Improve My Business

We are all about trying to help you improve your business, whether that means improving your personal efficiency at work so you get more done, or helping you find ways to attract new customers. Today I want to talk about one of the easiest ways to improve your business, cost cutting. Cost cutting isn’t always easy, actually it is often very difficult to find areas to trim the budget because everything seems important. However, there are some often over looked steps we can take to help control costs without affecting anything we do in our business. One major one is power usage.

Did you know that many electronic devices continue to use power as long as they are plugged into the wall, whether the device if on or not? By simply plugging these chargers into a power board that has an on/off switch you can make it easy to insure that all of your devices are truly off when you want them to be, simply flip the switch on the power board. It is also important to remember that chargers for things like laptops and cellphones will continue to draw power as long as they are plugged into the wall, even if the chargers aren’t charging anything. Making sure you turn off/unplug all devices and chargers in the evenings and one weekends is an easy way to reduce the money you spend on utility bills and the best part is, during the day it can still be business as usual. I told you cost cutting could be easy!

Here is a brief list of things to look at for cutting out phantom power drains: Things with remote controls, anything that has a blocky looking plug or inline block converter (think laptop charger), things that have quick on features, anything that displays a clock. For further cost reductions you can also look for energy star approved electronics when making your purchases, this will ensure that you are getting the most energy efficient products you can and just by being a little more aware you can improve your business. The best part is you are also improving the environment at the same time. Not only will reducing phantom consumption cut down on the amount of coal and natural gas burned to create electricity, lowering our over all demand for power will help make transitioning to renewable resources a more feasible option.

Technorati Tags: Business, enviornment, improvement

Steven Covey, in his groundbreaking work The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, tells us to “begin with the end in mind”. The concept is to know what you want to accomplish, and to set up your tasks to assist you in reaching that goal. This is nothing more than knowing what you want to accomplish, and aligning your tasks and assignments with that goal.

Many folks get caught up in the social media craze – I admit that I did too for a while. The good news is that my personality gets ‘tired’ with things pretty easily – whether it’s posting 5-6 times per day on twitter, or connecting with acquaintances on Facebook, or answering questions in the Q&A on LinkedIn Answers. Why is that good news? Because I know that, once I ‘master’ this new application, it will lose its allure. So, I can focus on my new obsession in the knowledge that it’s only because I’m not expert at it yet; once I get there, my nature will allow me to naturally ratchet back on the time, effort, and brainpower I’ll put in on this.

Let me give you an example: when I first logged on to Twitter, I was one of the earlier adopters (I won’t say early adopters, but certainly am not a newbie to the app). I was focused on identifying posters who were interesting, humorous, leaders in their field, and leaders in my field. I grew my follower list thoughtfully (I don’t automatically follow those who follow me; and if someone follows me, I go to their profile, read 2-3 pages of the most recent posts, and decide to follow or not based on whether I want to hear what they have to say. If their entire post history are either retweets (RTs), responses (@twittername) or links to their own products (“come check out my 50% off sale!”) I don’t tend to follow them.)

My twitter followers to @marymcd has grown organically to around 1,000 – 1,100 followers – every week I gain some, and I lose some. I check out who I lose, and it’s invariably people who have followed me for 48 hours, seen that I don’t automatically follow them back, and they drop me (Twitter Quitters). Conversely, I’ve built online relationships with folks that I’ve never met IRL (In Real Life) and have a network of professionals I can tap at any given time to get their thoughts on something I’m struggling with. So, although I devoted a bunch of time to building this network, I don’t spend NEARLY that much maintaining it (and yes, I do post regularly on Twitter except when I’m travelling…)

What was my original goal? To understand this new tool, to figure out if I could build a revenue stream from it (yes, but indirectly only), and to connect with colleagues in far-flung locations. Did I accomplish this? You bet. Was it worth the effort? Yes, when I consider the friendships I’ve developed (you know who you are, @my-virtual-twitter-friends…) Am I a twitter guru? Not even close. I use the tool, and am happy with my use, but do not aspire to be a Twitter queen.

Re-examine how you are spending your time – are you doing things that support your ultimate goal? If not, why not? What can you do differently?

