The year 2022 has been a wild ride economically, with tired “survivor” businesses lurching along with pandemic damage, trying to revitalize marketing and market share, only to face financial pandemics on the horizon.

If you’re a current business owner, you deserve congratulations for making it this far this decade. Regardless of what biology, oligarchs, and stock markets throw at you, your bottom line is always, well, your bottom line. So it's time to stop talking about solutions and time to take tangible, measurable actions that will put your bottom line on the top of the priority list! 

Here are actions you can take to change your business for the better.

Turn Your Process Dial To The Quality Setting

When times are tough and every business has its elbows out, it is time to fight back with quality. Put time aside, drop the headless chicken approach and focus on taking your processes and product or service offerings to a new quality level. Clients love quality and the clients that matter will happily pay for it. 

Poor quality is a massive waste of money, time, brand value, and client relationships. Poor quality is, therefore, incredibly expensive! 

A quality process, product, and service are easy to repeat; therefore, they have built-in input and output savings while building brand value and client loyalty. It also contributes to staff engagement and productivity, easier resource planning, and more accurate forecasting. The compounded bottom line benefits just keep snowballing.

Keep Things Slim And Trim

It is time to be as lean as possible and remove “wastage”. This may require actions like re-engineering production planning to a ‘pull demand’. Sit with your accountant or CFO and thrash out multiple “economy of scale versus cost-of-money” (tied up in stock) equations until you find a formula that raises your bottom line. In addition to the cost of money, there is the cost of warehousing, insurance, handling, depreciation, shrinkage, etc.

You can also look at removing waste by focusing on improving:

• Work layout efficiencies (shorter trips, faster production)
• Downtime due to poor sales (implement better marketing)
• Digital upgrades or implementation (implement new or more software)
• Planning improvements (supply chain trimming)
• Poor training of staff around understanding their role (better engagement/efficiencies)
• Assign the right role to the right resource
• Leverage the use of your team’s multiple skills

Respond And Deliver - Consistently

If all of the points mentioned so far are in good shape in your company, then take the time to review your marketing team’s response time to clients, the quality of the response, quality and timing of the action taken, and the quality of timing of what was delivered to them as a solution.

Retaining clients is a bottom-line friendly habit. To achieve this, your clients need to feel appreciated and when they complain, you can use that opportunity to win a deeper loyalty from them. Or you can drive them away. 

Aim for fast responses. And we don’t mean chatbots; we mean the human response after the chatbot, and deliver a satisfactory result. In fact, every touch point for the client should register fast, quality responses. Your online and offline processing time must be as short as possible (with the parameters of quality).

Conclusion

Keep it lean, avoid redoing things, aim for quality, develop and respect your human resources and ensure your entire business loves your client base, from the lowest pay grade to the CEO. 

With better quality driving EVERYTHING you do, you’ll have more time, lower costs, happier staff, better productivity, loyal clients, and an attractive bottom line!

Can’t achieve this on your own? Call on us for advice that you can implement quickly.