How to Improve Small Business Productivity & Drive Better Outcomes

Are you working so hard to improve productivity, expand your reach and drive better outcomes for your business?

As an entrepreneur, knowing the exact steps to take to improve productivity for your small business can be tricky sometimes.

Especially where you don’t have adequate business experience to start with.

This is one of the reasons why a lot of new entrepreneurs focus on using the trial and error method, where they try random strategies in the hope that they will get to find out one that sticks.

For a good part of my over 6 years as an entrepreneur, I’ve gone through some of these trials and error method with my business so, I know how it feels to get started on a business journey without adequate experience…

And over the years, I have also come to realize that no one really has to go through the stress of trying and failing before getting to learn important business lessons.

So, no matter how life changing they may be, smart entrepreneurs do not have adequate time or the willingness to wait, in order to experience every single part of the lessons they need to learn in life.

There are always pioneers to learn from. And for this reason, in order to move ahead in life, you can always learn from others who have had experiences, take up the part that can work for you and apply to your own business.

In this tutorial, I’ll be sharing with you below, seven of the important strategies you can use to improve productivity and transform your business…

Identify Things You Want to Achieve

One of the first steps to improve productivity in business is to identify the things you want to achieve with your business and then break it down to smaller achievable goals to be achieved within a specific period, say one month interval for instance.

The reason behind this is very simple. One; having a clear idea about your goals makes it easier for those goals to be identified. And when goals are clearly identified, they are already halfway towards getting achieved.

Now, to get this done easily, you can start with taking a look at your overall goal for the year…

If it turns out that you were not able to break down your yearly goals into monthly or periodic achievement levels, you can begin to do that at this point. If not, then this is when you can start breaking it down.

Start with figuring out; what part of your yearly goal can you achieve in this month and how much impact will this have towards your overall goals for the year?

As soon as you have sorted this out, the next thing you want to do to improve your business is to move over to the next step – strategic planning.

Plan Strategically

Ordinarily, planning is very important if you really want to drive improved productivity in business, whether online or offline.

And one of the key steps to build a successful business is to have a strategic business plan that will get you through the steps you need to take in order to achieve your goals.

To be more specific, planning helps you in setting out the tone for the achievement of your goals…

So, to have improve productivity in business, after setting out your goal for the month, you have to strategically plan out the steps you want to take to achieve those goals.

If you’re a web developer and your goal is to make an XYZ amount of money in the month for instance, you need to ask yourself questions like; how many clients will I need to have within this period so I can make this amount of money?

As soon as you’re able to sort this, you need to follow up with the next question; how will I be able to get in touch with them? How much will I charge my clients per service (or product) in order to achieve the targeted goal.

And how many hours will I have to work in order to meet up with this target?

Asking these questions makes the achievement of your goal more realistic… So, with a tailored and more streamlined plan you already know how to get from point A to B. And how to navigate through, all the way to achieve your goals.

Implement your Plan

Strategic implementation is a very important strategy you can use to improve productivity in business.

Because you can have some of the best business plan, well thought out goals, and even a billion dollar idea but, without implementing your plan, nothing is ever going to happen to your business.

Thing is, implementation of strategic measures is key to experiencing improved business productivity. For instance, is your goal to create a consistent content marketing campaign? Then ready or not, show up and create content whenever it is time. That is implementation.

Are you planning to drive more customers to your business? Then implement a more robust and improved marketing strategy.

Always remember that Implementation is very fundamental to the success of your business. I have seen a lot of promising small businesses get stuck at the implementation stage, due to one reason or the other. Even businesses with some of the most fantastic ideas are not left out.

You need discipline and consistent effort at implementing your solutions, ideas and business plans, if you really want to experience improve productivity in business.

Prioritize your tasks

As a small business owner, you’re going to be faced with a lot of different tasks and activities calling for your attention at the same time.

Gets worse if you’re working alone. As the tasks keeps pilling and pilling up. To correct such anomalies, you need to prioritize your work.

Divide your activities into the most urgent, the less urgent, the recurrent tasks, the intensive tasks, less intensive ones etc. Make your list as long as possible.

After that, go ahead and allocate your time for each of these tasks, based on what time you have available, their urgency or profitability and the number of staff you’re working with.

Doing this gets you to give your attention to all the tasks the way they deserve it. In turn, you will realize an improved productivity in your business if you are disciplined enough to stay through each schedule.

Collaborate with Others

You may think that taking up the whole job and doing it by yourself will get you more money. Realistically, it will get you more stress, weigh you down and possibly reduce your efficiency.

You really don’t want this to happen to you. So, instead of focusing on doing all the job alone, get to work with others.

Yes they will share in the profit but at the end of the day, you will get more jobs done at a better time. And probably get more customers going home happier working with you.

Another problem with small businesses is the lack of funding to employ workers. Thing is, you don’t need to have permanent staff while you’re just starting out.

You can contract staff who work with you on contract basis. Or pay per project kind of arrangement where you pay your staff based on the projects they work for you, without having employ them permanently, it’s up to you.

You can always come up with something that suits you and the other party.

Measure your outcomes

After you begin to implement your business ideas, to know if there’s any improvement or not, you need to measure your outcomes.

By measuring your outcomes I mean reviewing the things you have been able to achieve so far, based on the steps you have taken and the ones you were not able to achieve, after taking the steps.

Now, too many businesses do not review or measure their outcomes in any part of their businesses. And this is really bad. You need to pay attention to the things you have been able to achieve with your business and the ones you failed at. This is about the only way to know if there’s any improvement or not.

To get started, you want to measure the results you have achieved so far at least within a month’s interval since your goal is to boost your productivity within a month.

Find out; which of the strategies stood out? Which of them flopped and what was responsible for both results?

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a, content creator, designer or freelancer, having a complete idea about what worked or didn’t work is one of the steps you can use to improve productivity in business.

The moment you get to find out the true situation of things after evaluating your outcomes, you will be well positioned able to make some adjustments that will further improve your business productivity.

Re-strategize & re-launch

No strategy or business plan is cut in stone.

During your business journey, you will get to realize that some approaches or strategies you took are not giving you the best result. What you do when you realize this is to change the strategies ASAP.

No, don’t fret out. Your overall goal is to improve your productivity in business at all times. This is what you should be focused on, always. That is why from time to time you have to review your outcome.

So, whenever you realize your business is not driving productive outcomes, find out what is wrong and where necessary, change your strategies.

Never be afraid to restrategize and relaunch your business when you have to or based on your new realities. This is very important.

Final Words

Other important strategies you can use to boost your productivity in business includes using productivity tools like task manager, calendar apps, and others including Zoom, Google Drive, Slack etc. to collaborate and run your business on the auto mode.

While working on analyzing your strategy, always remember that a particular period under review may be too short to give you adequate data that will afford you a clear understanding of factors that led to an improvement or decrease in your productivity.

You want to be able to have a more holistic view of your business growth patterns and then draw up better conclusions based on that.

After your conclusions have been drawn, in order to further experience improved productivity in your business, you need to figure out ways to continuously improve on your strategy for better results.

Now, there you have some of the important strategies that will help you to improve productivity in business whether SMEs or small online businesses. Our team can help you drive even better results for your business if you reach out to us here.

your business productivity. So, which of these strategies made the most sense to you?