I do it like this because that’s how I was shown how to do it

So, you’ve managed to navigate those choppy start-up years when it was just you, your laptop and a mobile phone. Perhaps you now employ a couple of people and have an actual office. You’ve got data on your PCs, data in the “cloud”, systems to help with your time recording, expense tracking, email marketing, billing, case management etc. Everything is kinda OK though because at least you still manage to get the bills out every month. But kinda OK isn’t great is it? 

1. Spending too much time on administrative tasks

If you have highly paid, highly qualified people frequently doing repetitive, administrative tasks like filing or photocopying, then you are not only getting a very poor return on your investment, you risk sapping the morale of the people involved. Some people may not mind these off-periods whilst getting paid good money, but most will inevitably get bored without enough mentally stimulating work and eventually move on.

2. Too much manual intervention

Until such time that artificial intelligence and robots take over the world, this essentially means that individuals are having to re-work/manipulate information/data in some way in order to complete a given task. This may take the form of correcting work, filling in missing information, removing irrelevant information and so on. How many times has your finance officer had to look up the client code on the system and then enter that missing data into a spreadsheet because that field was originally left blank by the lawyer who could only remember the client’s name on his expenses form? Imagine repeating that step several times a day/per week.

I spend half my time correcting other people’s work

3. Waiting for other people to complete their tasks

Processes that on the face of it seem to work well can actually be very inefficient because a process gets to a certain point (such as when a decision/approval is needed) and then the whole process is held up until that action is completed. I have personally witnessed the issue of a cheque (yes, some people do still write cheques) take over 3 days longer than was necessary simply because the clerk that handled cheque payments had changed his work pattern from five to three days a week. Nobody had even considered the impact on the business that this change would have. Worse still, nobody had even thought about documenting how this job could be done in the event of this clerk’s absence. It was nonchalantly accepted that you could only get a cheque payment on Monday thru Wednesday. Hard luck to anyone that needed one on any other day.

4. Overstocking

You may be regularly placing orders of a specific value and/or quantity so that you can reap the savings through the economies of scale. But beware of falling into the trap of simply ordering stuff for the sake of the order. What are the items that you are regularly ordering? Have your needs changed over the years? Why are you ordering a new print run of 2000 pages of a marketing flyer when you still have boxes of last year’s flyer still sitting in offsite storage which you can’t use because it contains the photograph of a director that has since left the firm?

We save £200 per quarter ordering with BuyFromMe Ltd

5. Everyone has their own way of doing the same thing

The saying that “a chain is only as strong as the weakest link” is a very true one when it comes to efficient processes. How successful would a biscuit producer be if it produced a particular brand of biscuits but each time they came off the production line, they were of variable size, shape, flavour etc?  Imagine a legal practice whose client take-on process has long since ceased to be fit for purpose. Clients were being set-up on the system in an inconsistent way which led to numerous errors and omissions. Often these inconsistencies would only show up at billing time or even after the bills had been sent out. The consequences were an increased number of client complaints, bills having to be amended and re-issued, not to mention the time and effort of staff to make all these subsequent corrections. 

It is pointless having a process if the people involved have different expectations, complete each step differently or are even unclear about what process is being followed. Yet for a lot of companies, this is exactly how many

core business processes work. Some processes may have developed organically over time. Staff may be too intimidated by management to air opinions about how things could be improved for fear of being singled out as a troublemaker or wanting to make their boss look stupid. On the other hand, others may remain quiet for fear of “talking themselves out of a job” or the business owners themselves may simply not have the time and resource to conduct such a review with an objective eye.

It is chaotic, but hey, it keeps me in a job!

Whatever the reason, it makes sense for all business owners to regularly review the way that they do things. Sometimes change may be foist upon you as a result of legislative or regulatory change, for example, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). As onerous as it was when the regulation came into force in May 2018, it did make many business owners both large and small, sit up and take a serious look at how they handle personal data. Perhaps the regulation even helped to initiate a review of other areas of your own business too.

So, if you’re getting that nagging feeling that your business could be doing better than it is. You’re probably right.