Contracts get lost, cases pile up, and important clients forget to call back. We tell you how to put things in order.
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1. You Can’t Go on Vacation.
If you realize that you can’t leave the business even for one day – the processes need some serious tweaking. Think about what it is that keeps you in control all the time. Everyone needs a vacation and you have other responsibilities besides work, such as buying a house for your family.
You need to know things to consider when buying a house, but your work can’t handle it without you? If you just want every step to be coordinated with you, you need one solution, and if employees stop working altogether in your absence, another.
How to Put Things in Order
Evaluate the effectiveness of your employees and try to assemble a team of only those you can trust. Talk to them about company strategy so that everyone knows not only their part of the job but also their overall goals-this will help make the right decisions.
Keep a workload in manager programs so that you know what each person in the company is doing without too many questions or reports.
2. You Are Constantly Bombarded by Force Majeure
Every business has an emergency from time to time: an employee makes a mistake, a supplier lets you down. But if you’re always putting out fires and don’t have time to deal with other tasks, it’s time to change something.
Maybe the employee or the supplier. Or maybe the business processes entirely. For your company to grow and for you not to die from constant stress, you must have time and energy for strategy and development.
How to Get Things in Order
Make your business processes more predictable with planning. Avoiding problems and risks can help even a simple analysis that identifies your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and potential threats. If you write down in advance how you will deal with likely problems, you will face crises fully armed.
3. Managers Have Separate Client Bases
Some companies do not keep a common customer database – each manager works on his own and does not know the clients of others. Even if this arrangement is convenient for you now, it can lead to several problems in the long run.
First, when a manager goes on vacation or is on sick leave, it can be difficult for a client to contact the company. Second, if the employee decides to quit, customer contacts can leave the company along with him.
How to Put Things in Order
In order not to lose all the work with the change of employees, it is important to keep a unified database of all customers. And it is better if it is not an Excel file on a shared drive, but a full-fledged CRM system for business and customers.
4. You Forget About Meetings and Calls
A company executive cannot afford to forget to call a client or not show up for a meeting. Maybe some clients or business partners will forgive you easily, but for others, it will be a reason to break off the relationship. If it hasn’t come to that yet, but you often catch yourself at the last minute before a meeting, it’s a red flag.
How to Put Things in Order
Remove the reminder stickers from your computer and create an orderly appointment system. An electronic manager that sends you reminders in advance is more reliable than handwritten notes in a day planner.
Don’t give up the notebook if you’re so used to it, but duplicate your tasks on an electronic calendar. In addition, online calendars of employees can be linked, so everyone will know what their colleagues are doing.
5. You Spend a Lot of Time Figuring Out the Status of Tasks
Making a couple of calls, writing an email, or asking an employee is all it takes to find out how things are going with a task.
This kind of algorithm may be doable when you have a few people on staff. But the first time you expand your team, it will crumble.
How to get things in order
Automate your task management. With special workflow management software, you can find out how your employees are doing just by clicking on a task. This can save you a lot of time.
Especially if at some point you need to pull up information on a case that is a year old: employees can quit, documents can get lost, and the CRM system will put everything in the archive.
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