Where are your business inefficiencies?

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Are you one of those business owners that’s done a fabulous job growing your business? Maybe you’ve doubled or more your revenue yet you find yourself working harder and making the same amount of profit or even less?

Hi, this is Judi Otton with GrowthCast and this is the second in a series of videos for business owners that are not as profitable as they’d like to be.  Today we’re going to talk about the natural inefficiencies that occur as the business grows and I’m going to illustrate this with a few stories.

The first one is about a landscaping business that I know and this man did a fantastic job growing his business from one crew all the way to 20 crews. But he realized that every morning his whole team would come in almost 50 people and they’d spend an hour getting ready, putting stuff on their trucks, grabbing coffee, shooting the breeze, blah, blah blah. He called it the morning circus. He finally got smart, he realized that this was costing him almost $1,000 a day. And he finally got smart and had a couple of guys come in and load up the trucks and then set the expectation with the rest of the team to get in their trucks and go out and do their work, again, saving him almost $1,000 a day.

The second story I have is from one of my previous businesses, I owned a consulting firm and as we grew and had more dedicated salespeople and a dedicated finance team, The sales people would sell something and the finance team didn’t always know what was going on. So they didn’t realize there was a new customer. There was a new consultant perhaps that they had to get all the billing information for and get invoices out. So we put in a one page transfer form to transfer and I realized this might sound basic, but as a business grows you have to put these things in place.

Finally, another customer that I had did business building permit processing. We worked together to put in standard work processes, checklists and templates and they increased their capacity with the same staff, they doubled their capacity so they could grow their business much larger with the same cost.

The tricky thing about this is that you may not see these opportunities Because you’re used to doing business the way that you do business. So get a trusted advisor in there to look for these inefficiencies. Look for these places where you too could maybe save $1,000 a day. That adds up to real money. This is Judi Otton with GrowthCast and I’ll be back next week with your Fiscal Fitness Tip of the Week