Technorati Tags: blogging, Business, communication, efficiency, goals, managing your time, Time Management, working smarter

If you are looking for ways to improve your business, and that is what this blog is about after all, auditing might be just what you need. When most people think about auditing they start to get concerned, they think that someone is going to come in and try to find things they are doing wrong, but this is just a misconception. Auditing isn’t about finding out what an individual person is doing wrong, its about finding weaknesses in your business system so you can improve them. I encourage anyone who is looking to improve their business to go through an internal audit.

Internal audits are great, they are relatively low cost because you are using your own people and they serve the dual purpose of cross training employees. Ideally in an internal audit each area of the business will be audited by someone who doesn’t typically work in that area. This does two things, first it brings a new set of eyes to the area which can provide a fresh perspective on how that part of the business is running. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it gives employees a better understanding how the business runs outside of their particular area.

So what should you expect from your internal audit? First you should expect to find out how well your documents match up with the reality of your business. If you find that they don’t match up well it could point to one of two problems. The first thing it could indicate is that you are failing to keep up to date documents. This means that as things are changing in the way you do business the changes aren’t getting added into your documentation. Alternatively it could point to a failure in your training methods, meaning that your documentation is correct but for some reason the employees on the floor haven’t been properly trained to follow the documentation. Either way this could present significant challenges for training new employees and controlling important factors of your business.

The second thing you should hope to get out of your internal audit process is greater cross unit functionality that will lead to better work flow. By giving employees the opportunity to learn how the business groups that surround them operate, they will naturally have a better understanding of how their work fits into the larger puzzle of the business. When employees have a greater understanding of how their work affects other areas of the business they can start looking for ways to improve the usability of their product for internal customers. For example you might find that by having someone from your sales department audit the assembly line, they find out that before a job can be started all of the information they take from the customer has to be transposed onto a work traveler for the assembly line. This takes time away from the line employees and generally slows down production, so the sales staff, instead of recording the information in their own method, starts recording it directly onto the traveler, allowing the production staff to focus on production.Without the internal audit, the sales staff may never have realized that the method of recording customer information they were using was actually creating more work then necessary for the production staff.

The final thing you can expect from you internal audit process is increased employee participation in improvement efforts. Your own employees may be your greatest untapped resource for improvement ideas, they just aren’t being encouraged to share them. By asking employees to get involved in an internal audit with the goal of improving the business it shows them that management values their opinions and wants their help to make the business better. You might be amazed at some of the great ideas your employees have for improving your business that they have just been sitting on because they figured no one cared.

The list of benefits you can get from an internal audit extends well beyond the three examples I have given here, but even if these are the only benefits you see, it will still be a great step towards improving your business. The best part is that all it takes is a little training and a day away from their usual work for your staff. This is why, for my money, internal auditing is one of the best ways to find business improvements.

Technorati Tags: Business, improvement, process improvement

Spring is in full swing, at least it is here in the southern part of the country, the trees are green, the sun is out and the flower are blooming. This has me thinking more and more about spring cleaning, and today specifically about spring cleaning for your ideas. Most people have a bunch of ideas that just come to them throughout the year, and if your involved in the running of a business a lot of those ideas probably relate to your business. Many of the business people I know record their ideas either in journals, or e-mail to help them remember the ideas later when they have time to act on them. Ideas always seem to have a way of always coming to you when you don’t have time to work on them.  So today, I want to talk about doing some spring cleaning of our ideas.

First thing to do is to consolidate your ideas into a single list. This may mean pulling together multiple entries into your journal, or searching through your E-mail for notes to yourself, or maybe you just have them all rolling around in your head and just need to right them down. One way or the other it is important to get all of the ideas you have been storing up in one place so you can look at them all together. Once we have our completed list we can being sorting through our ideas using the following steps.

1. Combine. I like to start by taking ideas that are related or similar and combining them, that way I won’t accidentally through out one part of a two or three part idea.

