What business is like …
Being in business means making hard decisions and taking difficult actions to manage market conditions, your staff, or your finances. The responsibilities can leave you feeling out of your depth, believing that the business is running out of control. Such problems are common to many businesses, and almost everyone in business experiences some or all of them.
Business Improvements can help you work out what is the best course of action to take you and your business out of the situation you are in.
For businesses across various market sectors, Business Improvements has helped individuals and organisations overcome their specific business issues by providing them with the tools and skills to resolve their problems and make the organisation more effective.
What is preventing you and your organisation from being more effective?
Time issues?
Staff issues?
Sales issues?
Marketing issues?
HR and recruitment issues?
Money issues?
Systems and procedures issues?
Time Issues
The symptoms
- feeling overworked or working extended hours to ‘catch up’
- missing deadlines
- often fire-fighting
- poor planning
Whether you are a supervisor, chief executive, business owner or branch manager, the use of time is almost always one of the challenges near the top of the list.
The cure
Our one-day workshop on time management can be a good starting point, but changing anyone’s approach to time is like changing a habit, and that usually takes at least three weeks of strong discipline, or a couple of months of fortnightly coaching – most people find that one to one coaching is the most successful!
See how we helped Opendoor Marketing (UK) Ltd to manage the time issues they were experiencing.
Staff Issues
The symptoms
- poor motivation
- high absenteeism
- low staff retention
- unwillingness to take on tasks
- poor communication
- lack of enthusiasm
The cure
Business Improvements will give you help, support and guidance. The issues and symptoms could be caused by any number of factors, so our first task is to ascertain the real core of the problem. We would conduct a free, in-depth diagnosis to establish the causes, and give you an honest and simple plan as to how we would help you to cope with the challenge, and we’ll be there to help you implement the changes you need to make.
See how we helped Eastwoods to eliminate the staff issues they were experiencing.
Sales Issues
The symptoms
- part or all of your sales team is not performing up to the
required standard - sales people are not motivated
- the manager and/or business owners do not have a sales background
- you regularly miss your monthly sales targets
The cure
If the issues are across the whole of the sales team, Business Improvements would suggest a tailored training course to help them overcome their challenges. So that we can create the course for you, we like to spend at least two half-days in the field with individuals to fully appreciate how they work face-to-face with customers.
If you have just one isolated individual who is underperforming, it is more cost effective to coach him or her to achieve success, rather than go through the process of removing that person and recruiting and training a replacement. Business Improvements may suggest introducing monitoring systems and procedures to solve the problems with motivation.
See how we helped Old Pond Publishing and Write Thinking to reduce the sales issues they were experiencing.
Marketing Issues
The symptoms
- marketing costs continually increasing
- lots of marketing activity but few new customers
- marketing initiatives are not being converted into additional sales volumes
The cure
Business Improvements can offer a one-day workshop to give you many different ideas to implement yourself, but you would probably see a greater impact through coaching. This is because we encourage you to measure the success of the marketing strategies you use. Business Improvements has a list of over 100 different marketing strategies, and we can guarantee that on that list there will be at least five that will work effectively in your business, and probably be more cost-effective than any monthly advertising.
See how we helped Old Pond Publishing to increase the return on their marketing spend.
HR and Recruitment Issues
The symptoms
- difficulties with recruiting and retaining staff
- no induction training for new recruits
- an ineffective or non-existent appraisal system
- problems with staff discipline and/or no experience of
disciplinary procedures - staff with specific issues that are not being addressed by either the organisation or the individual
- ‘troublesome’ employees
- managers and supervisors not coping with the people they manage
- lots of interviews that lead to no-one being employed or an inappropriate person being taken on
Many HR and recruitment issues are full of legislation pitfalls that can land you in all sorts of trouble.
The cure
We have found that tailored training sessions for your supervisors and
managers can be of tremendous help. We can also get involved at the
second interview stage with many companies who are recruiting managers
and really want to be sure they get the right person for the job.
Money Issues
The symptoms
• poor control of cashflow
• investing in marketing without knowing the return
• debtor days lengthening
• unsure how much it costs just to be in business
The cure
Most money issues can best be addressed with coaching, and often, all that’s needed is to ‘test and measure’ the areas of greatest concern. Monthly cashflow statements are a must for all businesses; they allow you to focus on how to reduce some of the regular costs, such as telephones, stationery, postage, etc. Strategies such as changing your terms can have a positive effect on your ‘debtor days’.
Systems and Procedures Issues
The symptoms
- few, or no, procedures or systematic ways of doing things
- different people doing the same task differently
- new staff unable to do tasks
- reluctance to delegate because “No-one can do this job as well as me!”
- staff retention is poor
- tasks not done because people ‘assume’ someone else is doing them
- wasted time and unproductive staff
- continual interruptions from inexperienced staff
The cure
A one-day workshop on time management would prove to be invaluable, provided the participants were able to implement ideas and systems on their return to everyday duties.
Executive coaching can massively improve time management issues because it encourages individuals to focus on and complete the relevant tasks. Business Improvements has trained and coached over 7,000 people to improve their time management, so we know it works!
See how we helped Glasswell and Last Ltd to improve productivity through better time management/introducing procedures.
