Achieving business greatness doesn’t have to necessarily mean you’re improving your business constantly, this is obviously a major factor, but there’s other ways you can do it as well. But what even is business greatness? Well it’s being at the top of your game and ahead of any competitors. People should be looking to your for inspiration, and if they are, you need to be setting the best example possible. So, as we said, to achieve greatness you really do need to focus on the major aspect, improving your business.
There are so many different ways of doing so, and you should always be looking for ways that you can make things better. If not, your competitors are going to race ahead of you in a flash. It takes a lot of hard work, and you’ll definitely have tonnes of set backs just like with any other business. But the reward for always staying on top of your game will be more than worth it. If you’re looking for some advice on how to achieve greatness in business, just follow these simple tips.
Cutting Costs
You might think that when you feel like you have enough money to pay for things that there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be purchasing, or running your business at the most expensive costs. But no matter what you should always be looking for a way to cut costs. You never know when you might need the rough patch and that little extra bit of money will come in handy. So, to cut down costs you need to see where you’re spending the most. The most common area where people lose money is through the offices they’re renting.
The price for the actual monthly rent is a lot higher than if you owned your own office or building if you need the extra space. Renting an office is good when you’re a smaller business. Everything is managed for you, and there’s just a lot less hassle in terms of sorting bills etc. It’s usually just one monthly payment and that’s it. But there are often times when extra charges will be put on you, especially if you’re using a lot of electric or Wi-Fi if it’s included. After the initial purchase of your office, things aren’t going to be as expensive.
You can hire companies to fit solar panels to make electricity bills a bit cheaper. Or air conditioning for when the warmer months hit us again. If this interests you, click here for more information with regards to how they can help you reduce your energy bills. Once you’ve got your bills reduced, you can then look how to cut spending further in your office. Hiring a receptionist is an expensive deal, especially if they aren’t really needed for much. It might be cheaper for you to look into a virtual office receptionist. It’ll help keep your business looking professional whilst still reducing costs.
Better Products
Better products always equals a better business. The better your product, the more you’re going to sell and the more you’re going to attract customers. But how do you better your products? Well one of the main ways you can do so is by looking what your competitors are doing and take a bit of inspiration from them, especially if they’re doing better than you. All you have to do is a little market research to see what you need to do. Customers want reliability and durability no matter what product you’re selling.
The only way to offer this is by bettering the materials you’re using. If it means spending a little bit of extra money, then it’s going to have to be done in order to boost sales. They also need products to be constantly evolving to keep up with the pace that technology is changing at. For example. In the auto industry Tesla are no rolling out the driverless car feature to all their models.
Customers whose budget is a little out of the Tesla price range are yearning to have a go with that technology as well. So other manufacturers are looking to incorporate this feature into their new car builds. You need to apply this to whatever you product is. If there are better materials out there, go and find them. If there’s better, quicker technology being put into them, make sure your product has it all too.
Employee Interaction
The way you interact with your employees isn’t generally seen by the wider product. What happens behind closed doors generally stays behind them. But nothing can stop word of mouth getting around. If you hire a bunch of employees and you’re treating them badly, there’s nothing stopping them from telling their friends, and then their friends, and then the trail goes on. Before you know it your business has this terrible reputation that’s going to be hard to shift.
Take Amazon for example and the working conditions their drivers had to face. The targets they had to meet were that stressful a lot of them were urinating in their van in order to save time between drop offs. So how can such a big company let such a big issue get out of hand? Simple, it’s greed from the big bosses. They wants as many deliveries to happen a day to make as much money as possible. It seems to be the same principle happening in a lot of work places.
If you want your employees to work hard for you, you need to treat them with the respect they deserve. This is achieving true business greatness as it is something a lot of businesses fail to do. Become friendly with your employees and interact with them on a human level. Just by asking them how their day is going, or what plans they have for the weekend can massively boost moral. Try and follow the likes of business greats such as Google who create a massively inviting place to work for.
Customer Interaction
You can’t achieve business greatness without customers. Without the right amount of customers your business will just fall and fall until it fails. So making sure they’re always at the forefront of your mind is so important. Just like with employees, it can help to interact with customers on a more personal level. Don’t just do the typical ‘Hi, thanks, bye’ that a lot of companies do. Have a big smile on your face and ask them how they are, what they’re up to for the rest of the day, or even just if they’d like any help with what they’re looking for. A simple smile can mean the difference between great and poor service.
Achieving business greatness obviously means you want to be in the great category. It’s not just face to face interaction that needs to be on point, you need to be focusing your efforts into email and telephone communication skills as well. Not just for yourself, but your employees to. Anything they do wrong is going to reflect badly on your company so they need to be trained properly in the art of perfect communication skills. It might be worth having a training day or even just an afternoon to clarify how you’d like everyone to interact with customers. It is a lot harder to convey your tone of voice and personality through an email. It is often the case that emails get misinterpreted on the other end, so if you’re struggling with how to perfect your email communication skills just take some advice from guides online such as this one.
Charity Work
When you’ve finally got to that place where you feel like you’re doing great and profits are looking good, you should definitely consider what you can do to give back to the community. Not only does it give you an excellent image to the public, the sense of reward you should feel from it will be amazing. There are so many people and animals out there that can benefit from the money your business has.
A really wonderful thing to look into is the building of villages in remote poverty stricken areas. A lot of them have no homes, food or water. Simply building them a small home can mean the difference between saving a life or not. If you don’t want to donate to a charity, you could look into managing this project yourself. All you need is a small team of volunteers, perhaps from within your own company to step forward and travel to wherever you wish to start helping. The material cost of the whole project will be fairly low. You won’t be building houses like we know them.
If you’d rather go down the route of animals, there are plenty of shelters across the country that are crying out for donations. What you can give would be life changing for them. As we said, it reflects so well with the public if they see you are giving back to the community.