This is a critical point for anyone looking for business simplification ideas:
Who are you simplifying your company for?
Business simplification ideas should focus on the customer, and deliver the best products and services to them, within the scope of your market. It is a key point.
The secret of this story is how to do it with maximum efficiency, using fewer resources and less time.
Therefore, we divided our business simplification ideas into two types:
- How to deliver more perceived value to the customer
- And how to employ fewer resources to provide this higher value
Inspire yourself to improve your business: Walt Disney’s Most Famous Business Quotes
5 quick business simplification ideas
Before trying to deliver better services or products to your customers, look internally: are your processes working well?
So let’s start our tips with; “get your house in order.”
Business simplification ideas: Produce more with fewer resources
1- Eliminate waste
Everything that is done in your business follows a sequence of chronologically ordered tasks. To model this process, which is the appropriate order of these tasks in stages, sometimes we don’t realize that we’re losing money by wasting resources.
For example: How many monthly SaaS software subscriptions do your company has and which don’t you use (or use very little), can you cut any?
Image banks paid data analysis tools that you could replace with freemium versions or free full versions (such as Google Analytics itself), online magazine subscriptions, software support that you no longer use, and more.
It is common, especially in rapidly growing companies, for a department to “enjoy” certain social media or CRM software, and another to prefer a different one.
Take stock of all the tools used in the company, standardize them, and eliminate anything that is redundant, underutilized, or unnecessary. You will be amazed at the amount of recurring expenses that you can cut in a day or two of work.
See more: Check out a diagram for continuous process improvement
2- Outsource online services
If some apps are in excess in your business, there may be others that are missing.
You need to analyze the core business of your company and focus your attention on it.
For example: If you’re not an advertising agency, it might be more interesting to focus the time and talent of your marketing associates in planning your campaigns than by creating layouts or dealing with expensive and bureaucratic agencies.
For this, Crowd sourcing and collaborative creation are usually agile and offer quality solutions at good prices.
This is a business simplification idea which is easy to implement and worth doing in areas such as Accounting and Finance and even services like maintenance and cleaning.
3- Home office
Your employees will be very happy (and more productive) if they can work from home on Fridays (or any other day of the week you prefer). And, by working from a Home Office, energy costs will fall by 20%, along with other expenses, such as office supplies and the wear and tear of machinery and equipment.
According to this story from Forbes Magazine, employees who work from home are more productive.
Read more on How Hiring Remote Workers Will Boost Your Company’s Productivity.
Business simplification ideas: Satisfy more customers
4- Online market research
This phrase from Peter Drucker will help you better understand our business simplification ideas:
“Everything you can measure you can improve”
Without measuring customer satisfaction or figuring out what they want and need, it will do no good to improve their processes.
And don’t think that this is expensive.
There are excellent online research platforms, some even with free options, such as GoogleForms, Typeform and SurveyMonkey, among others.
5 – Train your team
No, you don’t need to hire professional speakers and expensive consultants.
In addition to great video channels such as TED Talks, there are many distance learning platforms with free course options, often taught by universities such as Harvard, MIT and Berkeley, among many others.
See two of the most famous: edX and Coursera.
Also see: 5 Tips on How to Increase Team Productivity
Knowing the needs of your clients and having a well-trained team will help you know exactly what steps in the process you need to invest more in to deliver more perceived value to your customers.