The bane of every small business is a seemingly insurmountable workload. These micro and small enterprises usually have anywhere from 1 to 49 employees. You’d probably think that having less staff means easier management; however, the truth is just the opposite. Ask any entrepreneur or small business owner, and they’d tell you about the plethora of roles they must undertake to keep the business running. While they’re making sure the boat stays afloat, they also must ensure that employees are completing tasks efficiently. It’s an incredibly tricky balancing act of steering the ship and patching the leaks simultaneously.
Hence, it comes as no surprise that 20% of small businesses fail within the first year. Poor planning and bad team management were the most common reasons for small business failure after financial difficulty. The inefficiencies created by bad team management also lead to financial challenges for these small firms. Poor workflow leads to increased labour costs and valuable time lost by sorting typical business responsibilities. These problems add up for small businesses because they lack economies of scale and cannot afford to lag in productivity. Effective team management is just as important as any strategy to improve competitiveness. Collectively small firms in the US are losing billions of dollars in revenue annually simply because their management processes aren’t optimised.
Bad team management often slips under the radar of small business owners. It’s easy to figure out why. Debt payments, unsatisfied clients and rent are more visceral problems that businesses face daily. As a result, ironing out management problems gets put off for later until it’s forgotten. The longer these issues are left unaddressed, the worse they get. In essence, bad management is the iceberg that most owners never think about but will run into inevitably.
Naturally, the question for business owners becomes; “How can I avoid these icebergs?” The simple answer is to employ software that allows for better team management. This solution is often met with apprehension because using business software usually means incurring relatively high investment cost. Fortunately, there’s good news for entrepreneurs looking to improve their operational efficiency without spending big.
Free software tools like Asana allow business owners to manage their projects and reduce the amount of time spent organising the workflow. In Asana, you can create projects and tasks for each project. The duties can be assigned to someone with due dates, sub-tasks and “followers” which are simply people who are notified when a task is updated or completed. Users can see what tasks are coming up, mark complete tasks and post updates to tasks in progress. Asana offers many more features that may be what you need to get your workflow organised.
There are several other software tools that you can use to solve a wide range of problems that your small business may encounter. Stay tuned for more tips on our next blog post. Learn how to use the best software to optimise your business processes and maximise profit – Book a consultation with Dominate Tech now!