What are the four most important areas you need to consider in your business?
As a business owner, you must be committed to constantly evaluating your business practices and making the necessary changes if you want to see growth. If your business is stagnant, or not as profitable as you would like it to be, doing the same thing repeatedly will not help your business move forward. Your success is the total sum of all the decisions you make!
So, what are the four most important areas you need to consider in your business? They are:
- People
- Strategy
- Execution
- Cash
Good decisions equal success. Even though most growing businesses face continual challenges in all these areas, the challenges in one area at any one time can impact the others.
Let us start with the “People” strategy.
In 2016, Warehouse Stationery conducted a survey of over 1000 of their BizReward customers. From that survey, 9 out of 10 customers were small businesses.
When asked about the personal challenges they faced in business, half of the respondents to this question (51%) selected work-life balance. Work-life balance was the most common concern, followed by time management (41%) – which is a necessary tool to achieve the sought-after work-life balance, by ensuring work does not take over every aspect of your life.
One of the most critical components of growing any business is working with the right people. Get it right, and your business’s growth trajectory is likely to continue, or accelerate. Get it wrong, and your tentative step forward might lead to the proverbial three steps back. The purpose of hiring staff or outsourced specialists is to free the business owner from some of their multiple “hats”, and the wrong hire can have the opposite effect as it can be costly, stressful and time-consuming to manage the consequences. Having someone who fundamentally understands their role, and what is required to do it successfully, is crucial for any business.
Where do you start? Ask yourself why you need to hire someone – and do not accept obvious answers such as, I am busy, tired or overworked.
Below are some core questions you should ask yourself:
- What do I expect the new hire to do in their first month, and in the months that follow?
- What can I reasonably expect them to achieve, how quickly, and what can I do to help them?
- What core skills and attributes are absolute necessities for my business?
- Is an employee the right way to go, or should I look at outsourcing?
The last question is an interesting one. There are advantages for either hiring an employee or outsourcing to a specialist. To make this a little easier for you, we have put together a list of steps that will help you determine which option is best for you:
- Identify what areas you can outsource.
Before you figure out whether to outsource, you need to identify what areas you can outsource, and whether any of these areas are where you need help right now.
- Identify business-critical functions.
If the function you need help with is not a core function of your business model, outsourcing will probably create fewer headaches for you.
- Assess the market availability of skills.
You may prefer having someone in-house, but if you cannot find the right talent, outsourcing may be your only option.
- Identify all the costs for both in-housing and outsourcing.
When you are considering the financial difference between the two options, remember to include the costs of your time and emotional energy. While hiring in-house is generally cheaper on paper, there are a host of responsibilities that go along with managing a new staff member including holiday and sick leave, training, downtime, and so on.
Remember, when it comes to making the decision of in-house or outsourcing you do not need to choose either/or; it is pretty common that one part of your business may be better off with an employee, while another may be better off with an external company managing it.
If you are ready to outsource the financial side of the business come then you need GoFi8ure. This is what we do – it is in our DNA and we are passionate about helping ease the accounting pain that business owners face. ">Send us an email or call us on 0800 463 488 today.
Tip: Gazelles has a one-page “People” tool that will help you sort out these accountabilities and metrics.