You can let things slip when you have so much to do as a business owner. Delegating is essential. Yet there are often times when being more hands-on in your approach will help you steer the ship to take control of your core business strategy and get your agenda back on track.
Define Your Goals and Work Towards Them
Understanding what needs to be done reduces wastage in terms of time and money. Additionally, you can make changes towards aligning your business with what you want to achieve. You may need outside help with this, and even proposal management training will probably help you increase the chances of winning the bids you want. You can then work to organize and document your vision to get the rest of your team onboard moving forward.
Measure Yourself Against KPIs
You cannot make positive changes or move in a better direction if you don’t measure your performance. So, you need to come up with key performance indicators (KPIs) for evaluating your overall efficiency in relation to goals. Some examples include customer retention, profit increases and customer satisfaction. You need to set an acceptable goal to work towards and actively pursue any reasons why you may not be meeting any of your goals as set by KPIs.
Use Feedback to Take Control of Your Core Business
Feedback is one of the most useful tools in a business arsenal. And it should be done through every task, process and layer of your company. This is because you cannot fix a problem if you don’t know it’s there. So feedback is valuable from your employees, customers and management alike. Easy ways to get feedback include surveys, reaching out to people, taking note of online reviews, and using third-party services, and these can be used to measure KPIs.
Encourage Employees to Contribute Solutions
Your workers are vital because they see the ins and outs of your business. They are the troops on the ground, as it were. Often, upper management and executive-level staff are oblivious to some of the issues in a business. But by being at eye level and engaging with customers and each other, employees in other segments can see issues. Therefore, you can fix many problems simply by asking employees to provide what they think is the right solution to an issue.
Implement a Long-Term Vision with Short-Term Tasks
Your business can slip. And when major problems arise, they aren’t fixed overnight. Some can take years to remedy. And a solid business recovery plan can take a decade to implement. Yet, as mammoth a task as this may seem, you can work towards taking control by implementing smaller steps. You can also get help with this by removing underperforming staff and positioning solid workers in key positions where their talents and skills will be better used.
Summary
You can take control of your core business systems by taking some specific steps. These include working towards new goals, getting feedback across the board, and a long-term vision.