When trying to organize your business, keeping the work environment clean, storing all your files on the cloud or arranging them neatly in a cabinet or using an app to manage your passwords might not produce the desired result. They’re all reasonable steps, but successful businesses take it a step further.
If you wish to retain top talent, clients and customers, and experience tremendous business growth, prepare to do more to organize your business. This article considers realistic steps to ensure you’re putting the right things in place to increase business growth.
How to organize your business
The following steps can help you as a business owner organize your business to increase efficiency, productivity, and employee and client satisfaction:
1. Set clear goals
Before hiring any employee, ensure there’s a reason behind it.
Some employers hire close relatives because they don’t want them to remain unemployed. Some hire job seekers that come to their DMs with a great pitch that they couldn’t refuse- even when they have no immediate need for their services. They hire them for ‘future purposes’.
Hiring people when you don’t actively need their services isn’t advisable. Every employee should have a goal to achieve.
When hiring a software programmer, ensure you immediately need an app, software or website. If you’re employing a content writer, you immediately need web content, blog posts, ebooks or case studies. If you’re recruiting an accountant, it means you need someone to reconcile accounts and manage accounting transactions.
Numerous studies have pointed out that setting goals encourages employee performance and increases their connection to the company.
When you decide you need these professionals, have a clearly defined goal for each role.
A salesperson is not there to make sales when they feel like it. Set a percentage of sales you want them to meet and locations to cover. Let employees know their exact responsibilities so they can focus on achieving them.
2. Avoid burdening employees
Let each team members know their exact responsibilities. If their roles are undefined or you give them many tasks, they won’t complete all, or they’ll do some and leave the rest- this can affect the company in the long term.
For example, a company hired a software developer and made him the head of the technical team. Soon after, they hired a freelance content writer and asked this developer to edit and approve her work for publishing. She could only get paid after approval. The content writer submits articles, which takes weeks and even up to a month for approval, slowing down her work and earnings. It continued until the writer got tired and resigned.
First of all, software development is a very technical role and needs eagle eye focus. Distracting them from other responsibilities will leave them disorganized, and they might not succeed in either position.
The better solution was to hire an Editor to manage the company’s content writer, social media manager, and other content marketers.
If it’s a more prominent company with many content creators, employ an equivalent number of editors. It helps to increase productivity and ensure everyone is playing their part in the company’s growth.
3. Communicate
A survey of 400 companies with about 100,000 employees cited that each company lost an average of $62.4 million annually due to inadequate communication between company leaders, managers and team members.
Even smaller companies with about 100 employees lose about $420,000 per year. Both company executives and employees need to improve their communication skills for the company’s success.
Effective communication helps share a company’s mission, vision and values in a way employees can understand. This fosters cooperation and collaboration to achieve set objectives.
Organize your business by communicating with employees whether the company is going through positive or negative changes.
If it’s positive, employees can become encouraged to put more effort into their job. If it’s negative and would require late payment or laying off employees, let them know as soon as the management is sure. It will help them get their life together, whether saving money, spending less or looking for a new job.
Informing employees of laying-off possibilities one or two weeks before it happens can lead to disorganization within the company.
Those not laid off might begin actively looking for other jobs because they realize they don’t have job security. When they get a new offer, they leave, and then the management will have to start a recruiting process, which costs a lot of money.
Another important act is hiring bold and assertive employees because you want people who can be honest enough to tell you where the business is lagging or if they have more responsibilities than they can handle.
4. Pay vendors on time
Not paying suppliers on time can harm your business reputation and strain your relationship with suppliers, which may result in their refusal to supply in future. It also restricts the growth of both businesses because when you don’t pay suppliers, they won’t have the funds to produce more supplies.
When they stop supplying, your business won’t have adequate resources to complete business processes.
Paying vendors on time builds trust and strengthens relationships. They also place you on a list of top priorities for supplies that may be scarce. Your team can also negotiate better deals.
If you’re experiencing business difficulties that may result in late payments, let the suppliers know and ask for a payment extension.
Sometimes, late payments happen because the person in charge of processing payment missed or forgot the invoice. That’s why it’s necessary to organize your business to prevent inefficient internal processes.
Create an effective accounts payable department to handle vendor payments and transactions. Empower them with automation software to eliminate the demands of manually processing invoices.
5. Pay employees on time
Whether they’re full-time, part-time, or independent contractors, ensure you pay your employees according to verbal or contract agreements. If there’s an agreement on weekly, biweekly or monthly payments, ensure they get it as at when due.
Paying employees on time shows you appreciate their efforts; in return, they’ll continue producing quality work. They’re more focused on completing their jobs since they’re not worrying about how to get funds from elsewhere.
For example, a freelance writer who receives timely payment can create more high-quality articles faster.
It also encourages loyalty to the company as employees might want to stay in the job for the long term and refuse job offers from other companies.
Late payments can prevent employees from budgeting properly. It might affect paying their monthly rent or lease, down payment for a house, feeding, or prevent them from seeing through a plan for personal or professional growth.
It might even lead to the resignation of some of your best employees who might get a better offer elsewhere. This could mean a setback for the business as it struggles to meet orders or commitments.
