With every series, it is time to wrap up. In the last post, we talked about three more ways to maximize your current resources. They included:

• Reveal your business’s soul, bring your why/motivation to the front of what you do.
• From breaking even to breaking the bank, the power of cost-cutting, not cutting people.
• Stand up and stand out, having an efficient USP.

Today we’ll talk about the last three areas you can work on to maximize your current resources. They are:

• Your people & Your Time
• Eliminate before you delegate
• Stay away from the edge of the cliff.

Your People & Your Time

The secret to any great business is maximizing your people because through your people; you gain the time to work on your business and not in your business. So You’re probably asking yourself, how do I get to the place where my people work as hard on my business as I do?

The answer is they never will. What is possible is creating how you use your time to get your people to do what you need them to do. This efficiency is achieved by dedicating your time to three major business systems.

• Staff Development 
• Instruction & Training 
• Personal connection 

Staff Development refers to the time spent asking your employees about their professional goals and helping them to develop the resources to achieve them. The hard pill to swallow is sometimes this means that they won’t stay in your business forever.

Instruction & Training refers to the time developing their soft and hard skills pertaining to their position. 

Personal connection refers to the time you spend getting to know them as people. This is the time sadly that most employers fail to capitalize. However, this is also the best opportunity to turn an employee into a champion for your business regardless of whether they work there or not.

If you want to start making all-around business improvements, you need to ask yourself how much time I spend in these three areas? Then how much more time can I add to these opportunities?

Eliminate Before you Delegate

How you use time can be one of the enormous wastes in your businesses. It is the time spent doing repetitive or mundane tasks that you feel could easily be delegated or eliminated. These tasks include data entry, holding non-strategic meetings, etc.

Now, I am all for the power of delegating, but before you do it, ask yourself, does it even need to be done? If it needs to be done, is there a software option that does not take a human to do it?

The reason you follow this progression is if you hate the job or task, your employees will hate it too. So remember this valuable lesson before you delegate any task. Think about how we can eliminate or make it so no one has to spend time on it.

Avoid the Edge of the Cliff

Continuing to test and measure your systems, products, marketing methods, and all other aspects of your business allow you to see problems before they happen and therefore avoid falling off the edge of the cliff. 

Here are a few specific areas you can test for potential improvements:

• Marketing 
• Sales Copy
• Customer Service
• Sales Letters
• Sales Presentations
• Employee-Customer Interaction
• Employee-happiness 
• Employee-growth

Through creating a deliberate and regular testing procedure, you will find opportunities to utilize your resources better. For example, you might find products/services where you can raise the price, maybe others where you should lower the price or offer that product as an incentive item and discover many other areas for improvement that will better utilize your current resources. 

I hope this series has helped you to look at your business resources differently. If it has only created more questions then we are standing by ready to help try our FREE test drive to work with one of our unique business coaches.