you are in the world.
Dictation tools
This is the secret weapon of the modern business. So many of us can look at how long it takes us to type out an email, work on that proposal, and these things can gradually result in an elongated work day. Using dictation tools, either in terms of typing, or giving commands to your computer can help to cut down processes significantly. If you are working in blogging, having someone dictate the articles with the right software means they can generate more ideas, but also if they are bound by limited typing skills, they can dictate articles as fast as they can talk. As any business needs to find shortcuts, dictation software can prove to be one of the most important.
Ensuring that your business runs faster is not just about the tools, but it’s about the mindset that your employees exude. We have to remember that as our business begins to develop, especially after that first year, we have a better idea of what we need to improve on. And this means that we can start to cut processes in half, but also ensure that our business runs faster. Making it faster means making it better, as long as we retain that focus.
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Henry Brown is an online marketing executive. When he isn’t talking shop, he’s roaming the streets of London, uncovering the extra-ordinary in the ordinary.
