Starting & Running a Business All-in-One For Dummies, 4th Edition (UK)

Chapter 3

Improving Your Company’s Performance

IN THIS CHAPTER

Examining your internal systems

Holding on to customers

Improving your company’s productivity

An unpleasant truism in business, and in much else, is that after resources are allocated they become misallocated over time. Another way of looking at this problem is to say that just because something ‘ain’t broke’, it doesn’t mean you can’t make it perform better still. To get your business to grow and keep growing requires a continuous effort to improve every aspect of that business.

In this chapter you find out how to boost your business by keeping your customers happy, improving your efficiency and effectiveness, and increasing and expanding your business.

Checking Your Internal Systems

In order to improve performance, you have to have systems in operation that help you measure performance in the first place. A good test of whether you’re allocating enough time to the task of improving performance is to keep a record of how you spend your time, say, over a month. As well as recording the work you do and the time you spend on each major task, put the letter R for routine, S for strategic or I for improving performance ...