Part 2 of the 4 part series covering essential steps in growing your bottom line.
In this series I talk about essential steps to not just make more money, but to keep it! Part of the series is to address business development, and how to make more money. But it’s not always about how much you make, sometimes it’s about how much you keep! In this 4 part series we’re talking about Lifestyle, Business Development, Loss Prevention, Growth & Branding
Business Development
Today I’m going to talk about some of the basics for growing your business from a developmental position. This may seem like common sense for some, but I’ve audited large publicly traded corporations that fail in some of these areas. For example, backend office or CRM, tracking analytics, management reports, Standard Operating Procedures, employee contracts, performance and training reviews. I’ll touch base on some of these.
Standard Operating Procedures (SOP)
This might seem basic to lots of people, but you wouldn’t believe how common it is, even for the global operations, not nor build out SOP. Every position from the grounds keeper to the managers need to have their positions outlined in a contract and performance reports. This is truly the only way to establish your baseline for performance, and gradually increase that standard as you establish best practices.
It amazes me to find that most companies don’t have every empolyee positions outlined on paper. Having employee contracts, that outline position responsibilities does a few things. It establishes a baseline for performance, and gives you a point of reference to establish best practices.
This gives you a standard to train new employees on their responsibilities. Which also becomes necessary in order to council them on bad performance. Now implementing performance/training reports gives you a chance to manage performance, and train the employee/manager on their performance. These weekly or monthly performance reports gives you the grounds to fire or support raises, but also to increase your base performance by SOP. To schedule a free consultation with me (Click Here). To book me for a full or half day in-person consultation, or for a discrete corporate analysis (Click here).
Company Platform/CRM
In the age of technology, it still amazes me that a lot of companies don’t use a CRM. A quality Customer Relationship Management platform not only helps you keep notes on your client base, it also provides detailed analytics. A good CRM can automate daily, weekly and monthly reports that show KPIs, Key Performance Indicators for sales reps.
For example, best times of the day to contact a client. Best ways to contact that client, email vs phone call, vs text message. A good CRM can record your phone calls for management and Quality Assuarance. It shows the number of contacts, and basically you can begin to see a better picture of who your top client demograph is, and how to contact them.
Another key important factor to having this type of technology is for loss prevention and keeping track of your employees and manager’s performance. We’ll talk more about loss prevention in the next part of this series. The capabilities of the best CRMs are also vast, and so I’ll have to do another post just breaking down my top choices. You can start looking into them yourself now though, my top 3 favorite CRMs are Freshsales, Hubspot and Zoho. I’ve built out those 3 systems extensively, with several companies that I’ve worked with. I setup an affiliate relationship with them because I really do approve of their products.
In Summary
So the automated systems that you employ are foundational for increasing your bottom line. After that it’s a matter of finding ways to save, and keeping what you make. These automated systems provide tracking analytics for your client base, marketing campaigns and statistical analysis. So tracking your systems with cool visual reports that can be customized for daily, weekly, monthly and annual reporting.
Your standard operating procedures to be created with position contracts, not only train your new people, but council your current employees, to justify giving a raise or firing them. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been contract to provide a discrete corporate analysis, and discovered that managment has not properly trained their employees, and had no position requirements in contract.
Sometimes a good top down audit from an outside professional is just what the doctor ordered. Till next time friends!
