Nibletz Staff
Businesses can be pretty complicated. That’s hardly going to be something that comes as much of a surprise to anyone who’s ever tried to either start a business or keep one running over a long period of time. As the business owner, you’re often tasked with keeping a whole bunch of plates spinning all at once. This is something that comes with the territory and if trying to juggle a bunch of different things at once doesn’t sound like something you’d be able to handle then you may not be the right kind of person to be running a business. That being said, this doesn’t mean that running a business always needs to be an incredibly complicated, difficult process all of the time. In fact, if you’re finding yourself stretched thin trying to deal with a dozen things at once then something has probably gone wrong. There’s just no way that you could ever handle your business properly if you’re spreading your attention between so many things that you’re not really able to concentrate on anything. Luckily, if you do find yourself in this kind of situation, all hope is not lost! There is one solution to this problem that can make running your business a far easier and less frustrating experience: simplify. By stripping away unnecessary elements of your business, you’re going to be much more readily equipped to deal with problems that do occur. Streamlining and simplifying your business is a fantastic way to make your business far easier to manage overall without having to sacrifice its overall size and scope. Here are just a few aspects of your business that you should be looking to simplify right away.
Marketing
One of the most common mistakes that is made by a lot of business owners, especially those who are relatively inexperienced, is that they assume that the best way to market their business is simply to have as much marketing as possible. As though by spreading their marketing out to as wide an audience as possible, they’re going to be able to reach everyone at once. Sadly this is not the case and often has the opposite effect to what you might intend. For one thing, it’s important to remember that your business is never going to be able to appeal to everyone at once. Your business is going to have a target audience who will connect with it, and you should focus on those people. By putting out marketing in places where your target audience is never going to see it then you’re just going to end up wasting both time and money. Think about the kinds of platforms that your target customer uses and market through those avenues. Not only that but trying to appeal to everyone at once is just going to end up making your marketing so bland and generic that it’s not going to really appeal to any specific demographic. You’re much better off focusing your marketing in specific places and tailoring it directly to your target customers.
Infrastructure
No business can function without a solid infrastructure. This is especially true now that the vast majority of businesses are based online so much of the time. Without networks that allow you to communicate and connect with customers, employees and anyone else you need to speak to, your business could end up falling apart incredibly quickly. However, that also means that you could end up with dozens of crossed wires all at once getting in each other’s way and turning the day to day running of your office into an overly complex nightmare. Luckily things like hyperconverged infrastructure allow you to simplify and collect your data much more efficiently than you might otherwise be able to. Being able to simplify your infrastructure means that your business is working more effectively from the ground up, which is the best possible way to start making any changes.
Employees
A lot of businesses simply have too many employees. This is because the assumption of what you need is often way off the mark from the reality. Look at your business and ask yourself, how productive are you employees actually being? A lot of studies show that many employees are only productive for about three or four hours a day. That means that they could be spending more than half the day being distracted, chatting or doing something other than working. This often happens because they simply don’t have enough to do in order to keep themselves engaged. They have three hours worth of work that they need to stretch across an eight-hour work day. Given a choice between paying two employees to spend half the day bored with nothing to do, and paying a single employee to be productive for the entire day, it’s pretty obvious what the right call is.
Storage
Storage can be a major issue for a lot of businesses, especially ones that deal with large numbers of customer or accounts. In the past, as you took on more customers or clients, you’d fill up physical storage databases, something that would eat up a large amount of physical space. Then digital storage became a possibility, meaning that you were in a position to save physicals space by placing all of your storage on a dedicated server. However, that came with its own share of drawbacks. Filling up your servers puts a lot of pressure on your system which can cause it to slow to crawl or for things to go pretty badly wrong. However, many businesses have a solution to both of these problems at their fingertips: cloud storage. The cloud is essentially a vast network of servers that you can use to store, and easily access, important data and information for your business. It allows you to put everything you need in a single secure location which allows you to keep your information safe without overloading your personal servers.
Whenever you find yourself in the position where your business simply isn’t functioning the way that it should, take the time to see if there aren’t places where you could trim some of the fat away. By simplifying elements of your business, you’re likely to find that the whole things begins running more smoothly.