2. Review. This will inevitably happen when you go through to combine, but you want to review your ideas with a critical eye. Things to be looking for are ideas that are no longer relevant, meaning that either your business or the business environment has changed significantly sense you had the idea and therefore it no longer seems like a good one. Other types of ideas you might want to identify are ideas that are just too out there, unless your at a place where pursuing a pretty out there idea is what you are looking for, and ideas that are too grandiose, while we all like to dream big, putting these kinds of ideas on your to do list will only stress you out.

3. Discard. Any ideas that you identified during your review you should discard from the list, the goal after all is to reduce the number of ideas we have in our idea bank, thus making room for more ideas, not to mention giving us some space to actually work on the ideas not just have them. Other items to discard from the list might include ideas that never seem to get done, if you have had the same idea for two or three years and aren’t any closer to realizing the idea then you were then, it might be time to let it go. Alternatively these types of ideas can be great candidates for our next step.

4. Organize. In this step you want to organize your ideas in order of importance. The goal is to come away with a clear picture of what the next idea you want to work on is going to be, and the one after that, and so on. Often times with so many ideas floating around it is hard to pick just one to work on, so organizing your list is a way of focusing your energy on realizing the most important ideas first. Items to look at for moving to the top of the list are probably either, recent and time sensitive ideas, or those old ideas we discussed in number 3, if they still seem like great ideas and you just can’t let them go then try to get them off your list by making them happen.

5. Get to work. Now comes the easy part right? Just start working on realizing the idea at the top of your list. I know its typically not that simple, but at least by cleaning your ideas you can get more targeted and focused and clear up some mental space to really delve into your ideas.

Another thing that some people have found helpful but that I didn’t include in the list, is making two separate lists in the organize stage, sorting ideas into big ideas and smaller ideas. Typically this is done based on the amount of time it would take to accomplish the idea. This way you can always be working on one quicker easy idea and one more long term idea. The goal in either scenario is always the same though, get your ideas in order, get rid of the ones you don’t need, and make space for working on the ones that are most important.

Technorati Tags: Business, de-clutter, goals, improvement, organizing, working smarter

I recently wrote a little article for our upcoming newsletter (sign up through our homepage at www.mcdcg.com) about the internal auditor refresher classes we offer and the benefits they provide. It got me to thinking about the idea of looking at problems from a new angle or a new way of thinking. You see part of what we do in auditor refresher classes is work with the auditors to give them new tools that allow them to approach audits from a different perspective. For experienced auditors it is easy to fall into a rut where you no longer look critically at the area you are auditing so much as go through the motions of your audit, it has become too familiar. While this blog isn’t about auditing or how to be a better internal auditor, I think that auditing isn’t the only place where we can tend to have rut syndrome.

Rut syndrome is what I am calling our tendency in life and in business to get stuck in the same groove. After a while we wear this groove so deep it’s more like a trench and it can be quite a struggle to climb out of, but if you think about it, if you are so deep in your groove that you can’t climb out of it, you probably don’t have a very good view of the world around you. This is not to say that there can’t be progress made by working in your rut, you can move forward and go deeper, but the progress at some point becomes undirected. Unless we step outside our rut to check our bearings every once in a while we may wind up grooving our way right to where we don’t want to be.

So I encourage you think about what kind of ruts you are digging right now. When was the last time you stopped and poked your head up for a look around? You may find that the landscape has changed dramatically sense the last time you stopped to examine it, and that in fact what you thought was your productive rut is actually holding you back from an even greater opportunity. Just like auditors get too comfortable with the audit process we can get too comfortable with our work, our life, our business and stop exploring and examining. At this point our rut is limiting our opportunities for growth and success.

I would also like to point out that sometimes it can be hard to get out of your rut, ruts are after all comfortable and routine. Just like it takes training and new techniques for auditors to gain a new perspective and get out of their auditing rut, there may be some techniques we can use to help us get out of our ruts and survey our surroundings. One of them that I know works for me is as simple as taking a vacation, and no I don’t mean going to a hotel where you will plug into the wi-fi and turn on your cell phone, I mean taking a true vacation from your work. Vacations from work allow you to escape the day to day run around and take a good look around, survey the surroundings, and examine the value of your rut. I am sure there are other techniques that you use to help you get out of a rut. What are they? I would love to hear your thoughts.

Technorati Tags: Business, living your life, working smarter