There is the possibility of getting into legal issues for violating employment laws depending on your country of residence. That could be costly to resolve and create a negative reputation for your business.
Avoid late payments by ensuring the finance and human resource team collaborates to process payments on time. Choose effective payroll software to automate employees’ payments. You can also outsource payroll to fintech firms such as Pinwheel and Atomic.
Companies with global workforce can consider using third-party payment platforms like Tilpalti so employees can have options to choose different payment methods such as wire transfer, physical check, e-check, ACH or PayPal.
Companies that work with freelancers can improve transparency by creating a platform that allows them to view and track their earnings, pay periods and payments. CopyPress has such a platform.
Using the right software to organize your business
Organize your business and empower your employees with the right tools to increase productivity. The software to choose depends on your company.
When investing in software, always choose what will source the right people to work with, improve communication with employees, save time, make work organized, make transactions easier and make work transparent.
The following are some software to purchase depending on the company type:
CRM
If you deal with numerous clients and want to continue serving them best, get Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.
CRM software collects customer data such as contact details, communication history, social media channels, company website, and purchase history to develop insightful data to help determine customer preferences and build products and services to satisfy them.
You can do much with a CRM to ensure you’re invested in your customer’s journey. An example is being able to set reminders so you can follow up on sales and close deals faster.
With a CRM, you can effortlessly search and sort your contacts, set reminders for follow-ups or tasks, and create detailed reports to help you analyze your business’s performance.
Some CRM software includes Salesforce, Hubspot, and Insightly.
Accounting software
Make financial transaction processes easier and more organized by getting accounting software. With the right software, you can process transactions, make proper spending decisions and comply with tax regulations.
To choose the right one, check whether its features align with your business needs. Some features include reports to analyze your business finances and dashboards that provide an overview of accounts payable and receivable, cash flow and sales data.
Features such as permitting multiple users are essential so the entire team can record their expenses rather than one person doing it.
Consider choosing cloud-based software so you can access it from anywhere to complete transaction processes. Other things to check when selecting include security and user-friendliness.
Also, read reviews to learn from other users’ experiences.
Some accounting software includes Oracle Netsuite. If you’re operating a small business, consider Zoho, Intuit Quickbooks Online, Expensify and Xero.
Payroll management software
Another software that helps to organize your business is the payroll software. It can save time used for processing payroll and help the HR team focus on other responsibilities.
A high-quality payroll system can automate employees’ pay, pay direct deposits, prevent paycheck errors and missed payments, generate tax payments, manage global payment, monitors leave and overtime and maintain human resource record. It can also calculate bonuses, overtime, holiday pay and employee expenses.
Employees can get access to their software to update their information, view payment history and change payment preferences. It also provides security for employee payroll data through password protection and limited system access.
The HR team can customize it to meet business needs. Some payroll software to consider is Quickbooks and ADP GlobalView Payroll.
Messaging and collaborating apps
So while emails are great for sending official messages to employees, consider less formal messaging apps where employees and supervisors can send instant messages to each other when working on a project.
Smaller businesses, less than a year, can use these apps to assign tasks. For example, content marketing agencies can send content writers writing tasks through these apps..
However, it’s not advisable for thriving businesses of over a year with numerous content creators working on their projects to use these apps to distribute assignments as it could be disorganized and time-wasting.
Consider creating a content management system for ease, transparency and increased productivity. Some messaging apps include Slack, Asana, and Skype.
Content management system/ portal (CMS)
For content marketing agencies and companies that work with content creation, a content management system such as WordPress, helps organize content creation, editing and publishing.
Teams can collaborate on this system, handling different roles.
For example, content writers can write and save it, and then the editor assigned to the writer can edit or send it back to the writer to rewrite. After editing, the quality assurance can make the final edit before sending to the client for approval or publishing it to the company’s website.
There are built-in and customizable user roles and permission which allow multiple employees to use the system without being able to alter the site’s functionality.
One content marketing agency with a great CMS is CopyPress. Their portal is known as Dante. The content team can perform their various roles in the portal, whether it’s writing. editing, graphic design, and other functions.
The portal also helps the team keep track of their earnings as their total earnings and pending payments show on the earning dashboard. Then the task invites section where you can view and accept assignments.
It’s a very comprehensive CMS that allows employees to create and edit content stress-free.
Automating apps
Avoid spending time on manual and repetitive tasks by automating business processes.
Employees can save time, minimize errors and increase performance through automation. They can now have the time to focus on more critical tasks that require their skills and creativity.
It also saves companies operational costs as the software doesn’t tire out or break down quickly. When you get the right ones, you discover how one can efficiently complete numerous tasks.
In the past, employees attached labels to products using their hands, but now, there are numerous automated labelling machines, which may be expensive, but a worthy investment.
So also, automation software can now take care of mundane tasks such as recruitment cycles, email marketing or pre-scheduling posts to social media platforms. It is beneficial for companies in the digital space with marketing-related tasks.
You can also automate tasks on your accounting software or project management tools. So ensure whatever software you’re purchasing has automation features.
Some automation tools you can use are ThinkAutomation, iSmartrecruit, Zapier, Kissflow and Hootsuite.
Nenye Writes is not affiliated with the companies mentioned in this post.
