Underrated Profitability Tip
Can you believe it's August and time for kids to go back to school?! We've gotten through the slowness (or craziness...?) of summer, and I don't know about you but I'm ready for the routine and rhythm of school. Things with work and business can kind of pick up again and you want to make sure you're making decisions that are going to be profitable in the long run.
Before we make any right decisions, let's take a deeper look into something that a lot of people don't think about when it comes to increasing profitability. It's more than just increasing sales or cutting expenses, so be sure to keep reading. With the back to school busyness, we’ll keep this post short and sweet for today!
When people ask how they can increase their profitability, usually they start with things like "well where can I cut expenses?" or "how can I increase my sales?" Don't get me wrong, it's definitely a good idea to do an expense audit and see if there are subscriptions or anything you no longer need. And it's a great idea to see where you can improve your marketing or offerings to increase sales. But what you really need to have in place before all of that is to increase efficiency and productivity with your team.
Listen, let's say you do increase your sales. Does your team have the capacity and ability to handle that increase? If you have a team of 7 full-time employees that are all at max capacity, how are they going to handle more work? This ties in with my recent post about doing a time audit. Where is your team spending the most of their time? On each project, can you consolidate or minimize tasks, or delegate to other team members to increase efficiency? An example of this for us is with our marketing. It's been hard to find a system that works for us, between me and my marketing assistant, to get content out. These emails always felt really intimidating, so what we've started doing is I'll record a little voice memo, like 3-5 minutes, and she types everything out. It has worked great for us!
So yes, while increasing sales and cutting expenses are important, don't miss out on increasing the efficiency and productivity within what you already have. That way you're also setting yourself up to scale and handle the influx of sales when the time comes.
