All small businesses endeavour to expand and grow their operations, and key to this is ensuring that you’re in the best position to deal with all of the new demands associated with increased business.  This can be everything from making certain that you can fulfill orders, to keeping your books balanced in the same way.  Paying a lot of money to add staff or purchase expensive equipment can be tricky when you’re on the verge of growth, so one of the best pieces of advice most entrepreneurs will give you, is that it’s better to make the most of and enhance what you already have, rather than bringing new processes in.

Streamlining and refining processes is one of the best ways of improving your business as a whole.  The idea of the lean and agile business is a very popular one in modern business, due to the fast pace at which things in the industry change.  This can’t happen with overweight, overwrought processes.

New office by Phil Whitehouse, on Flickr.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

Streamline Your Processes

Now, making this happen isn’t necessarily easy.  After all, it’s likely that someone within your organisation was responsible for coming up with the processes in the first place, so trying to improve them won’t always happen without some creative thinking.  It’s a good idea to set up a project team and involve everyone by collaborating and collecting ideas on how they can make things more efficient.  Always include those who are directly involved with the process too; they’ll be best placed to give helpful advice.  Business consultants such as Evolve are one option if you’re struggling to work out where you can make improvements.

Make Your Technology Work for You

Equipment and technology are also major components of any business, but the question is, are you making the most of them?  The humble desktop computer is a very powerful tool, but if you’ve got nothing but basic word-processing applications and some spreadsheets, then you’re not getting everything out of it that you could.  There are applications for just about everything you can think of these days and so you should definitely spend some time researching what’s out there.  There could well be applications that will take some of the load off your employees, giving them time to concentrate on something else.  Here are several free apps to help get you started.

Get the most out of your staff, your equipment and your processes, and you’ll be in the best shape possible to take advantage of any imminent growth.  Always look inside your own organisation before you go trying to bring new assets in, especially if you’re looking to save money.