How and Why You Must Become Efficient to Become Profitable

Having started and run various successful small to medium businesses myself, I feel like I am in a position to give advice to those looking to make theirs a success. For the purpose of this article we shall define success as becoming as profitable as possible given our resources. Aside from running my own businesses, I have had experience as a business consultant, giving myself an insight into many other organisations, their owners, and the way that they are run. If there is one piece of advice that I could give to any business, it would be to become as efficient as possible. This article will break down the reasons why this is absolutely crucial to becoming profitable and successful.

Get rid of waste

Now, waste can come in many forms; time can be wasted by inefficient processes and this will result in lowered productivity, resources can be wasted through overproduction or products and services that don’t meet standards, to name just a few. By becoming lean, a business can reduce or eliminate such waste and will therefore contribute to profits, rather than taking away from it.

Invest in technology

Technology is in non-stop development to improve efficiencies in almost every part of our lives, not just in business. The chances that if you are thinking of a process that could be improved, there is more than likely someone working on that solution already. If not, you could have yourself an opportunity. Take for example the process of booking meetings within organisations – for decades you would have had a secretary organize these, until an integrated room booking system was created. Such as system allows pretty much every aspect of organising a meeting to be done by the end user on their phone or laptop, with no need for a middleman. While this may render the secretary’s job obsolete in many ways, this all plays a part in improving a business’ efficiencies and therefore profitability. We shouldn’t shed tears for lost jobs, especially if it improves the business and could lead to more jobs being created on the whole.

Analyse all your processes

The aim is to make everything as streamlined as possible – the less people involved the better. A good example of this is in government. Countries with lower cases of corruption are largely due to the fact that less people are able to influence it. This comes through digitization. A smooth process has inevitably less speed bumps, so in order to evaluate and improve upon these, ask the people currently involved what and how they believe these can be improved. You will certainly get the answer that less bureaucracy is needed. By documenting, measuring and analyzing every process within your business, you will surely find more ways of improving efficiency.