At the beginning of 2019, you may have compiled a list of business goals for the year that you want to accomplish. Some of them might include improving your overall sales, figuring out how to better your internal communication, or acquiring new clients. These are amazing goals to have, and making small tweaks to the structure of your business can actually help you to achieve them – no matter how big or small.
Make a laundry list
Every business owner has that list - the list of things you’ve been meaning to do, whether it’s installing new software to help you streamline business or employee training that you keep putting off. Set aside some time to tackle these tasks, and remember that your business will be better for it!
For example, in the past year we added an interactive help center and a FAQ for our clients. Now they can find the answers to their questions at any time of day and no longer have to rely on communicating with someone from our office. Essentially, we have written articles on every topic we can think of that would help our clients and they can use a search to find the articles pertaining to the information they need. Most of the articles have videos and images to make the entire process as easy as possible.
If you think about yourself as a consumer, you’re also probably used to this kind of service on websites that you do business with. We highly recommend integrating a help center if you haven’t already!
Take a look at client and employee feedback
Even when you think that you may not necessarily need to make any changes in your business, your clients and employees may feel differently. We personally look for trends in our external and internal feedback to decide what we want to improve on next. We make sure to keep a list of updates we want to make to our website and rank them in order of importance based on how often it comes up in feedback from surveys, emails, live chats and tickets generated from our website.
Knowing what’s important to those that help your business stay afloat is a great way to stay grounded, and it’s helpful when you feel that a change is needed but you aren’t sure where to begin. For example, perhaps your clients are finding that your website is difficult to navigate on mobile devices, or your employees are feeling burnt-out on the scheduling process. These can be easy fixes, but you have to be willing to put in the extra work.
Taking charge is the first step, and making small adjustments throughout the year is much easier than if you were to let them pile up and run into a bigger issue down the line. You’ll find that your business runs smoother, and your clients and employees will be happy you adapted!
Keith Phillips is the Director of Business Development for Classic Photographers, a company that provides high quality wedding photography and videography services for the budget minded couple.